If you happen to be a fan of the Hargate Gallery at St. Paul’s School, you might want to stop in for a visit.
’Cause if you don’t get there by Saturday, then the school’s longtime home for art exhibits simply won’t be there – at least how you remember it.
The final exhibit in Hargate history, appropriately named Farewell to Hargate, closes this weekend and after that there won’t be another art show on the campus for who knows how long. The exhibit feature old photographs, paintings, exhibition cards and brochures and a bunch of other things to do with the history of Hargate.
“Lindsay (Bolduc) and I were talking and we thought if we’re going to move why don’t we do a retrospective,” said gallery director Colin Callahan of his conversation with his gallery assistant.
Sometime in the near future, the fine arts department, which has called Hargate home for almost 50 years, will be moving to a temporary location across campus when the initial stages of a major renovation project on campus begins.
“A few years ago, they started talking about it,” Callahan said.
Hargate will eventually become a community center featuring things like the campus mail room, an activity room, the dean of students’ office and a snack bar along with other cool stuff that just screams a cool place to hang out.
The fine arts department will move to temporary quarters in the top floor of the Freeman Center, which is currently home to the student center, and once the renovation project that encompasses three buildings on campus is finished over the next couple years, will make its permanent home in what is currently called the Moore Building. It will be two levels and allow for a more state of the art space for the faculty of four to teach. The plan is for the upstairs to consist of studios for painting, drawing and print work, while the bottom level will be for photography, graphic arts, ceramics and 3-dimensional art.
“It will be a big open, flexible space where we can move stuff around,” Callahan said. “They’ll be divided, but there will be more flow between classes.”
And one of the major changes with the ol’ switcheroo is that the gallery (which will no longer be known as Hargate) won’t be in the same building as the fine arts department. Instead, the gallery will eventually call Freeman home (name to be determined) along with a much better spot to keep the school’s permanent collection and a couple classroom type spaces that can be utilized when teaching requires use of the collection.
“The gallery here is a much bigger space then what we’re getting, but we’ll have a nice space,” Callahan said. “It’s going to be a big change, but a good change.”
So now that we’ve told you all you need to know about the changes that will be taking place over the next couple years, let’s take a look at what the Hargate Gallery has been.
The building was named after one-time SPS teacher John Hargate and originally started as a dining hall for first and second form students, also known as seventh and eighth graders.
Once the school decided to focus on high school students, Hargate was transformed into the fine arts building in the late 1960s and has housed gallery exhibits, around 300 to be kind of exact, and including individual shows with local folks like Melissa Anne Miller, Clifford Smith and Tom Devaney, along with the yearly faculty and student spreads. And this won’t be the first time that Hargate has gone through a major renovation. After the great flood of Mother’s Day 2006, where the bottom floor was under four feet of water, it all had to be gutted and replaced. So even though moving to temporary quarters isn’t ideal for the fine arts department, they’ve had to make due with a tough situation before.
“This is a great building as long as the water doesn’t go running through it,” Callahan said.
After the flood, the gallery was turned into four studios, which meant no art shows then either.
But at the end of it all, there will be a nice new space for fine arts, housed in the same area as the rest of the academic departments and a new gallery space that will make accessing the hundreds of pieces in the school’s collection much easier.
It’s unsure when the next art show at St. Paul’s will take place since the temporary space will not include a gallery, so that means the annual student and faculty shows won’t happen this year.
“During this time we’ll work on organizing and cataloging the permanent collection,” Callahan said. “You kind of have to audit your permanent collection every so often anyway.”
For Callahan, who has spent his entire 32 year teaching career in Hargate, including the last eight as department head and 16 as gallery director, one of the more difficult things about the move is that when he leaves his on campus house, he’ll have to turn left instead of right. It may seem like a simple task, let’s just hope he has better luck than Derek Zoolander.
