IMA Unveiling: The Best of the Artists’ Registry | Special to the Journal
Published 10:28 am Wednesday, November 26, 2014
If ever there was an appropriate name for an art exhibition, it is the one-word title given the highly anticipated first show at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art: Unveiling.
The Artists’ Registry has been a jewel in IMA’s crown for many years, and the dramatic glass and steel building on Spring Street in Friday Harbor will open its doors to showcase them just in time for the holidays.
According to IMA President Jack Yelverton, it is appropriate that local artists’ work is the first to hang on the new building’s walls. “This is an opportunity for local artists to show their work in a first class environment that we hope will catch the eye of art collectors worldwide,” he said.
How did this building get started? The IMA dream was an improbable notion brought to life ten years ago by an unflappable bunch of San Juan artists with a hare brained idea: to build a fine arts museum that would gain the attention of artists and audiences around the world. They had no money. They had no building.
Still, the tiny museum-without-a-home set up grand exhibitions in venues from theater lobbies to abandoned retail shops. Dedicated volunteers swept, painted, built exhibition space and wooed talent from around the country as they moved from building to building.
After seven years wandering, the peripatetic museum began to pine for a real home. More than a decade later, IMA has found it.
After the construction of Peace Island Medical Center, the former EMT garage stood abandoned on Spring Street. The garage building was tall and sturdy, with excellent bones and personality. The potential, invisible to some, was obvious to executive director Charlie Bodenstab and the IMA crew: It’s our museum!
Realizing the potential to create a true work of art, local architect Richard Hobbs’ added a soaring glass and steel atrium that gives the structure a uniquely dramatic presence at the quiet top end of Friday Harbor’s main street.
Plans for the new IMA include workshops that vary greatly in style and price, taught by artists both from the islands and around the world. IMA expects that art-loving travelers who come to see the new museum will stay to relish the beauty of the islands. They will sleep at local hotels, eat at local restaurants, shop in local shops – thrilled to discover so many art studios and galleries in this out-of-the-way place.
The doors open Dec. 5 with the Unveiling: The Best of the IMA Artists’ Registry, which runs through January 25, followed by IMA’s Grand Opening February 14 of Illuminated: Glass by William Morris 1998-2013.
Charter memberships are available for a limited time. Admission to IMA is free.
— Rebecca Parks, IMA marketing director
