A nomadic art gallery finds a home in Bantam

On Saturday, Aug. 22, Friday Arts will open its new gallery in the Bantam Arts Factory.

In the summer of 2025, former Guggenheim Museum head of digital Laura Kleger and her husband, award-winning filmmaker Justin Schwarz, opened a gallery … kind of. When we usually think of galleries, we might conjure the image of white walls lined with art and littered with sculptures. Some of us might think outside the box and visualize barns and industrial towers, like at the Wassaic Project, or Millerton’s Re Institute. But Friday Arts, as Schwarz and Kleger called it, thought of the space as secondary.

To them, the main idea is to display and promote art and the artists who make it. In that endeavor, they’ve done a whole lot in a single year, including hosting 11 exhibitions, collaborating with 15 artists and producing eight original films, all without a permanent home. They’ve done it at a series of venues, both traditional galleries and unconventional art spaces, including a former dairy factory in Amenia.

In addition to these pop-up galleries, they’ve also hosted art shows online. It’s part of an ethos developed around the concept of making art more accessible to everyday people. To that end, they started the Friday Arts Editions, which features limited runs of sculptures and prints designed for consumption. “We think buying art by living artists is a vote for a certain kind of world — one where creative expertise, imagination and possibility are valued.”

While they plan to continue all these efforts, they’re adding their own gallery space to the mix. And much like their diverse venues of the past, this one is a bit of a mix. Yes, it has white walls like a traditional gallery, but it’s housed in an old switch factory and surrounded by working artists. Moving into a building with a history seems appropriate, as part of their mission statement as an arts group is to foster deeper dialogues with the stories behind the works they present. Part of those efforts come through in interviews with the artists themselves and the subsequent short films posted to their website.

“We often envision a version of our younger selves,” Kleger said, “living outside of a major art center, spending time with [the website] as a helpful resource to inform their own creative journey.”

Their first show, opening on Saturday, Aug. 22 is called “Second Cutting,” based on the second harvest of the summer and “the finer, denser growth a field yields after the ground has already been worked and then returned to.” The show will feature paintings by Rachael Catharine Anderson, Ryan Steadman and Annika Tucksmith, which will work in dialogue with the theme. Kleger and Schwarz will personally lead tours of the exhibition on the two Saturdays after its opening and will offer subsequent tours by appointment.

More information, including videos and contact information for appointments, can be found at friday-arts.com.