Picture a gallery. Got it? Now think smaller. Shrink your scene down to a meticulously crafted 1:12 scale model. Reconsider the capacity of a storage closet. Imagine a refrigerator door covered in contemporary photography. Visualize a vending machine stocked with zines and artist-made stickers and hand-painted jewelry. Local artists have turned all these spaces into homes for art. And in recent years, others have created micro galleries that double as public art projects. With reduced overhead but ample opportunities to surprise and delight passersby, these small but mighty spaces are putting work on view around the clock in unexpected locations—say, a vacant storefront, a snug shed, or a mobile trailer.
The last on that list is now home to the Burlington Micro Gallery, a solar-powered gallery on wheels that launched on June 27 on the Burlington Town Common and will hitch a ride to other public parks and the Burlington Mall. “I wanted it to be mobile and out in a park so that everyone felt welcome,” says gallery manager and curator Catherine LeComte Lecce. “And the art will also be viewable twenty-four seven from the windows of the gallery, so there’s never a barrier to entry.”
For LeComte Lecce, making art accessible is a personal mission. “My path into the arts was really long and difficult,” she explains. “I grew up in a low-income household. There were times we didn’t even have money for food, so that made extracurricular activities like sports, arts, and music off limits for me.” She made her first visit to a museum at age fifteen, when a high school trip to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts sparked her passion for art. But even as she went on to earn her BFA and MFA in photography, she didn’t always feel welcomed in traditional gallery settings. It was during graduate school that she came up with the concept for a mobile micro gallery.
“At the time I was in a business class at MassArt, but I was also pregnant, and it ended up becoming too much, so I tabled the idea,” LeComte Lecce recalls. But then last year, with her son in a stroller beside her, she pitched the concept to Melisa Tintocalis, the economic development director for the town of Burlington, which had earmarked funds for a placemaking grant. Now, after transforming the trailer—and finally finding a solar company to work with after thirty rejections—the Burlington Micro Gallery has launched with “Loose Ends,” a show of Jai Hart’s shaped and stuffed paintings, on view through August 29. “They’re very vibrant and playful,” LeComte Lecce says. “And Jai herself is incredibly kind and just so talented. She lives nearby in Concord, and my goal is to highlight Massachusetts-based artists with this space, at least for the next year.”
Yolanda He Yang, the founding director of Behind VA Shadows, has an even more focused curatorial mission: showcasing the art of local museum workers. Founded in late 2021 by a group of visitor assistants at the ICA—and named for the traces such workers can leave when they lean against gallery walls during long shifts—Behind VA Shadows organized online and pop-up exhibitions before opening its “25/8 artspace” in a vacant storefront in Harvard Square in 2023. “Right after our first in-person show in Downtown Crossing, I realized it’s pretty hard for a collective to have a space to show together,” Yang says. “Everybody’s just so busy, and most of us have nine-to-five museum jobs during the daytime, meaning the staffing would be a problem. I thought that if a space doesn’t need staffing, if it could be on view twenty-four seven, that would be perfect and really serve as public art rather than a traditional gallery space.”
While searching for vacant storefronts, Yang was also busy with her own practice as a performance and installation artist. Her public projects found a fan in Denise Jillson, the executive director of the Harvard Square Business Association, and Yang asked Jillson if she had any recommendations for potential spaces. They landed on a long, narrow storefront on Linden Street that’s since hosted more than a dozen solo and group exhibitions. And on August 3, it’ll be the site for Behind VA Shadows’ annual summer party, which is doubling as a launch event for the collective’s first print catalog, an ambitious undertaking covering its programming since 2022 and clocking in at two hundred pages.
“We are going to collaborate with artists to make a photo booth and have an open mic and a DJ,” Yang says. “Everything is volunteer based because we’re not a currency-based project. So it’s very sweet to see everything can still come together without money and that people can get together to create a community.”
A yearning for community, not commerce, has likewise been a driving factor for Katherine Spencer, founder of Concord micro gallery The Tender. “I felt sort of out of the loop, and I wanted to be more of a part of things. So I wanted to find other artists who might be in a similar place,” Spencer says. “I’m an artist, and I’m also a mom and my kids are really small. I was trying to learn about ways to be both at the same time.” She found inspiration in the Suburban, the avant-garde mom-and-pop gallery artists Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam operated in Oak Park, Illinois, in the garage of the home where they raised their three kids. “I realized that there’s a lot of possibility even in places that don’t feel totally fertile for contemporary art.”
Spencer found a place full of possibility when she spotted a For Rent sign on a small shed near the West Concord Commuter Rail stop. Already equipped with a big window and a keypad-locked door, the structure had originally been intended to house a flat-screen advertising real estate listings, but it never ended up being used for that purpose. Instead, since the Tender launched in April of 2023 with a show of Spencer’s art, it’s hosted everything from Destiny Palmer’s mixed-media work and Joetta Maue’s photographs on fabric to M’Kenzy Cannon and Maya Rubio’s “public bathroom” sculpted from plaster and—on view now—invitations to movement from choreographer Jessica Roseman.
Often drawn to artists who are emerging, experimental, in a dry spell, or in a moment of transition, Spencer sees curation as an act of care and named the gallery in a nod to that idea as well as its railway location—the tender is the car that carries fuel for a locomotive. “My son was playing with trains a lot, and we were reading books about trains,” she explains. “And I loved the idea that it could be this tiny little thing that was fueling people.”
That small public art projects like these can fuel folks who might not have easy access to art otherwise is made clear by a story Yang shared. When she was installing Isola Murray’s show “Tired Clichés,” filling the Linden Street space with art after a week-long vacancy, an unhoused man approached her. “He said, ‘Oh my God, you’re back,’” Yang recalls. “And I said, ‘I’m always here. What do you mean I’m back?’ And then he said, ‘I was so worried that you guys were just gone. This is my favorite spot in Harvard Square.’”
Later, Yang left for an errand, and when she returned to the space, she saw that the man had left a tiny bouquet of dried flowers wrapped in ribbon tied to the door handle. “And he’d left a note that said, ‘If you would like, you can also put my artwork for your space inside.’ There are lots of holes because of the screws and nails [from installing the work], so for Isola’s show, I inserted the dried flowers he gave us into a hole. The next time I saw him, he said, ‘This is so cute. I love to be part of this collective.’” The bouquet has made an appearance in every show since—a reminder that small gestures and small spaces can have an outsized impact.
