Joy Gallery showcases local art

The Sunday experience at Homewood Cumberland Presbyterian Church includes more than a worship service and Sunday school classes. Everyone also gets to look around the art gallery housed inside the church and the exhibits that rotate through it each month. 

The church’s pastor, Derek Jacks, often comes into the gallery during the week to clear his head, and the public is welcome to tour it on weekdays.

Local curators Tom Dameron and Maud Coirier-Belser had talked about opening a gallery for years. With a downturn in the economy that started in 2008, they saw galleries close and knew local artists were looking for places to show their work without creating unnecessary stress. 

“There is good art, and we want it out there,” Dameron said. 

And so the Joy Gallery was born inside Homewood Cumberland Presbyterian, where Dameron has been a longtime member.

The curators wanted an intimate space, and they found it in what had been Dameron’s parents’ Sunday school room for years. Dameron said he feels a “spiritual connection” to the room.

The gallery is about the same size as Lyda Rose Gallery, which Dameron owned and ran on Crescent Avenue while he was working as a pharmacist. The gallery closed in 2001.

     Since opening in April 2012, the Joy Gallery has featured fabric, realistic, abstract, sculpture and plaster relief art. Marking its past exhibitors, a permanent art collection in the hallway outside the gallery displays one piece from each artist who has shown work. 

“They are forever connected to us,” Dameron said.

Each exhibit lasts about a month and kicks off with an opening on a Sunday afternoon from 1-3 p.m. The exhibits originally lasted six weeks, but the period was shortened as demand increased. 

The artists get 90 percent of proceeds from their shows, and the other 10 percent goes toward overhead expenses for the space. 

Curators Dameron and Coirier-Belser have known each other for close to 40 years and consider one another like family.

Dameron said Coirier-Belser draws animals better than anyone he knows, and you never know what she’ll do next.

“I have a short attention span. I get bored,” she said.

While Coirier-Belser often favors the abstract, Dameron is more into creating watercolors, etchings and drawings of concrete things. He has a series of flowers and is currently working on a series of etchings of faces in different mediums.

Dameron and Coirier-Belser have shown their own work in the gallery once each since its opening, but at any time you can also find prints and cards with their art along the back of the gallery. 

Still, for them the gallery is about connecting art and artists to the community.

“Art is therapeutic, it’s good for people,” Coirier-Belser said.

Homewood Cumberland Presbyterian Church is located at 513 Columbiana Road. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-2 p.m. For more information, visit thejoygallery.org or call 942-3051.