click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Jack Morris
- Jack Morris and Alex Weathers with Martini the dog
Jack Morris is a 16th-generation Vermonter with family ties dating back to Ethan Allen, or so he's been told. His partner, Alex Weathers, is a Houston native who grew up surrounded by contemporary art. The two recently purchased Robert Paul Galleries in Stowe, which over its 34 years has primarily shown paintings and other artworks in traditional styles. The 23-year-old gallerists are anything but.
The pandemic disrupted the college years of both new owners, but with surprisingly positive results: In Stowe, Morris taught himself photography during the shutdown. Weathers, who was studying art history at the University of California Santa Cruz, rejected virtual classes and moved to Vermont, where the two started dating.
When Morris saw a "retirement sale" sign on the gallery last year, he stopped in to see if he could buy any framing equipment. Instead, he found himself making plans to buy the business. Over the past nine months, the couple has been thrown into the deep end of learning how to run a commercial gallery, from obtaining a business loan to becoming familiar with their client base to repainting the spaces. In late October, they took their first day off.
Since taking over from previous owners Robert Paul O'Toole and Gail O'Toole last May, Morris and Weathers have been making lots of changes, without dropping Robert Paul's roster of established Vermont artists.
"The goal that Jack and I have is, we want to keep a lot of the quintessential Vermont artists that people love and know," Weathers explained, "but we do want to bring in new flavors. We want to slowly become a more contemporary-leaning gallery."
That approach is evident in how the couple are showcasing artists. Instead of keeping everything the same — Morris pointed to a wall where Fred Swan's paintings had hung for 30 years — he and Weathers are curating rotating exhibitions of each artist's work alongside a smaller selection of other pieces.
Their current show, "40 Years Painting Vermont: An Eric Tobin Retrospective," features many of the noted plein air painter's works, including a timeline that starts with a remarkably adept first effort by the artist at age 12. Tobin's loose brushwork and sense of light, especially in works such as "The Village Church, 2004" and "Journey's End, 2019," make these paintings well worth seeing in person. Although Tobin has long had a presence at Robert Paul, a number of these works had never been displayed before.
Morris and Weathers will soon change the name of the gallery to Hayden Block (their combined middle names) and look forward to bringing on new artists. They have already added a few fresh faces, such as Brooklyn-based painter and printmaker Emilio Perez, Italian painter Sonia Bukhgalter and Burlington multimedia artist Tim DeLorenzo.
The gallerists are looking to diversify the types, styles and subjects of the works they show, as well as who is represented — think fewer barns and older white men, more of everything else.
"Viewing art and relating to art is a very personal experience, and I want people to come in here and find something that they can connect with, and that's a very individual thing," Weathers said. "Having diversity within the gallery is so important to me, because I want every type of person to be able to come here and see something that speaks to them."