BRATTLEBORO — A year ago last November, artists Petria Mitchell and Jim Giddings were set to debut a new Main Street gallery when builders hit a sprinkler that flooded the drywall and the wooden floor.
“What’s next?” Mitchell asked the local media. “Locusts?”
The couple didn’t foresee the global coronavirus pandemic that closed the business just weeks after its grand opening, sending the storefront online until its recent return with masks and physical distancing. That’s when a second pipe burst on the anniversary of the first downpour — a seemingly last straw that instead has sparked a timely story of gratitude and grace.
Mitchell Giddings Fine Arts’ downtown cornerstone address has served as a local anchor for nearly two centuries. Back in 1828, an early home on the site was turned into the Vermont House hotel and tavern, which hosted travelers for decades until a fire incinerated the property in 1852.
“As we write, the Aurora is streaming brilliantly above the ruins, like hope hovering over the couch of despair,” a local paper reported after the blaze. “We accept it as an omen of a speedy restoration of that part of our village to its former beauty.”
Brattleboro soon replaced the charred remnants with a stately brick Town Hall, which stood there nearly 100 years before bulldozers made way for a modern retail building that welcomed the once-heralded advancements of a chain department store in 1954, a mini-shopping mall in 1978 and, most recently, a home furnishings importer with goods from around the world.
Mitchell and Giddings opened their first gallery in the basement six years ago. It was a gamble for two artists, settled on a still life of a dirt road, to invest their retirement savings into a showy downtown space more likely seen in Boston or New York.
Giddings recalls telling a colleague about the plan.
“His only comment was, ‘My condolences.’”
But when the basement gallery opened in 2014, the now late renowned painter Wolf Kahn wrote in the guest book: “You have brought Paris to Brattleboro.”
The upstairs import showroom closed last year, spurring the couple to relocate to street level and remodel the building into an arts hub that also includes the First Proof Press printmaking studio, In-Sight Photography Project and, coming soon, Brattleboro School of Dance.
Some lament the loss of retail space.
“I miss the downtown where you could buy clothing and bedding and have shoes or a radio fixed,” says Giddings himself.
But the move, part of a statewide surge in the creative economy, has precedent. Shortly after the Brattleboro Town Hall opened on the same spot in 1855, leaders rented a studio to local boy turned lauded American painter William Morris Hunt, then added an 875-seat opera house at the turn of the 20th century that became a movie theater in the 1920s.
The area Chamber of Commerce gave the site’s latest incarnation its seal of approval this January, naming Mitchell and Giddings its Entrepreneurs of the Year. Then came the pandemic, the switch to plugging into online sales, the recent in-person return with an Amy Arbus show of Village Voice photography and, this month, a second deluge.
“When we got the call from the alarm company, I joked, ‘We’re lucky it’s not another flood,’” Mitchell recalls. “But when we heard water again, the PTSD was instant. Our hearts wanted to stop.”
Surprisingly, they didn’t. The torrent, the couple realized, didn’t touch any of the art. They’ve also had plenty of practice juggling cleanup crews, insurance adjusters and contractors.
“It gets old,” Giddings says, “yet as crazy and unsettling as it all is, it could have been worse. One of the things I keep thinking is you do what you can. We have this space and the opportunity to continue.”
And so the gallery will open its front foyer for business this Thanksgiving weekend, then return to online sales until reopening in January with two social justice shows, Jackie Abrams’ “Precarious Shelters: Houses that Hold Us” and Erika Radich’s “Deportees: A Tribute.”
“We’re all dealing with so much fear and unknown — I’m amazed the human spirit can seem to find a way to dig deeper,” says Mitchell, speaking as much collectively as individually. “Maybe there’s so much we’ve been through, those muscles are just very well defined. We’re finding places of resilience that, for me, create hope we can move forward.”