How art built New Bedford

by Lori Bradley

A university business program can help students prepare for future success on their chosen path, but it rarely addresses the challenges by first-time small business owners, especially artistic ones.

For over two decades, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD) art and design students had a special opportunity to venture off the campus and into the streets of New Bedford to start their own creative businesses. Many of these ventures still enrich the downtown area. Many have changed hands or been replaced over the years, but all, no matter the length of their existence, helped impart a distinctive character and sense of community to this small city. Now that the UMD art department has been entirely relocated to suburban Dartmouth it may be more difficult to attract creative students to start their own business ventures. Hopefully, efforts will be made to continue to draw art students downtown because they, and the UMD art faculty, crafted the city of New Bedford over the years with their time and talent.

Twenty years ago, artist and photographer Sheila Oliveira was a member of The Artist’s Cooperative Gallery on Centre Street, one of the earliest galleries opened and operated by UMD students. She was a graduate student in the photography department and went on to teach at the university and participate in other galleries and artist’s cooperatives downtown. The Centre Street location was perfect for a gallery built by artists inspired by the sea as the working waterfront with ships masts, brightly colored boats, and shimmering water was visible from the front door.

Oliveira shares, “An area such as New Bedford that has a deep maritime past and present, offers a sense of unique subject matter to work with. My experience reflected this as a member of two art cooperatives. The artwork was often created by graduates, faculty and others connected with the university and it reflected a combination of art in various media influenced by the environment or a combination of personal interests within that environment.”

“Paintings of seascapes, imagery of seagulls, boats, fish, would be requested by customers as a remembrance of their visit to the area. In a way, both the economy of the city, as well as the sale of art is a perfect combination. At both artist cooperatives I belonged to, shoppers would come into the gallery looking for artwork that was original. They felt comfortable buying from artists who made and sold the inventory and they wanted to talk about how it was made. A true sense of art community has existed in New Bedford for many years within a city history that has been part of the American Maritime conversation in literature and fine arts.”

Oliveira touches on one of the most vexing and intriguing business challenges for small business owners which is how to address and serve a specialized audience. For beginning artists, it can be tough to confront the reality that customers want to purchase a particular subject matter rather than art created from the heart. The small artist-run galleries that grew in New Bedford were the perfect setting in which to deal with this marketplace reality while discussing the business-side of art with fellow student artists.

Urban inspiration

After experiencing the commercial side of art, some artists decided that direct sales to an audience primarily interested maritime subjects was not for them and found ways to stay involved with art in other ways, sometimes renting studio space in one of the many city’s mill buildings, pursuing an educational career, or developing multiple bodies of work, both personal and commercial. Others listened to audience feedback and developed work tailored to a coastal audience. Most important overall was the experience of making and selling work made possible by an abundance of affordable shop spaces. In this way, New Bedford became a welcoming environment for the arts and a live learning lab for creative businesses. Through these businesses, many artists discovered how to deal with taxes and accounting, city policies, public relations, landlords, and building effective group governing structures for small businesses –necessities not always taught in school. Many UMD artists moved into the nonprofit business sector and developed organizations that continue to enrich the city and pull visitors in from the suburbs, the state, and from other parts of the country.

Interested in starting a non-profit arts gallery, graduates of the UMD Art Department precursor, the Swain College of Art and Design, founded the venerable Gallery X that now owns a renovated church gallery at the top of William Street. Ever since, arts graduates and affiliates have been active in a plethora of creative non-profits. ArtWorks! was another institution instrumental in building the downtown arts scene and grew out of a program hosted at the old UMD Purchase Street arts campus.

Twenty years later, the UMD downtown galleries in the Star Store, expertly and passionately curated by Viera Levitt, brought nationally recognized artists to New Bedford through her active association with the successful AHA! New Bedford’s non-profit organization promoting Arts, History and Architecture. New Bedford’s annual Seaport Art Walk was founded in 2013 by artist and former UMD student Jessica Bregoli, bringing beauty to the waterfront each summer through sculpture and murals strategically placed along New Bedford’s working waterfront.

One of the newest non-profits to enter the New Bedford arts scene is the Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute (DATMA.) As stated on their website, “DATMA is committed to bringing world-renowned art, design, and technology exhibitions, programs, and initiatives to the visitors and citizens of New Bedford and the region, identified as one of the Commonwealth’s most creative economies by the Massachusetts Cultural Council.” DATMA’s Executive Director is a former UMD artisanry graduate student, Lindsay Mis.

DATMA’s mission statement reflects the dream of attracting artists to downtown New Bedford for two decades. Here artists have the opportunity to buy-in to an accessible arts economy and then to grow and build-up to a larger, perhaps global, audience within a nurturing scalable urban culture. Importantly, New Bedford has multiple, distinct cultural influences that interconnect within a relatively small physical footprint.

The longing for a sense of place is obvious as Sheila Oliveira describes her migration from a student at the UMD downtown campus to urban entrepreneur,

“It was a natural progression for me to graduate from the university and continue my art career in New Bedford for logistical reasons, as well as creatively inspired ones. If I could boil it down, the attraction was the combination of locally created artwork of high quality that has a sense of presence and place. Often, cultural influences were a factor such as artwork created in a Cape Verdean or Azorean aesthetic.

Downtown New Bedford overall has a longstanding respected art community to which visitors are attracted. With several art galleries, eateries, cafes, and architecture, not to mention a beautiful waterfront, it is a winning combination. These factors combine to create an urban art oasis that exists in larger cities such as Boston and New York City.”

Logistically, with the loss of the UMD Star Store, it will now be more difficult to attract UMD students into downtown New Bedford from the suburban campus, but with effort it can be done, and hopefully interested parties will keep the spirit of the New Bedford art adventure alive. Author Sue Monk Kidd writes, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we’re here.”

Creatives who will continue to populate downtown New Bedford need to keep sharing their art and their stories along with their experiences of developing an artist-run business in a small coastal city. They need to share these stories with current art students who are now working in the suburbs, only a few miles away. Hopefully, if kept alive, these stories about a small city that became an arts business incubator will keep New Bedford from becoming “just anywhere” in the future.