Artistic temperament
Cantrell Gallery marks five decades of serving artists and art lovers
For five decades, the Scott family has battled the scourge of bare walls.
Just read the sign in the window of Cantrell Gallery, the business founded July 1, 1970, by Norman and Helen Scott.
“Naked walls are indecent.” An apt statement for an art gallery and frame maker celebrating its golden anniversary this month.
It’s a Friday afternoon in June at Cantrell Gallery, 8208 Cantrell Road, Little Rock, and owner Cindy Scott-Huisman is here with her husband, Clarke Huisman, and her mother, Helen Scott. Paintings by Rebecca Thompson, Patty Criner, Megan Lewis, Daniel Coston, David Mudrinich and others are on display and there is a wall of frame samples.
Helen Scott, 81, is talking about her late husband, Norman, and the early days of the gallery and frame store, years before it was even on Cantrell Road.
Norman was working for what was then the Arkansas Department of Welfare but had his eye on starting his own business, she says. He grew up in Crossett, where his family owned Ideal Lumber Co., and knew he wanted to someday be his own boss.
There was a certain amount of necessity involved in the decision, as well.
“Something clicked with him about art, and we started purchasing paintings,” says Helen, who was a schoolteacher. “Our home was getting full and he said, ‘Maybe it’s time to find a place and open shop.’”
They found a tiny duplex at 722 Seventh St., next to Bragg’s Electric, and called their new store Art Fair.
At first, they were simply placing paintings into ready-made frames, but soon offered custom framing and in a couple of years had to expand into a bigger space. It was also around around this time that Norman quit his state job and went to work at the shop full time, Helen says.
They moved from Seventh Street to Chester Street, catty-corner from where Vino’s Brew Pub is now.
“It was a great old building,” Helen says. “It had a balcony around it. It was just so interesting even before we even did anything to it.”
They didn’t last long there, however.
“We woke up one morning in 1974 and Norman said: ‘There’s a picture of our store on the front page of the paper,’” Helen says. “No one had said anything to us about it, but the city bought it.”
The spot is now occupied by the Little Rock Fire Department’s Central Fire Station.
So it was off to yet another new location, this time on Third Street. They also had a second store on University Avenue that was open for a few years.
“There were several moves in the first six years,” Cindy says.
In 1976, plans were being made
for the Cantrell Heights Shopping Center, and the Scotts wasted no time in getting in on the action.
“The minute we saw the sign, we called the owners of the property that were building [the center] and told them we wanted to sign up,” Helen says.
Cindy, who was 10 years old at the time, remembers the anticipation over the spot.
“We would come out here at least once a week to watch this building being built,” she says. “We were so excited about getting to move in here.”
★★★
Cindy has spent most of her life in the shop.
“I came to work with my parents on a regular basis,” she says. “And it wasn’t just coming to work with them, but sitting around the dinner table in the evening discussing stuff going on at work. I felt like my parents respected the things I had to say as far as ideas and input.”
Indeed, Norman and Helen renamed the shop Cantrell Gallery at Cindy’s suggestion.
“We shifted more toward the focus being on the gallery,” Cindy, 53, says. “The framing is our bread and butter, but it’s more fun to promote the art.”
Before he made a name for himself with his often haunting, surrealistic paintings, Warren Criswell had his first solo show at Cantrell Gallery in 1981.
“They gave me my start in Arkansas as a professional artist,” he writes in an email.
He first met Norman in the ’70s, when Criswell was teaching himself how to paint with watercolor and brought in some of his work to be framed.
“Norman liked them and wanted to show them. He was very encouraging and actually sold some of them,” he says. “A few years later when he and Helen opened Cantrell Gallery in west Little Rock, they sold so much of my work that I was soon able to quit my job and live my dream as a full-time artist … They accepted everything I brought them — drawings, paintings, sculpture, prints — throughout all the changes in my work, no matter how outrageous or seemingly unsaleable.”
Though Criswell now works with Little Rock’s M2 Gallery, Cantrell Gallery shows the work of his daughter, Kae Barron.
★★★
Little Rock painter Rebecca Thompson’s exhibit, “Moments,” is up through July 18 at the gallery. It’s her first show there, though she was a customer of the Scotts even before they moved to Cantrell Road.
“They care,” she says. “That really sums them up. They are knowledgeable and they care about their clients, their artists and what they sell. They’re just a treasure.”
Says Criswell: “Helen and Norman Scott, their daughters, Cindy and Angela and Cindy’s husband Clarke are like family to me. We miss Norman, who passed in 2010.”
Gallery “Founding Father” Norman sounds like a hoot.
“He was quite a character,” Helen says. “The business would never have happened if he hadn’t had the drive and ambition to make everything work.”
Being around so much art rubbed off on Norman, and he started creating his own paintings.
“He didn’t have a lot of respect for what he was doing, but he sure enjoyed it,” she says. “He had no intention of selling these things.”
Some artist friends, however, convinced him to submit his work to a show in North Little Rock in the mid-1980s. The exhibit’s juror, Fayetteville artist Donald Roller Wilson, chose three of Norman’s pieces.
“All of a sudden he was like, ‘I’m an artist,’” Cindy says with a laugh.
In 1997, when a Cantrell Gallery exhibit by another artist was cancelled, Cindy talked her dad into showing his work.
He had a couple of requirements, though.
