Falls Village’s Former Town Hall Is Born Again as a Gallery

After repeated winter walks down the quiet Main Street of her countryside town, Kathleen Kucka had an idea.

A former downtown New York City artist and curator,  Kucka has made a home in Falls Village, Conn. — fittingly, on the property of another artist, the late American muralist Ezra Winter.

In the long stretch of the winding, displaced time of the pandemic, it’s easy to forget that it was fairly recently, in that let’s-throw-a-party summer of 2019, that celebrated interior designer Bunny Williams unveiled her home decorating store in Falls Village, at (and called) 100 Main Street. 

It was the village’s single retail offering — not just on Main Street, but in the entirety of what’s known as “Connecticut’s second smallest town” (for the record, the smallest town is Union, with a population of 854; Falls Village has a population of 1,050).

Yet just across the street from 100 Main Street, were two small, adjoining commercial properties, like unanswered questions, recently vacant and full of potential. 

A town committee had been formed, to search for business ideas that could build off Williams’ success. At the start of the year, Kucka went to work, and on May 1 she successfully celebrated the opening of her new gallery. 

Furnace: Art on Paper Archive is a contemporary setting exhibiting a single-artist collection on paper — bold, graphic and thoroughly high-end.

To conceive of the gallery, and open it in only a matter of months, is an ambitious timeline in any year. But for some, there’s been a particular energy harvested from the emptiness of the pandemic — it has been a space for renewal, for taking the unexpected turn, and seizing an opportunity that might have otherwise gone by.

For Kucka, despite productivity in her own artist studio, the time away from the downtown clamor, buzz and chatter of the art scene only clarified the importance of public viewing and conversation around the unveiling of new work. 

“Not seeing artwork in person, I was really craving it, and craving that art community. I realized just being in the void of my own studio for one hundred percent of my time isn’t enough. I really need that yin and yang, that dialogue with artists and their work.”

Maine
to Falls Village

With newly mounted large-scale gallery walls that mostly obscure the building’s original old-fashioned wainscoting, Furnace has been reimagined as a sleek, crisp white canvas — all the better to draw focus to the hyper-pigmented abstracts of artist Stephen Maine. 

Browsing the debut show at Furnace the week before its unveiling, Kucka admired the work of Maine, a printmaker based in Cornwall, Conn., who has shown his optical color explosions internationally. 

“There’s something almost geological about the paintings. He uses these self-created plates that he carves from Styrofoam,” Kucka explained. “It’s a very physical process, and in a way a very sculptural process as he carves out these shapes, and then applies paint to them and makes these impressions that get layered and layered over time. When I say over time, I mean years. When he works it’s always a surprise. The work is always revealing itself.”

Paper as a
point of entry

Kucka is the only gallery owner in the town (although the local library puts on popular art shows). “I really like that it becomes a cloistered experience instead of art hopping,” she said. 

As if that weren’t differentiated enough, Furnace has a niche specialty:  paper. It’s an often-utilized medium that provides an intimate connection with an artist’s methods as well an inviting scale of price variation. 

“Artists make so much work on paper as a process, when developing paintings. It’s a way of working quickly, and it’s not that expensive as an outlay. But these works often aren’t shown. There’s so much available work, why not show it?” 

Kucka acknowledged another advantage. With the ease of shipping paper, Furnace is looking beyond Litchfield County — “even artists from Berlin,” she said — for contemporary talent to showcase.

Through the back door of Furnace, Kucka wove her way through a little labyrinth of construction (the second part of the shared building will soon open as a café) and stepped into an actual walk-in safe from the days when this was the Town Hall. It’s a turn-of-the century vault, massive and heavy, not like the shiny Swiss-style ones you might see in a heist film. The unexpectedly large safe, with sectioned-off interior spaces, offered a surprising shift in tone from the airy front of the gallery — industrial, brutal and underground. 

Unconventional art spaces are nothing new in New York City, where a pop-up guerrilla fashion show can make a splash at the grimiest of warehouses. In this second space, away from the central gallery, you can examine works on paper by Marilla Palmer, Georgia McGovern, Amanda Konishi. It’s clear there’s depth to the collection Kucka is developing in Falls Village. Despite a small space in a small town, there is the sense that she’s ready to offer a big statement.

Furnace: Art on Paper Archive is at 107 Main St., Falls Village, Conn. The show of work by Stephen Maine called, “Cupcake Uptake and the Cloud of Unknowing,” can be seen Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. For more information go to www.furnace-artonpaperarchive.com or follow @furnace_artonpaper on Instagram.