BVAA and the Alternatives Uxbridge Community Gallery

We have great news! The BVAA officers have met with a group from Alternatives and put together a plan of action for moving forward with our use of the Alternatives Uxbridge Community Gallery space. This gallery is located at 5 Main Street in Uxbridge, where 122 meets 16. The BVAA will be given access to this space for free.

We can discuss this arrangement in depth at the September meeting, which will be held in this gallery. You can email any questions you have at any time. Here is the gist of the plan.

Starting in September, we’ll have our monthly meetings at the Uxbridge gallery. They’ll even put our name on the door and everything! It gives us a permanent “home base” where we can sell artwork, have shows, have meetings, run classes, and more. Alternatives uses the gallery space each day from 9am – 3:30pm. That means from around 5pm on each weeknight, and all day on weekends, we can have seminars, sessions, classes, sales, and other activities. BVAA members will be able to use that space to run their own events.

Here’s a photo of how full the gallery gets during the huge Uxbridge First Night celebration, at the start of December each year.

There’ll also be the Uxbridge festival coming up on September 2nd that is on that Main Street area. We should be able to get visitors from that as well.

As part of the arrangement, any income generated from the location from art sales, shop sales, or for-fee events will be split 75% to the artist / organizer and 25% to go into our gallery funds. These funds will help pay for teachers at our workshops, food for receptions, and other gallery-specific activities. The aim is for our art activities in this gallery to be self-sustaining.

We will have the massive power of the Alternatives team behind any marketing we do, including for the sessions and seminars our BVAA members wish to run. They’ll make flyers, postcards, and more. Please aim to plan to have all details about an event finalized 2 months before the start of the event. That gives Alternatives ample time to get the news of the sessions into all the local papers, include it in their ValleyCast mailing, and spread the word. That helps guarantee maximum attendance at the events and maximum publicity for the artists involved.

Please let us know if you’re interested in using the space for the upcoming fall season. We will organize the calendar and coordinate the logistics with Alternatives for the marketing.

This is an awesome opportunity for all of us. Those with small items can have them available for sale in the glass cases in the gallery. Our art will be hanging on the walls. Those who would like to run classes and seminars will have quiet, easy-to-access space to do it in which has oodles of parking. We can do drop-in critique sessions where artists brainstorm about their in-progress works. And all of us can enjoy the meetings and shows in a space which is truly “our own”.

They’re even installing a new hanging system on the brick wall, so hanging art will be even easier than before.

Ask with any questions!

We hope to hear from you soon!

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