Anniversaries...

This year marks a few important milestones. Being that I let this past year go by without realizing that it has been 25 years since I began selling my art, I wanted to pay a little better attention this year, keeping an eye out for any milestones.

This year will be my 20th as a photographer, so I am planning to have monthly shows of new work at my family's gallery in the Cotton Exchange in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

As it turns out, this year is also a milestone for The Golden Gallery as well. This year marks our 30th year in business. My mother started the gallery as a way to sell her watercolors way back in 1977, shortly after my family moved to Wilmington.

The Cotton Exchange had recently been saved from the wrecking ball and urban renewal, and was a small complex of shops in an historic grouping of buildings that had once been saloons, a bordelo and a cotton warehouse. Many shops have come and gone, and we are the only original shop owners left. A few shops and restaurants have remained with new owners, and some new shops will be opening in the next few months.

From the age of 10 years on, I have been spending time in the gallery, from when I used to walk to the gallery after school, in the back room of the gallery building model houses out of scrap matboard, to this last year, when I moved my office into a space in the Cotton Exchange, and now spend part of every day there.

To mark our 30th Anniversary, we are moving across the hall into 2 spaces. This will be our 5th location in the Cotton Exchange, and we are very excited about the prospect of more wall space and a larger back room. We are a working gallery, so there are often several of us working the back room matting, framing and otherwise packaging artwork and filling internet orders.

The pictures here show our current gallery. We moved to our current location several years ago after some repeated flooding in our previous space. It was a hurried move, into about half the space of our previous location. We will be bidding farewell to the brick wall (hard to hang stuff on) and saying hello to having 2 entrances and a more visible storefront.

We have to knock a big whole in the wall between the two spaces, and add a few walls, and paint a lot of walls, but we hope to be in our new digs by March 1st, ready to go another 30 years.