Two days before Branch Gallery opened its new location, the lights still weren't on. Painting and electrical delays plagued the move from Carrboro to downtown Durham until almost the last minute. But even in its raw state, Branch was gorgeous.
The gallery occupies three bays of an old car dealership on Foster Street, with soaring barrel-vaulted ceilings, exposed brick columns and steel beams, a working garage door and white walls that seem to hover just off the cement floor.
By opening night Jan. 19, with the art hung and the paint almost dry, it had become just the right setting for a gallery that for nearly two years has offered the Triangle a portal to the New York art world.
Among the young gallery's frequent visitors are Kimberly Rorschach, director of the new Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Rorschach, who pays attention to the galleries that discover the next museum-quality artists, compares Branch to the hub of New York's gallery scene.
"It's just like Chelsea," Rorschach said. "I'm really excited about this. ... It's great for contemporary art in the area."
The gallery is the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Chloe Seymore, 31, and Harrison Haynes, 32. The Rhode Island School of Design graduates moved from Manhattan to Carrboro in 2004. Two years later, Branch has already made a splash on the international art market and turned heads in North Carolina by taking a distinctly noncommercial approach.
They don't choose artists they think will sell; they choose work they love and cross their fingers that someone will buy. Like most New York galleries, there are no price tags and no labels because they want people to appreciate the art itself, not focus on its title or cost.
In essence, Branch is curated like a miniature museum.
"There's a level of seriousness and sophistication here that doesn't exist [in the Triangle]," said LUMP gallery director Bill Thelen, who guest curated a show at Branch last year. "That's why it's so fresh."
The problem is that museums run on donations and goodwill. An art gallery can't afford to do that.
"We're not a nonprofit," Seymore said. "We're not a project space. If people don't buy art, we close."
The gallery has just one paid staffer, who works part time. Two interns work free. Seymore and Haynes draw no salary. Prices are similar to those at other Triangle galleries, with very large paintings ranging up to $6,500, but the profits, Seymore said, are plowed back into the business: to print better announcement cards, to help an artist frame her work, to afford a bigger show.
"Obviously, you never want to be in a position to say you don't want to sell something," Seymore said. "The one thing that can be difficult is if they get successful and they kind of get stuck in this one style. We're not really interested in that."
Beyond the Triangle
They stay in the black because of the outside world. The majority of their art collectors are not from North Carolina.
Instead, they sell the bulk of their work at far-flung art fairs. The booming trade events create a sort of Fashion Week for contemporary art. Tens of thousands of collectors, curators and just plain spectators browse hundreds of gallery booths in tent cities, exhibition halls or even whole floors of rented hotel rooms. The most significant fairs in the United States are Art Basel Miami Beach and the annual Armory Show in New York.
Branch has already participated in two prestigious fairs: Art Cologne in Germany and the New Art Dealers Alliance fair that runs concurrent with Art Basel Miami in Florida. At the four-day NADA fair in 2004, Seymore said, they made as much money as the gallery does in six months.
How do Seymore and Haynes pay the grocery bills?
"Very leanly," Seymore said.
If the couple's philosophy sounds unusual for the Triangle, it is.
Most gallery owners will take risks on emerging artists. But few will show the kind of conceptual work that Branch routinely features: line drawings that make up an avant-garde coloring book, intricately stitched handmade books, oversize lush-but-nihilistic photographs of suburban swimming pools.
Some of the best art can be a tough sell to certain collectors. The giant painting of the sedan stuck in the trees might look neat in the gallery, but some people balk at how it would look over a couch.
Seymore and Haynes see part of their work as evangelism. Buying art -- particularly contemporary art -- can be intimidating.
"Art is meant to be experienced," Seymore said. "It's great to see it in this context, but it's meant to be lived with."
For the reopening in Durham, Branch featured two solo shows, by artists Katy Clove and Joshua Abelow, with pieces ranging from $350 to $6,500.
Clove, who moved to Durham from Portland, Ore., makes figures in evocative narrative poses in etched glass or cut-paper silhouettes.
Abelow, who lives in New York City, showed abstract paintings up to 11 feet tall.
"The one thing we have to offer is for artists to show work in a whole group that they couldn't show elsewhere," Seymore said.
Opposite Abelow's paintings, boldly colored in orange, ivory and teal, she hung his monochromatic pencil drawings. The absurdist and often hilarious drawings included a man in a camouflage hat paired with a bear that looks as though it is prancing away in the distance.
"I'm really happy with the way they did it," Abelow said at a private opening reception for collectors and artists. He pointed to the circles and triangles in the drawings, then gestured to the same elements in the paintings.
"It draws viewers into the unexpected," Abelow said.
Abelow has an impressive resume, with a painting award from the Rhode Island School of Design -- the nation's premier art and design school -- and a show last year at the alternative art fair called -scope New York.
Branch Gallery is the only one that represents him. That they aren't as focused on selling doesn't faze him.
"I think that's the only way it should be," Abelow said. "The only way to make good work is not to worry about selling.
"I don't sell anyway," he said laughing.
But by the end of the opening weekend, three of his works had been purchased and two reserved.
Eyeing Durham
Branch Gallery decided to move late last year, when the Foster Street space in Durham came open. Seymore and her family own the house where the Carrboro location was run. They rented it to a computer repair shop and used the money to lease the Durham gallery, which is nearly three times as big.
"In a lot of ways, our artists were kind of in a fish bowl," Seymore said. "You couldn't really hang a huge painting ... because you couldn't stand back far enough [to see it]."
The renovated car dealership will also house Horse and Buggy Press, an artist's collective, a glass-blowing studio and a bistro. Branch's 3,000-square-foot space will also have three artists' studios.
"It certainly fits with what I want for Durham," said Laura Clough, 27, a preschool music teacher who lives four blocks away.
Clough said she has frequently visited New York galleries in Chelsea. After she discovered Branch Gallery in Carrboro, it became her favorite place to see art in North Carolina.
"They were always welcoming," Clough said. She also praised them for locating in an area of town that needed revitalization.
The city of Durham also supported the gallery's move, offering up to $7,500 to reimburse renovation costs.
Despite being home to Duke University, the city has had a lackluster visual arts scene, with its few art venues scattered across town. Branch Gallery offers a new arts anchor for the city's monthly "culture crawl," held the third Friday night of every month to bring more people downtown.
And with the recent opening of the Nasher Museum at Duke, two of the state's best venues for contemporary art will be two miles down the road from each other.
But there are sacrifices: Seymore isn't sure how she will get to work.
A native New Yorker, she doesn't drive. When she and Haynes moved to the Triangle, they bought the gallery first, then got a house within walking distance.
Now Haynes drives her to work, but he's about to tour Australia with indie rock band Les Savy Fav. (He's the drummer.) Seymore hasn't figured out how she will get to Durham. Driving is her only complaint about leaving Manhattan.
"I think there's a great fear of leaving New York, when you're wrapped up in that energy," Seymore said. "But then once you leave, you realize it will always be there. ... If the gallery does really well, it would never cross my mind to move it somewhere else. We're here to stay."