That's the idea at the Bigfork Art and Cultural Center, which only recently changed its name to the Bigfork Museum of Art and History.
"In many ways we're reacting to all the new people moving in," said Marnie Forbis, director at the center. "Lots of people live here seasonally, in vacation homes, and for them it's a beautiful place to live, but it's not their hometown. They don't have any history to connect to; and without a sense of history, you can lose the character of a community in no time at all."
And with 30 years downtown - smack-dab in the middle of Electric Avenue - the Bigfork Art and Cultural Center serves as a barometer of sorts for the changes sweeping over the popular destination town.
In fact, Forbis said, the evolution of Bigfork's identity as art scene can be traced, perhaps somewhat roughly, through the evolution of this nonprofit gallery and museum.
"Our mission, then and now, has always been to change as the needs of the community dictate," she said. "We've always done that, and we're doing that again today."
In the beginning, a half-century back or so, there were two small galleries in town. But Bigfork, while creative and progressive and commercial, was not yet a haven for artists.
That transformation wouldn't begin in full force until 1960, when the Bigfork Summer Playhouse was built upon the bay, tucked into the scenic shores that separated the Swan Crest from Flathead Lake.
The professional playhouse drew people who enjoyed the arts, many of them artists themselves, and not a few stayed on when the curtain closed.
By the time the nonprofit Art and Cultural Center opened its doors in 1977, Bigfork was well on its way to a new identity, one with potter's clay under its fingernails and paint smeared on its smock.
"There were a lot of artists here by then," Forbis said, but they weren't organized collectively."
And they couldn't be, really, until volunteers retrofitted an old downtown gas station to meet the changing times. The fledgling art center rented out pottery wheels, Forbis said, and offered lots of classes for budding artists.
It was a time, she said, of beginnings, and the center provided the raw materials.
Later, in the 1980s, an explosion of galleries hit Electric Avenue as those students hit their stride. Real estate was cheap then, even downtown, and the folks who moved in were artists capable of turning an aged living space into bright studio space, complete with a storefront on the street.
"That was the beginning of the end for the old hodgepodge of homes and businesses downtown," Forbis said. "All the empty lots got built up, and houses became businesses."
The last old downtown house, owned by Effie Docksteader, became a shop just last year, after Docksteader - the last downtown holdout - finally died.
But by the time the galleries began to line Bigfork's main street, the Art and Cultural Center found itself behind the times. The old building with burlap walls and kick-wheels for rent - "sometimes open, sometimes not" - was too loose a joint for a village of professional artists.
"And so we changed to fit the need," Forbis said.
Artists began renting space at the center, space to work and space to show their work. It became, she said, "a very popular gallery for local artists."
They didn't rent wheels anymore, or easels, either. Instead, they "focused on the gallery, and on displaying the arts."
The all-purpose building became fundamentally dedicated to the fine arts, just as did the town itself.
No more gas stations downtown in those years, no more hardware stores or ice cream parlors. Bigfork had painted itself into a grown-up picture of fine art, framed by mountains and clear blue lakes.
Then, a decade later in the mid-1990s, the center found itself again behind the times. Lots of artist-owned galleries had opened, and the nonprofit was in direct competition for gallery sales.
"They needed something new for the community," Forbis said. The answer turned out to be revolving shows, the ever-changing walls that keep buyers coming back to Bigfork.
The artist-owner galleries, she said, often didn't change much year to year. Some showed the same pieces for months. Others showed different pieces, but the style never changed much.
In becoming a modern gallery with revolving shows, she said, the nonprofit center kept the customers coming back.
The wall space they had been renting to local artists now housed themed and juried shows, with artists from far beyond Bigfork. They had a schedule, had rules, had official policies. They still kept two seasonal shows aside for center members, but the emphasis had surely shifted.
"We were responding to a changing need again," Forbis said. "That's our primary mission. The town had totally transitioned from burgeoning artists to more established artists with careers. They needed space for a major show, not a watercolor class and an easel rental."
All of that peaked in the last five years or so, Forbis said, when Bigfork became home to more galleries than ever. In fact, if it wasn't a gallery, it was a fine-dining restaurant, a five-star delight where chefs showed off their own arts.
Until now.
"Now," Forbis said, "the downtown rents are so high, no one can afford them anymore."
No one, that is, except the real estate agents. Increasingly, the prime downtown storefronts are being taken over by high-end real estate offices, with windows full of million-dollar homes.
Which brings us back to that nonprofit name change, and the emergence of the Bigfork Museum of Art and History.
If, after 30 long years, the nonprofit center can be seen as a microcosm of evolution and change in broader Bigfork, then this latest name change has everything to do with all those new downtown real estate offices.
"It's time," Forbis said, "to get back to our roots."
By which she means to say that there used to be a historic museum here, run by the nonprofit in the early years. And by which she means to say that the town's history, wholly unknown to the newcomers, is key to preserving Bigfork's character into the future.
Back in 2001, when the village celebrated its centennial, the nonprofit helped pull together a photographic display of village history. It proved, as expected, a huge hit with the old-timers. What surprised Forbis, though, was the response from the newcomers.
"They loved it," she said. "It gave them a historic context, and made Bigfork 'their town.' "
Elna Darrow - who in 1976 bought one of those two galleries that pre-dated the playhouse - agrees "that's absolutely true. We need that connection to the past if we are to remain a community."
The newcomers, Darrow said, don't know about the pulp mill once proposed for the waterfront now occupied by fancy Flathead Lake Lodge. They don't know about the logs floated down the Swan River and rafted across the lake to the Somers mill.
They don't know about the downtown mercantile that, according to old clippings in the new museum, sold men's union suits for $1, butcher knives for 75 cents, washing machines for $8. They don't know about the days of the ice harvesters, carving up Bigfork bay every winter, or about much else, for that matter.
"Personally," Darrow said, "I don't understand how people can choose to live in three different houses in three different towns throughout the year. How connected can they be to any of those towns?"
Neither does Darrow understand how all those real estate offices can be good for business downtown.
"You're not going to go to an artwalk to look at real estate ads in the windows of real estate offices," she said. "Downtown has enjoyed a dominance of art. If you lose that, you lose everything."
Through Bigfork's history - captured in that new museum up above the nonprofit's gallery - lies a place of hope, Darrow said, "where newcomers can become engaged, and really make this their hometown. Their other houses, those can be places they just visit, but Bigfork can be their home."
Which, in the end, is what the nonprofit volunteers have promoted all along. Throughout the evolution of this artists' enclave, the Art and Cultural Center has kept as its focus the idea of community, of making Bigfork a home rather than a cliche.
"We'll keep the gallery active downstairs," Forbis said, "because that's who we are and that's what we do. But we need the museum upstairs, because that's who we are, too."
They are Bigfork, the home, captured there in the old black-and-white photo of the year of the record oat harvest, grain piled high in the field. That field, Forbis said, is now home to Eagle Bend Golf Course, lined by vacation homes in the year of the record real estate sales.
"If you only see what's there now, and don't understand how it used to be," Darrow said, "then you can never really appreciate Bigfork, and you can never truly call it your home."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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