Patrick Ryan, owner and manager of Gallery 353 on Nassau Street in Princeton on Wednesday, October 21, 2015. (Photo by Martin Griff.)
By Alicia Brooks Waltman
The strains of a violinist’s rendition of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 4 fill the air. A tarot card reader confers with a client in a corner, predicting the future. And gypsy-inspired art hang on the walls, while gypsy headdresses adorn the hair of guests as they mingle in the basement level of 353 Nassau St. one Saturday night in October.
Not your typical scene at the McCarthy Building, which houses law offices. But the building now also has a tenant that is Princeton’s newest, and possibly most fun, art scene: Gallery 353. Opened last spring, the contemporary art gallery is currently hosting Fly Your Gypsy Flag, the art of homegrown New Jersey painter Nancy Merrill, which opened Oct. 17 and runs until Nov. 7. The gallery also features photography and landscapes, and on Nov. 14 will open a show of seven local artists called Menage a Sept.
“I’m a bit of an Irish gypsy,” said owner and manager Patrick Ryan, a Princeton University graduate (Class of ’68) who has lived in nearly a dozen locales but has roots in Mercer County. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm in Ewing, went to Notre Dame High School in Lawrence (and Phillips Exeter Academy for one year) and then attended Princeton, where he played football and took a number of art history classes, graduating with a major in medieval history.
After Princeton, Ryan spent 25 years as a stockbroker, mostly in San Diego. But he has lived in places ranging from Hawaii to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to Chicago, to Washington. He managed a thriving art gallery, called E.S. Lawrence, in charming Charleston, South Carolina, from 2000 to 2005, and after that, returned to his agrarian roots, buying and running a pecan farm in rural South Carolina.
But over a year ago he decided to sell the farm, move back to the Princeton area, and return to dealing in art. “I’m nearly 70, and I found I just couldn’t do the heavy lifting anymore,” he said. He is hoping to capitalize on the creative energy in town fueled by the university’s Lewis Center for the Arts.
“There is no reason that Princeton couldn’t be a reasonably sized art market,” Ryan said, acknowledging the nearby presence of the international art scenes in Manhattan and Lambertville-New Hope, but the relatively small number of galleries in Princeton.
In addition to art, Ryan deals in Anglo-Irish antiques, in a nod to his heritage and his lifelong love for the culture and country. His inventory includes more than 600 volumes about all things Irish, as well as furniture and art.
And if his resume weren’t long enough, Ryan is also an amateur filmmaker, having produced a half dozen documentaries on authors and their physical worlds. His subjects have included Dante, St. Augustine, Montaigne, Chaucer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life in Princeton, and a film on James Joyce’s Dublin, called Walking Into Eternity.
Gallery visitors can still see Fly Your Gypsy Flag, which includes more than two dozen paintings by Merrill, whose mother came from Budapest, Hungary, and of gypsy descent. The pictures are vibrant, colorful and multifaceted, “a bit like a gypsy wagon,” noted Merrill, whose work hangs in private collections across the United States and in Mexico. “I’ve been influenced by the freedom gypsies demonstrate in expressing their art.”
Princeton Junction art collectors Halina and Joe Caravello, browsing at the Gypsy Flag opening on Oct. 17, said they were thrilled to have a new, local venue to view and buy art. Indeed, that night the couple purchased Merrill’s eclectic and free-spirited rendition of Nassau Hall, a painting-collage that is a colorful and modern take on Old Nassau.
“It’s a fantastic piece of Princeton that we’ll carry with us and will be part of our memories of living in Princeton forever,” Halina Caravello said. “I love art that tells a story.”
On Nov. 14, Gallery 353 will open Menage a Sept, a collection of the works of seven artists, including Merrill.
The work of Heather Haaga (heatherhaaga.com) a California plein-air and still-life painter whose husband, Paul Haaga, (Class of 1970), is a trustee of Princeton University, will be part of the exhibition. The couple own a home in the area and are frequent visitors. So will that of Princeton photographer Richard Trenner, whose black and white photographs of New York City’s Rockefeller Center, the Princeton University Chapel, and other subjects, already hang at Gallery 353.
Monroe Township’s Karen Terry, who does her art with Sumi ink, acrylics, and found objects and Shirley Kern, a minimalist abstract painter from the Princeton area, will also be part of Menage a Sept. Pennington photographer Richard Merrill, who specializes in photographing the walls of buildings, and Katherine Mooney, a Princeton native, will round out the group.
Mooney, who is currently an art major at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, creates 3-D art that is computer designed and printed in parts, which are then assembled.
Until his next opening, Ryan will sit behind his 19th century Irish banker’s desk in the center of his basement gallery, selling its work, researching Irish antiques that come his way, and coming up with new ways to bring art, and fun, to the space.
“I love the way this gallery looks,” he said. “I am perfectly content to sit here, listening to opera, surrounded by this art.”
Gallery 353 is open Thursday-Saturday, 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., and by appointment. Reach the gallery at (803) 334-8838, and at twolockhart@hotmail.com.
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