“He said, ‘I do not want to be there,’” Cindy says. So they hired a friend to pose as him for the opening while Norman mixed drinks in a back room.
“This man we hired came to the opening in a kimono,” Helen says. “It was hilarious.”
A Democrat-Gazette reporter even interviewed the faux Norman, Michael Dunn.
The other demand Norman had for doing the show was that Cindy publish a book of his works — “Featherbeds and Jellybeans” — in conjunction with the exhibit.
“We sat here and put it together in a hardback and a softbound version,” she says, laughing. “It’s out of print. There are no more copies left.”
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After graduating from Hendrix College, Cindy spent a year working at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, where she met Clarke (they married in 1990), before joining her parents full time at the gallery.
“At that point, there was no looking back,” she says. “I love it when people come in here and a piece of art speaks to them and you can tell it lights up their world.”
She has owned the gallery since 2009 (her sister, Angela, works with the Everman Independent School District in Texas) and Clarke, who has a background in technical theater and construction, handles the frame-making side of the business. Their son, Christian, is 28 and works at Rocktown Distillery.
Clarke, 54, has handled some high-level art in this store, like the huge watercolor by modernist Marc Chagall that was on loan to the Arkansas Arts Center. He installed a then-new type of anti-reflective glass that makes it look like there’s no glass on the frame at all.
“We get to work on a lot of cool stuff,” he says. “I worked with [Arkansas-based art-conservation firm] Norton Arts on an Andrew Wyeth painting not too long ago.”
Elizabeth Norton owns Norton Arts, which often works with the gallery and its clients on conservation projects.
“They are fantastic,” she says. “They have a pretty eclectic mix of artists, and a lot of local artists. Cantrell has such a loyal following and their clientele trusts them to represent well artists within the state.”
Clarke, a member of The Contemporaries, an affiliate-membership group of the Arkansas Arts Center, also gets praise from Criswell for his discerning eye.
“He often sees meanings and metaphors in my images that I had not discovered yet,” the artist says.
The focus on local art really took root around 1990, Clarke says.
“We were still selling some international graphics, but we started renovating this space and that was when we really started selling more local art.”
Spencer Jansen, manager of member experience at the Arkansas Arts Center, says Helen, Cindy and Clarke “are definitely an asset to the arts community in Arkansas … They attend events at the arts center all the time and are very involved with us … whether it’s performance arts or a visual arts event, there is a really good chance Clarke and Cindy and Helen will be there.”
Thompson notes that the gallery is a friendly, open and welcoming space for newcomers looking to start an art collection.
“It’s sometimes hard for beginning collectors to take that first step,” she says. “But Helen, Cindy and Clarke are so knowledgeable about the art. They work with you and talk with you, but they never push. You never feel like you’re being sold something.”
Describing the art that the gallery specializes in, Helen says: “We like things that are well-executed … if the artist is doing an excellent job producing it, then I have high respect for it.”
★★★
She and Norman were aided in the early days by mentors Edwina and John Moore of Little Rock Picture Framing, which was closing about the time Art Fair was opening, and there have been several employees who have helped the business grow along the way, Cindy says. But since 2009 the trio of Helen, Cindy and Clarke have been the gallery’s only staff.
Oh, wait. We can’t forget Zoey, an 8-year-old rescued dog from the Pulaski County Humane Society and newest team member Brooklyn, a 7-monthold border collie, who both can be found there during business hours.
“We’ve had dogs at our gallery since almost day one,” Cindy says in an email.
Along with being the gallery’s owner, Cindy would help Clarke with framing duties. A little over two years ago, however, she was diagnosed with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy, which weakens the optic nerves and has left her legally blind.
Now she handles the gallery’s publicity and marketing.
“You’d be amazed at how much she can do on the computer and on her phone,” Helen says. “This is a challenge, but she is very creative.”
The pandemic has inspired even more creativity, and the gallery has stayed open. Customers are asked to wear masks and the space is thoroughly cleaned and scrubbed.
When Thompson’s exhibit debuted May 22, only nine people, including Thompson, where allowed in at one time. There were also video and photos of some of the work on social media in the days before the opening.
The turnout was great, Helen says.
“It went just like clockwork,” Cindy adds.
More shows are planned for the rest of the year, including the first commercial gallery exhibit by Little Rock artist Catherine Wood Burton that opens July 24, Cindy says.
Shows from Russellville artist Mudrinich and Daniel Coston of Fayetteville are also scheduled.
★★★
Cantrell Gallery downsized about three years ago. Where it was once about 5,000 square feet, there is now around 3,000 square feet, including the shop area and the basement, where Criswell once stored paintings, and where some of the old frame-making tools Norman and Helen bought from the Moores are still used.
These days the gallery has about a dozen artists on its roster, including Coston, Debie Deaton, Kirk Montgomery, Megan Lewis, Democrat-Gazette editorial cartoonist John Deering, Laura Raborn and more.
“I think this is the best incarnation of our gallery,” Cindy says. “I think we have honed it into the perfect little space right here.”
Coming to work “is a beautiful experience every day to see all the beautiful art,” Helen says. “And I love the design work and working with people.”
Talking about what it takes to keep a small, family business running for 50 years, Cindy says:
“There are rough times, but I think if you just stay positive and focus on the good you are bringing people, the joy, that is what has kept us going.”
The key to their success is simple, Helen adds.
“Our objective is to make people happy. It’s no big deal. We just want to make people happy.”