The Out of the Blue Art Gallery is packed to leave Somerville. After a residency since 2019 at the city-owned Armory community building, the art and owner are leaving. The gallery will reopen in the Jackson Mann Community Center in Allston.
Some other works will go to The Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, some to storage in Medford and some to Waltham, the next home of owner Parama Chattopadhyay and partner Steve Asaro. They shared the Armory building’s sole live-work space from when the building was owned by the Sater family, owner of The Middle East, but have been pressured to leave since the city took the building in a $5 million eminent domain deal in 2021.
The art is coming down from their third floor, up from the basement and off the walls of stairwells and public areas throughout the 27,000-square-foot Armory, leaving bare, white expanses.
All told, 250 works of art are being wrapped for transport in 10 trips by box truck, along with lighting, furniture, musical instruments and other items used by the gallery or for the apartment, Chattopadhyay said Wednesday. The lobby of the Armory was the primary staging area for the packing operation, including a gigantic roll of bubble wrap standing upright near the building’s ballroom doors. Help came from filmmakers Gordon and Joseph Goes of Live On Studios and Em McGrory, a theatrical designer and stagehand with the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.
While Chattopadhyay has said she’s “very sad to leave Somerville” after a long battle with the city about building management, she’s happy about the Allston location. “I got lucky,” she said Wednesday. The city has helped with the relocation, negotiated since a March hearing about the gallery, but it was hard to find a space that welcomed Out of the Blue performances as well as visual arts.
“Nobody wants to have performances, and I was like, that’s such an essential part of our thing,” Chattopadhyay said. Then the Jackson Mann opportunity opened up: “This wonderful thing just kind of popped up for me in the last two and a half weeks.”
The gallery has moved a few times since its founding in 1995 by Tom Tipton, described by Chattopadhyay as “Camberville’s godfather of local art” after his death last year at 75. Tipton, known for welcoming artists at all levels of ability, brought the gallery from Chinatown lofts to Cambridge’s Central Square area – first to 168 Brookline Ave. in Cambridgeport, then to 106 Prospect St. in The Port neighborhood, according to the Cambridge Arts office. A rent increase in 2014 forced Tipton off Prospect Street, but the largesse of 3MJ Realty’s Morris Naggar gave him for a while an even bigger, more prominent space: an old Blockbuster at 541 Massachusetts Ave., where he stayed until Dec. 1, 2017, and where Chattopadhyay joined as a volunteer.
When that lease ended, the gallery left Cambridge for an eight-month interregnum in Chattopadhyay’s home in Medford before the Saters offered space at their FireHouse space in Allston. After three years there, the Saters offered up The Armory.
Now it’s back to Allston – another change in location without a change in ethos.
“People love to generate problems by fixing things that aren’t broken,” Gordon Goes said of the Somerville-imposted change, as he and Asaro packed up gallery items from the Armory’s basement. “What I think this place is going to miss out on is the diversity, how every artist has their own poetic license and how they bring the art to the world.”
“It’s not lost yet,” Goes said. But it is heading to Allston.
