Televisions have found a home in the lobby of the Kelley House, and they aren’t showing Saturday morning cartoons. The four flat screen televisions hanging on the wall are framed and a succession of digital photographs slide across the screens. The Vineyard’s first digital photo gallery features 11 photographers with strong Vineyard ties. Some 200 photos are featured, approximately 20 from each photographer.
“As owner of Kelley House, I do encourage creative ideas over there,” said Brad Palmer, who acquired the hotel in March of 2014. “I want to add unique personality to the place, so it has its own voice and own features.”
Mr. Palmer said he and his wife are photography lovers.
“It occurred to us if you go to a lot of the galleries on the Vineyard, it’s a lot of fine art, but not a lot of photography,” he said. “At the same time, we noticed a lot of great photographers on the Vineyard. The Island provides an incredible playground for photographers.”
That dichotomy led him to decide to use the Kelley House lobby to showcase Vineyard photography.
“I had a pretty specific idea, I wanted the flat screens framed like photos with borders and with prints above them,” Mr. Palmer said.
As a photography fan, he was on the mailing list for Vineyard Colors, run by Yann Meersseman and Moira Fitzgerald, which sends out emails with photographs of the Vineyard taken each day during their early morning paper deliveries. Mr. Palmer reached out to the couple to feature some of their photos.
It was kismet as Mr. Meersseman had experience with technology and Ms. Fitzgerald had experience with design. They were hired to put together Mr. Palmer’s vision, and invited to feature their photographs too.
The lobby was redecorated for the gallery, the walls painted and old fixtures removed. In addition to the screens, framed copies of the photographs hang on the walls. As the gallery grows, the lobby will undergo more renovation to accommodate and feature it.
“It is a unique space, there is no space like that,” said Mr. Meersseman.
The shared space of the gallery and lobby means that hotel guests are frequent visitors, but since the gallery opening two weeks ago, there has been an uptick in people just stopping by.
“I think its an interesting mix,” said Ms. Fitzgerald. “I’ve always liked mix-use projects.”
While all the photographers have a tie to the Vineyard, not all of the photographs are of the Vineyard. Still lifes, portraits and landscapes slide one after the other across the screens, and sit dutifully still in their frames along the first and second floor hallways. Huge canvases hang above the screens, breathtakingly sharp and vibrant in color.
The large canvases are the biggest prints of their photos yet, Ms. Fitzgerald said. “We were biting our fingernails,” she said about when the large formats arrived from the printer.
An iPad sits on a stand in the lobby, allowing visitors to navigate the photos on the screens and read short biographies of the photographers. They can also purchase prints of the photos on the iPad or at the Kelley House Gallery website.
“In a sense the gallery is virtual, it is online, these are just samples,” said Mr. Meersseman. As long as one has access to the internet, the photographs can be enjoyed from anywhere, he said.
As the gallery expands to more walls and more photographs, it also is open to more photographers.
“Ideally we should have every photographer who could claim to have a connection with the Vineyard showing here,” said Mr. Meersseman. “The largest collection of photography by Vineyarders.”
The online gallery can be found at kelleyhousegallery.com, and the in person gallery can be viewed at the Kelley House Lobby in downtown Edgartown.
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