Spot Check - Black Lab Art Gallery

“There are a lot of places in Everett where people can go to talk about sports,” laughs curator/art director Isabella Valencia. “Black Lab is a place where people talk about art. Because it’s everywhere here.” She gestures to the walls around us.

To get one thing straight—the Black Lab Gallery is not a nonprofit supporting the arts. It’s a business that profits artists. That’s a key difference. It’s a place for budding artists to cut their teeth and pay their bills by selling their work. It’s an environment where the public (art buyers or not) can come, get a coffee or beer, and be surrounded by color, shapes, forms, ideas.

Located on the 1600 block of Hewitt, the place displays the visual art and photography of over thirty local artists: paintings, sculptures, and prints. The venue sells cassettes and t-shirts of Everett bands, hosts regular poetry open mics, and coordinates the city’s revived monthly art walk.

During the Art Walk (the third Thursday of every month) attendees move freely between improvised art venues such as Lion’s Paw Tattoo, Port Gardner Bay Winery, and Basecamp. Food and drinks all around.

String trio La Dolce Vita plays October Art Walk.

While I was at Black Lab local artist Anne Marie Grgich (annegrgich.com) brought in three of her recent works to display. I checked them out: portraits of children surrounded by layers of collaged materials, all sealed in wax. She tells me that a reoccurring pattern she uses in her work is from a chopped-up Fred Meyer table cloth.

I dig it.

From November 21 through Christmas Eve the gallery will be hosting Anne Marie’s art in a “Hundred and Under” show. This is an event where gallery-goers can buy holiday presents in the form of original art, all of it under a hundred bucks.

This is the underlying motive at Black Lab: to empower makers to sell their craft.

The gallery is in its second incarnation. The first Black Lab was located across the street from the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, during the 1990s.

Valencia likens modern day Everett to Ballard circa 1998. She calls this area “ripe, prime, with spaces to work in… it’s a reasonable place to have a studio.”

Grgich, hearing this, seconds the Ballard/Everett analogy. She was profiled as an outsider artist in a 1996 Newsweek article entitled “Swimming to Seattle-Move There.” Her portrait represented a post-grunge arts scene during a decade when Seattle was proudly, assuredly weird. Anne Marie has shown her art around the world from New York to Australia.

All this to say, there’s real talent on tap here.

Valencia reckons that today’s Everett has a healthy economic diversity. She sees blue collar workers, county workers, and financial district workers pass by Black Lab daily. This is a place where she believes that artists can make money from their craft and still pay rent.

I leave the gallery thinking, 'Is Everett the new Ballard?'

But no. Everett is Everett; we are ourselves and have our own art scene to offer. The Black Lab Gallery is in the right place at the right time to share our unique talents with others in the community.

It’s hard not to admire the dogged determination of Valencia’s vision.