Three Wellfleet galleries — Off Main, Burdick, and Marrinan — won’t be opening their doors this summer. The closings mark the end of a chapter for the three spaces, each of which uniquely influenced Wellfleet’s culture.
All of the gallerists said the reasons were largely financial. Two, Robert Shreefter of Off Main Gallery and Kate Burdick Barnholz of Burdick Gallery, said turning a profit had become increasingly difficult in recent years. Michael Marrinan of his namesake gallery did well during his six years in Wellfleet; but when the building went up for sale, buying the space was not tenable.
Off Main Gallery
Shreefter, who ran Off Main Gallery with his wife, Wendy Luttrell, opened the gallery in 2016 after retiring from Lesley University, where he founded a master’s program in art education. While at Lesley, he also started a gallery at the university for students to show their artwork. “I really liked doing it,” says Shreefter. When he retired, starting a gallery in Wellfleet, where he had a house, seemed like a logical next step.
Off Main Gallery got its name from its original location, which was inside a barn owned by Mary Fox, just off Main Street in Wellfleet and behind A Nice Cream Stop. “The building was this wonderful historic place with a long history of people who rented it as a gallery,” says Shreefter. “Very quickly, we were part of this Wellfleet tradition.”
Shreefter, a printmaker, initially ran the gallery as a collective. In its first season, he worked with Nancy Nicol and Sarah Riley. The three artists showed their own work and an additional artist. In subsequent seasons, he worked with additional artists who would pay $500 toward overhead costs and keep 60 percent of their gross sales instead of the more-typical 50-percent commission. This collective identity served as an economic model but also established an exhibition style that favored two- or three-person shows over solo exhibitions. As was the case with his Lesley exhibits, Shreefter was fascinated with the challenge of putting together shows where the work of a few artists spoke to each other.
“Over the years, we tended more toward painting and printmaking with art-historical roots in modernism and later movements,” says Shreefter. “Our joke was ‘No lighthouses,’ ” he adds.
The gallery got experimental at times, hosting two exhibitions by Mark Brennan, one of which featured a panoramic watercolor that wrapped around the gallery and another of a gallery-wide wall painting. Shreefter considers their approach to art as part of a tradition of Wellfleet artists who “really understand why they make art, why it’s important, and how it serves as part of a community endeavor.”
After a few years of operating as a collective, Off Main Gallery moved to a smaller and cheaper space on Commercial Street and transitioned to a more traditional gallery model, with Shreefter and Luttrell serving as owners and directors. It was simpler. And Shreefter had felt uncomfortable when a few of the collaborating artists didn’t make back their contributions.
“We were never thinking about what would sell and what wouldn’t sell,” he says. He took on full financial liability for the gallery when the collective dissolved. When the gallery sustained losses over a few years, it was hard to justify keeping it open.
During Shreefter and Luttrell’s tenure, the gallery developed a devoted following. “I was surprised how loyal people were,” he says. Many people came to openings regularly, often meeting new friends and expanding their social networks. And many of them purchased artwork, typically at modest prices. But eventually, the gallery’s core audience reached a limit.
“We had an audience of summer people who understand what Wellfleet is, but they were getting older and downsizing,” says Shreefter. He found the younger, more affluent visitors disconnected from the cultural history of the town. “How could they know where they are if they’ve never been here?” he says.
“I’m not bitter,” he adds. “The world changes.”
Along with the changes come new opportunities. “I’m looking forward to hanging out this summer and traveling,” says Shreefter, who was primarily responsible for sitting in the gallery when it was open. The space at 75 Commercial St. has a new tenant: Shinglefish, featuring the work of Nicole Gelinas, who paints images of fish on reclaimed shingles and designs gift items with images of sealife.
Burdick Gallery
Like Off Main Gallery, Burdick Gallery had its roots in the barn on Main Street behind the ice cream shop. In 1967, Charles Burdick opened his first gallery in the space and started the Wellfleet Art Gallery Association. When he bought a house in South Wellfleet, he set up a gallery on his property, passing on the barn to other tenants. His daughter Kate Burdick Barnholtz resurrected Burdick Gallery in 2008 after purchasing and renovating a former carriage house on Bank Street. With the help of her sister, Margaret Burdick, she has run the gallery ever since, except for two seasons at the height of the pandemic.
“I bought this art gallery for my family — that’s the bottom line,” says Barnholtz. Her mother, Joanne Burdick, and Margaret are artists like her father, who died in 2016. “Everybody was an artist,” she says. “When we were kids, that was all there was to do. We all learned how to knit, how to sew, how to do artwork.”
Barnholtz grew up in Wellfleet after her family moved here from New York when she was seven. She left when she was 17 and took a different course, eventually owning a film company in California before finding her way back to art.
“One of us had to be the accountant, the legal person,” says Barnholtz. “That’s me. Which is, of course, how I bought the gallery.”
As the daughter of two artists, she was well acquainted with the financial reality of the artist’s life. “I didn’t grow up in a middle-class family,” she says. Yet her father was able to make a living, however modest, and purchase property. Animals in motion were one of his favored subjects, which didn’t go over that well on Cape Cod. So, he sold his art primarily at outdoor festivals in New York, New England, Chicago, and Florida.
Since 2008, Barnholtz has sold her family’s artwork at Burdick Gallery in addition to work by other local artists including Nancy Nicol and Monica Rozak. Barnholtz cites an increase in costs, including taxes, and a lack of help as factors that led to closing the gallery.
“I couldn’t get any help here,” she says. “People can’t get places to rent. The economics are affecting everyone.” Turning a profit became too much of a challenge, and so she has offered her gallery for rent, asking $25,000 for the season. “I’d like to see a successful business in there that can provide taxes for the community,” she says. And if it can be a gallery, all the better.
“I hope it continues as a gallery,” she says. “I built it as a gallery.”
Marrinan Gallery
Michael Marrinan was born in London, England and moved in 1999 to Cape Cod where he worked as a mason and painted on the side until he opened his Wellfleet gallery six years ago. It was his dream to have his own gallery, but he didn’t want it to be stuffy, like the spaces he visited growing up in London.
“I said to myself, ‘If I ever get my own space, I’m going to make it a little less intimidating and a bit more friendly,’ ” he says. He accomplished that goal; it was a fun place to visit, with his alchemical paintings of sunsets and seascapes on copper and whimsical sculptures of gravity-defying furniture. Kids and adults felt equally comfortable in the space.
Marrinan did well financially, particularly during the pandemic, when people were moving to the Cape and turning second homes into primary residences. “There’s a thin line between what you want to do and how you make a living,” says Marrinan. Although he says he was never “money hungry,” he worked intentionally to create a balance between creative fulfillment and the need to sell work in order to sustain himself. He made accessible artwork and was often working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week during the summer.
When the owner of the building he rented decided to sell, Marrinan was offered favorable terms for purchasing the building, but it would have cost close to $1 million, which was untenable for him. (The building is now the home of Heart Core Fitness.) He thought about buying a building in Yarmouth, but when that fell through he decided to focus on building out his Eastham studio, and this summer he will sell his work at Chatham Fine Arts and a gallery in Nantucket.
“I’m taking a year or two to refocus and make things I want to make,” says Marrinan. “Right now, I’m levitating a lamp. I have the time to do this. I don’t have to get 40 paintings ready for May.”
