The little shotgun-style building on McKenzie Street near the pedestrian overpass in downtown Foley doesn’t look like a landmark, but it is twice over. The structure that houses the Foley Art Center predates the city itself, built around 1905 as the Claude Peteet Real Estate Office, a full decade before Foley incorporated in 1915. Inside, it holds one of the region’s most active nonprofit art communities: about 150 member artists, 57 years of history, and a rotating gallery of roughly 75 local artists’ work at any given time.
Executive director Chloe Salinas came to art administration by way of a painting class that didn’t take. She loved being around creative people, just not the canvas, and when a job opened at the center a year and a half ago she found her calling in the administrative side. Assistant Chele Jinn, an accomplished painter, serves as the center’s curator, and together they share a vision of art as an everyday part of Foley life.
A Downtown on the Way Up
Both point to fresh energy downtown, much of it driven by Foley’s Main Street organization: the after-hours Third Thursday events and the public art project known as Cat Alley among them. “Everybody’s working together and it’s forming this chain, and it’s a good, sturdy chain,” Salinas says. “Art brings everybody together.”
The city’s momentum is real: Foley Main Street and the city have collected statewide awards for downtown work in recent years, and the art center’s monthly exhibition receptions on third Thursdays now dovetail with the city’s Art Walk events.
A Launching Pad for Artists
The center’s model is deliberately friendly to working artists. Because it is a nonprofit, it charges no monthly rent and takes only a modest commission. “Artists who are just trying to get their feet wet find that we give them a jumping-off point,” Jinn says. Inventory rotates regularly, and a featured-artist program highlights one maker each month with extra gallery space; recent featured artists have included potter Steven Dark and painter-sculptor Cathy Calvin.
The mix reflects both the tastes of newcomers and the range of the membership. Beach scenes, native wildlife, and sunsets sell steadily to newcomers decorating coastal homes, but Jinn makes room for her own favored abstract expressionism and everything in between. “Most people who move here want to decorate with beach scenes or the native wildlife,” she says. “So a lot of our art is like that, but I like to have quite a variety.”
Trim-a-Tree and Art in the Park
Two events anchor the center’s year. Beginning in mid-October, the downtown gallery closes so the volunteer crew can mount the annual Trim-a-Tree holiday show in a temporary space at Tanger Outlets. It opens the second Friday of November and runs seven days a week, except Thanksgiving, until December 23, selling handmade ornaments, wreaths, jewelry, woodwork, fine art, nativities, jams, jellies, pickles, and local honey, alongside regular gifts and art.
The other signature event is Art in the Park, a juried show held Mother’s Day weekend in Heritage Park across the street from the center. It has been running for more than five decades and is among the oldest continuous art shows in the region.
Salinas wants the center to be a small landmark of joy in Foley, a place where something is different every day. “I love that there’s something different every day. You never know what artist is going to come in, or what customers,” she says. For a building that watched the city incorporate from across the street, that mission has a certain symmetry: Foley’s oldest commercial building now houses one of its most future-facing institutions.