Fine art finds its place

Ann Connelly rarely stayed long in Baton Rouge. At the beginning of her career as an artist representative, she worked in Paris, London, Miami, Houston, and Atlanta. Not because those places were romantic locales, but because Connelly had no other choice. “When I started I had to travel,” she says, “no one in Baton Rouge was interested in the kind of work I was dealing. And now, especially in the past three years, so much has changed.”

Part of that change is Connelly’s new location in the Southdowns Shopping Center on Perkins Road. After seven years her gallery has closed shop on Jefferson Highway and moved into the redeveloped corner of the Donnie Jarreau property next to Thai Kitchen and Spectrum Fitness Club.

The area is hot with activity, with other residents-to-be like Gene Todaro’s wine bar, Enoteca Marcello, and Baton Rouge’s version of The Bulldog, a famed Magazine Street bar and grill. Connelly’s gallery was a headliner in Mid City, and it seems Southdowns’ gain is that neighborhood’s loss. But Connelly doesn’t see it that way. “It is not that Mid City is losing out, but rather we’re expanding the spirit of that part of town,” she says.

Ideology aside, in a very practical way, Connelly needs to expand.

“As we started to sell more large work, we could not physically operate out of the space,” she says. “It is an efficiency issue, an expansion issue, and a momentum issue.”

More wall space has its advantages, too. Unlike earlier in her career, more Baton Rougeans now are buying contemporary art.

“We will be able to display two shows instead of one, and there is an outside area that I want to use to host student artists for a one-night show,” Connelly says. “I’ve been to the Backyard Gallery before, and I think it is wonderful the way they set up that venue. There is going to be a lot of physical space for 3D and projections.”

One of the area’s most established art dealers is taking cues from Backyard Gallery, a student-run, open-call exhibition that hangs on a privacy fence. This kind of open-mindedness may be part of Connelly’s success. Over the last 15 years, she has gone from selling uptown New Orleanians drawings by European Masters to providing Baton Rougeans with central contemporary pieces for their homes.

Connelly’s expanded space is welcome news to the artists she represents, including Erin Barker, Clark Derbes, Elise Toups, Edward Pramuk, and Jeannie Frey Rhodes. A portrait and wedding photographer, Rhodes knows Connelly’s business savvy and has moved in next door to the new Southdowns location.

“It’s a great place to be,” Rhodes says. “Ann is so gracious to the art community, and she does most of my framing — so that, too, makes it good for both of us to be next to each other again.”

In 1997 both Rhodes and Connelly were located in the Goodwood Shopping Center. The association was a fortuitous one. “At that time no local galleries were interested in photography or contemporary art,” Rhodes says. “Ann was the only one.”

Years later she may be the only one who can claim such a significant impact on the way local art is viewed at home and beyond.

“If I can make it in the art world in Baton Rouge, I can make it anywhere,” Connelly says. Perhaps now Connelly herself is making the art world in Baton Rouge.