Conway group uses pop-up gallery idea to support artists
CONWAY — Oak Street is growing crowded on a sunny, late Friday afternoon earlier this month as artists and businesses prepare for the Conway Art Walk, which happens on the first Friday of every month until November. Booths of arts and crafts are being arranged, a band is unloading its gear, the sidewalks are filling up with people and a steady stream of cars crawls past.
A small storefront at 1120 Oak St. is the temporary home of Central Arkansas Collective, a group of 11 professional artists who opened the gallery in August to exhibit their work and who hold events with other Arkansas artists. Artworks ranging from paintings and sculpture to ceramics are on display, and cookies and drinks have been arranged on a table for visitors. Later this evening the group will host a talk by Little Rock artist Robert Bean in the nearby Arnold Innovation Center.
The collective was founded by Faye Hedera along with husband and wife Barbara Satterfield and James Volkert. The three artists have arrived a little early to prepare the gallery for Art Walk crowds and talk about the collective.
Hedera, a self-taught painter, moved to Conway with her husband, Michael, and their three children a couple of years ago. To meet new people she began painting portraits, which eventually made up the “100 Faces of Conway Project,” an exhibit of her portraits displayed last summer at Windgate Museum of Art at Hendrix College.
Among her subjects was Satterfield, who works in clay and is the former director of the Baum Gallery of Fine Art at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. Her work has been exhibited in Arkansas and beyond and is featured in the collections of the Central Arkansas Library System and Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock, as well as Arkansas College of Osteopathy in Fort Smith.
Volkert, a Minnesota native, painted when he was younger and studied under famed California painter Wayne Thiebaud and sculptor Robert Arneson, but put his brushes aside as he spent 35 years working in art museums across the country. About 20 years ago, he says, Satterfield told him that he should get back to painting and he did. His current work finds him reinterpreting paintings by Winslow Homer, JMW Turner, Edward Hopper, Alma Tadema and others.
While there are galleries at Hendrix College and UCA, Hedera found there wasn’t much exhibition space for professional artists around
town. She was also looking for an artistic community.
“One of the first things I did when we moved here was ask our Realtor if there were any art galleries. When I realized there wasn’t one I started looking online for local artists to find my people. I was blown away by the skill of Jim and Barbara and thought it was a shame that there was no place to show work of that caliber.”
Over coffee in December 2022 at Bob’s Grill, just a few doors down from the space where the collective would eventually set up, the three discussed their goals.
“We wanted to see what we could do in Conway to support professional artists,” Hedera says. “We had a vision and we acted on it, and we invited other artists to join us that had a similar need.”
Other collective members are John Lightfoot, Lisa Davis, Jeff Young, Jeanetta Darley, Don Byram, Andrea Kielpinski, Liz Smith and Mo Lashbrook.
Darley is listening to an audiobook — one from the Ian Rutledge mystery series by Charles Todd whose title escapes her at the moment — and setting up her paintings outside the gallery for Art Walk shoppers; inside on the gallery’s walls are some of her larger pieces.
“I work in smaller sizes when it comes to events like [Art Walk],” she says, “but having a gallery space gave me a platform to display work that I wanted to be more indepth and on a grander scale.”
While a typical gallery business model is set up so that galleries earn a portion of sales from artworks, the collective operates as, well, a collective. Artists pay dues and keep 100% of the money earned through sales of their work.
Satterfield notes, however, that money isn’t the sole motive for the gallery.
“Market value is important, but there is also use value which spurs conversations and inspires people to come together and talk about art. That’s what we’re doing here.”
Artists also chip in at the gallery during operating hours — 11 a.m.- 1 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday — and in other ways. Volkert, who spent decades putting on museum exhibits, built temporary, movable walls to give the gallery more space to hang art, and Smith pops in with a case of bottled water for Art Walk visitors.
“Everyone is highly motivated,” Hedera says. “Because everyone is contributing equally they are motivated to see it work.”
The collective won’t be in this building much longer, however. The group is renting and will have to move at some point as the building owner plans to turn it into office space, Volkert says.
Events are scheduled through early April, including an artist talk by Kathy Bay during the next Art Walk at 6 p.m. April 5 (like Bean’s, it will be at the Arnold Innovation Center) and showings of eclipse-related works by collective members. The group is eyeing another spot, but isn’t able to say much more about where during our visit.
A nomadic existence, though, was in the plan.
“Part of the intent of the collective was to look at vacant storefronts in a pop-up gallery sort of way, with the idea of enlivening downtown,” Volkert says. “There are empty storefronts in any downtown and the idea was of the collective going in for short periods to put up exhibitions.”
Satterfield sees it as an example for like-minded groups across Arkansas.
“Hopefully this can be a template that can be easily replicated because there are towns all over the state that don’t have any kind of gallery presence.”