In late 2014, Angela Jones was visiting Camp Washington when she ran into property owner/arts advocate Fred Lane, who invited her to check out the building at the corner of Colerain Avenue and Alfred Street he’d recently purchased.
Upon seeing the rear-corner unit, Jones immediately recognized the location’s potential as an art gallery. And she just recently opened it as one — the HudsonJones Gallery.
“Anyone who’s ever shown art in any capacity has an affinity for big high ceilings, a roll-up garage door and ground-floor space,” Jones says. But even though she was encouraged by what she saw in the building, nothing happened for a while.
Last fall, Jones revisited the location — once part of the industrialist/WLW radio pioneer Powel Crosley’s holdings and then the Schroeder Paper Specialty Co. This time she brought some knowledgeable friends out with her to see it.
“(Local architect) Eric Puryear was the first person I contacted, and he immediately got what I was wanting — this idea that you come in and you get the full scope,” Jones says.
“I didn’t fall in love with this space to turn it into something else,” she says. “I turned it into this space because I wanted to use what was so good about it: the windows, the light, the expanse, the industrial details. We just had to make it more accessible for everybody.”
Jones struck a deal with Lane, who allowed her to redo the back-corner unit to her specifications.
But first it had to be degreased from decades of industrial use by power-washing everything just so paint would stick to the walls.
Jones had previously operated the SolwayJones gallery in Los Angeles with her husband Michael Solway, whom she had met in Cincinnati. They moved back here in 2010, and he became director of his father’s Carl Solway Gallery in the West End.
She named her new Cincinnati gallery in a similar vein as the L.A. one — this time HudsonJones, a combination of her middle and last name, versus SolwayJones.
“There were rules,” Jones says, regarding her own decisions about what could be done to the space. “Nobody was going to touch the bricks or the stone, and nothing would be white — everything was going to be gray.”
“In the past I’ve had nice clean white spaces,” she continues. “I don’t know that I was ever that happy with them in the end because I think for me it always felt like trying to do something very unnatural. This seems to have fallen into what it wants to be.”
A Mississippi native raised in Nashville, Tenn., Jones graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati trained in sculpture and printmaking. She planned to attend graduate school, but life had other plans.
“I ended up traveling with Michael and we would go to artist studios and museums and collectors’ homes and galleries all over the world, and that really was my education,” Jones says.
TODT, the Cincinnati-based artist collective, has the first show in Jones’ new gallery. Jones and Solway have been fans and friends of the collective for more than 25 years. She says that they wanted to show TODT’s work in Los Angeles but never had the right venue for it.
“I saw this space and thought, ‘Wow! Not only can I show them, I can show other work like this and we can recontextualize this,” Jones says.
“There’s a lot of possibilities here,” she adds.
And the TODT show Hopeful Monster — currently on view through Aug. 13 — seems like a perfect fit for the new gallery. It is filled with multi-media, found-object-based works. Even though the art runs the gamut from large-scale farm-equipment-like sculptures to collaged works on paper, the body of work speaks with one consistent voice.
Jones says she wants to have a supportive, connected relationship with her artists.
“The great galleries, that’s what they have — thinking of their artists as a family,” she says. “Everybody doesn’t have to get along, but you hope that the work informs and challenges one exhibition to the next. You want there to be some thread, even if it’s discordant.”
HUDSONJONES is located at 1110 Alfred St., Camp Washington. More info: hudsonjonesgallery.com.
