It's not that Murphy can't move Jubb's paintings. Rather, it's that he can't keep up with demand.
“Output is the only thing that limits her sales at this point,” says Murphy. “She can only produce so much work.”
“Her sales had steadily declined for about 10 years until we opened,” says Murphy. “But she had a tremendous year this past year. She eclipsed anything she's ever done (in terms of sales) by so much, it's ridiculous. The local patrons have supported us like crazy this past year.”
That's a theme echoed in several other quarters of the Missoula gallery scene: 2005 was a boom year for local art sales.
“I had a great year,” says Dudley Dana, owner of the Dana Gallery, located at the corner of Higgins and Broadway. “We were up 20 to 25 percent over the previous year.”
Ditto - and then some - at L.A. Designs, an art and framing shop located on East Broadway.
“We had an unbelievable year,” enthuses Lynne Himes, owner of the gallery, which serves (among other things) as home to the artwork of painter Larry Pirnie.
Himes says sales of artwork at the gallery was up 30 percent in 2005.
Why the boom? And in the context of the recent closure of one of Missoula's cornerstone galleries, Gallery Blue, is the Missoula gallery market truly experiencing a rising tide, or merely treading on shifting sands?
Ask Dudley Dana about the trajectory of the local art market, and you're likely to get a surprising answer.
“It's a little hard, as a gallery, to feel stable - despite the success we've had in the past year,” says Dana. “I'm actually somewhat troubled by what's happened.”
Dana says he was deeply shaken by the closure of Gallery Blue, which, with its eclectic mix of work by a variety of local and regional artists, was the closest thing to a counterpart to the Dana Gallery in the local marketplace (being half a block away from the Dana Gallery, it was also one in a small hub of galleries in central downtown). First opened as the Clark Fork Gallery in 1982 and later known as Sutton West, the gallery was the birthplace of what is now the First Friday Artwalk. Until its closure, Gallery Blue served as the local showcase for a number of Missoula's better known artists, including Dana Boussard, Rudy Autio, Nancy Erickson and Don Mundt.
“Now, the artists (whose work was shown at Gallery Blue) don't really have a place in the local galleries,” says Dana. “That's really a major blow to the arts community.”
Given the success of the Dana Gallery over the past year, it might seem that Dana should have little to worry about, at least where his own gallery is concerned. Having moved into the new digs on Higgins a year and a half ago, and after further expanding into an adjacent space last year, the Dana Gallery is now the largest contemporary art gallery in Montana, at least in terms of square footage. Dana now represents more than 40 artists, including Jonathan Qualben, Jeff Walker, Robert Moore and Jennifer Li.
But how much of the gallery's growth in 2005 can simply be chalked up to a parallel increase in volume of work available at the gallery? That's a tough question.
Perhaps part of the answer can be found down the street, at L.A. Designs - the local home of Larry Pirnie's artwork. According to owner Himes, the amount of work available at the gallery didn't change significantly last year. Rather, there simply seemed to be more buyers - particularly nonlocal buyers - coming into the shop, looking for a Pirnie to call their own.
“We had more out-of-state tourism than we've seen in the past,” says Himes. “I really think our success with Larry's work has a lot to do with this out-of-state market moving here, especially in the summer months. That's a key factor. I can't tell you how many times someone stops in, they're getting on an airplane in a half an hour but they want one of Larry's paintings, so we ship it to them wherever they live.”
Tourists also seem to have driven growth at the Missoula Artists' Shop, located (during most of the year) on North Higgins Avenue next to H&R Block.
“Almost every year we've been in business we've had an increase in customers,” says Sue Spanke, the current chairwoman of the shop, which is collectively operated by the artists whose work is featured there.
“We've seen lots of out-of-town people coming in, and I think a lot of them are not used to finding the kinds of things we have here,” says Spanke. “People from big metropolitan areas are so used to mass retail stuff, so they are often really impressed to find locally hand-made things that they can afford in our shop.”
That phenomenon is familiar to Dana as well. According to his sales records, a full 40 percent of Dana's clients are either tourists or part-time residents of Missoula.
Local artist Monte Dolack, whose artwork and posters are featured at his own Monte Dolack Gallery on East Front Street, has seen another side of the question of familiarity and volume of available work during the past year.
While 2005 wasn't a bad year for Dolack, it also wasn't much different from the previous year for his gallery.
That's probably because Dolack, years ago, hit the limits of output that other local artists are just now confronting. His gallery hasn't significantly expanded; nor are people who are interested in his work struggling to find the gallery. He's painting and selling about as many works as he did in past years; and as usual, few of his works linger long on his gallery's walls.
“Unlike other galleries that can offer a new artist every month, I can't do that,” says Dolack. “I can offer the body of work I've done, and that's the limit of what I have available. I'm happy to keep a consistent presence and hopefully offer good work.”
If there's one segment of the local art market that's seen a less-than-stellar year, it's what might loosely be referred to as the market for edgier contemporary art.
“The dilemma that most contemporary artists have in this town is that you're always butting heads with commercial galleries whose emphasis is salability,” says Michael DeMeng, a local mixed-media artist whose works, built out of found objects, are at once iconic and curious, like religious tokens from a parallel universe.
“Most of the really forward-looking art can be really tough to sell in this town,” says DeMeng.
Over the past couple of years, DeMeng has joined with several other local artists of like mind, including Bev and Stephen Glueckert, Peter Keefer, Cathryn Mallory, Karen Rice, Edgar Smith and others. Together, those artists have operated a seasonal space during the holidays, known as the Saltmine. DeMeng says that 2005 was a good year for most of the artists involved, but not a great improvement on 2004.
That sentiment is echoed by Leslie Van Stavern Millar II, a local artist who also manages the Brunswick Building, a collection of artist studios located on Railroad Street. Every year, the artists at the Brunswick host a holiday open house, at which they sell their works. According to Millar, 2005 looked a lot like previous years for that event.
Such wasn't the case for the Pattee Canyon Ladies' Salon, an artists' group of which Millar is a member. Every August, the Salon holds a sale of figure drawings produced by members of the group. Millar says sales at that event were “significantly off” compared to previous years.
“My perception is that people are being very cautious about spending money on things that they don't need to eat or live in,” opines Millar. “They want the art, the interest is there, but they aren't necessarily spending the money.”
Although it's sometimes misleading to compare the local market to national trends, in this case the successes of local galleries mirror a national trend.
Eileen Kinsella, editor of ArtNewsletter, tracks art sales at major art auctions around the world. She says that more and more buyers are spending more and more money on fine art in recent years.
“Recent auction seasons consistently have scored results that are among the strongest on record,” says Kinsella.
Case in point: Sales at auctions held by Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips, de Pury and Company between Nov. 1-11 of last year totaled $765.3 million. That's more than 2 1/2 times the total sales in the spring 2003 auction season.
In fact, art outperformed both the S&P 500 and 10-year Treasury bond yields over both a five- and 50-year period. That's according to an August 2004 article published in Institutional Investor, in which repeat sales of artworks were compared to stock and bond prices.
So maybe the overall tide is indeed rising in the art world. It certainly makes a degree of sense that edgier art would still find mixed results in this milieu, in the same way that riskier, small-cap stocks don't always follow the trajectory of the stock indexes.
Ram Murphy, for one, is looking forward to 2006.
“I bet you all the money I make that we'll do better next year than we did last year,” he predicts.
Reach Joe Nickell at 523-5358 or at jnickell@missoulian.com.
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