Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed posts on various listservs from Ben Finer and Bevan Dunbar about the new art gallery they're opening in White River Junction. Kishka Gallery is going in on Gates Street, in the space that was once occupied by Fat Hat Clothing's WRJ beachhead across from Northern Stage.

The gallery is very explicitly aimed at doing more than simply showing art, as Ben explains below. He moved back to the Upper Valley, where he grew up, to take over as director of the Aidron Duckworth Museum in Meriden, NH, after a long stint working as an artist in NYC—he's still a painter and sculptor, though most recently has been focused on making masks. The museum closed in the fall of 2019. Bevan, who was a costume designer in New York, is now an administrator in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Program at Dartmouth.

The gallery opens June 4, the next First Friday in WRJ, and Ben talks to Daybreak about what they have in mind...

So, how did this gallery come about?

I had a good lead time on the Duckworth closing, so I'd been thinking about starting a gallery even before that. What's funny is that we were thinking about starting it in one of the rooms in our apartment, just as a sitting room, even before Covid. But that model started to make a lot of sense for Covid—the idea to create a space that was slower, not your standard white-wall gallery, but with more of a lived-in feel. In our apartment it was going to be by appointment only—this gallery won't be, but if there’s a resurgence we could transfer to that model easily.

And could you tell me what you want the gallery to be like?

The idea was to create a space where people can come and sit and engage with art, but at a slower pace than your standard gallery. I’ve been in the fine arts since I was 16, I spent a decade in New York City, and I never found galleries to be welcoming spaces or wanted to spend any more time than I needed to to achieve looking at the work. I'm sure there’s a reason for that—maybe there's a commercial or design reason—but it never felt like a space I wanted to spend time in.

So then, how do you create a space people will slow down in? We came up with making it more like a reading room: You could give the work on the walls context, you could create a space where people could linger longer. We thought of books as a great entrance into that world. We're going to have a library of books, but we're also going to build it through asking the artist to curate three to five books that are in reference to the show on the wall. The books will give the artist an object outside their show that gives insight into their work—artists are not two-dimensional, and it’ll be great for people to see, "Oh, I can’t believe this artist is interested in this work that has nothing to do with their work," or, "Here's a book on microbiology, and I can see the connection." Maybe the books will give people who are new into art an entrance into the work on the walls. There are plenty of galleries that are very generous with their artists, but this shifts the focus a little more toward the artist’s voice.

And what's the actual space like?

We’re in the former Fat Hat space, which was not like a gallery-ready space, but we’ve been working on it. We've just installed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that I’ve been building with a furniture-maker friend.

And there's one thing that has to be mentioned because it can't go without being mentioned. The floor was covered with wall-to-wall carpeting for the last 10 years, but we took it up and on the floor, we found an art piece by an artist who, maybe in the '80s, rented this space—a sort of psychedelic linoleum patterning on the floor. I was like, Was this a disco in the '70s? David Briggs, the landlord, told me the artist had gotten a grant and used a huge portion of it to redo the floor. It's an incredible visual experience, so we've decided to embrace it. I invite artists to show, and then say, "Oh yeah, and by the way, the floor is crazy."

And who are those artists?

Well, because we have a shotgun start date, and I know the art world well, you can’t just spring an invitation like, "Hey, want to fill a show in three weeks?" on just anyone. So we started with artists we have previous relationships with.

The first is Lucy Mink, who had a relationship with the Duckworth museum. She lives in Contoocook, NH, and is a lecturer at Dartmouth.

We're trying to make sure there's a new show every First Friday, so shows will be open for three weeks, then we'll be closed for a week. We have to feel the schedule out, will try Thursdays through Sundays, and most likely will be open a little late, like noon to 8 pm. We'd love to catch people out for a walk before or after dinner in White River Junction.

Finally, I have to ask about the gallery's name. Kishka? [In Yiddish, kishka or kishke is slang for the intestines; it's also a sausage made using a beef intestine casing.]

It's funny. We had a bear of a time finding a name. You'd think it would be easy, but we tried to avoid things that were too precious. On a run, I suddenly had that thought: Kishka. We're coming up with a million different reasons for it — for a while, we wanted to invent a new story every time someone asked. "Oh, my great uncle was a bass player for Frankie Yancovich's song, 'Who stole the kishka?'" Or what we tell people the most is that when I was at summer camp, there was a counselor who called campers "you little kishka" as an endearing name.

But one artist says something we really like: Making a sausage, you take a bunch of stuff, it’s all the discarded parts that people aren’t interested in, but it becomes this cute package and it tastes lovely and it’s fortifying. That’s a great metaphor for art! It’s what the artist does: make the sausage. Making art isn’t always pretty. So, "Kishka." It’s a little bit cute and it has a little bit of an edge to it.

By the way, if you're interested in donating art books to help get the collection going, you can do so by dropping by the gallery at 83 Gates Street every day between 5 and 6 pm through May 21.