The Rise of Hallway Gallery

Erik Hall and Amy Spassov run a remarkable Bellevue gallery. it’s hard to find, but their luck may be changing thanks to the promise of a new space. Our reporter talked to them about the future of the Bellevue arts scene and what “grit” might mean on the Eastside.

Last February, Erik Hall said to his wife, Amy Spassov: “That’s it, we’re out of money. If we don’t do something this month, we’re done.”

The winter wind rattled the steel cargo door of their three-year-old exhibition and studio space, Hallway Gallery. If you did not know Hallway was there, you would never find it. Secreted inside the southwest corner of the E.E. Robbins building on NE 2nd in downtown Bellevue, it has no frontage and practically no signage, just a small black sandwich board.

As you descend the floating staircase Hall built, the twenty-five-hundred-square-foot space opens up beneath, a cavern of light and color. The light is warm; the air smells of cork and wine from art openings. Stained concrete and exposed brick express a retro-modern aesthetic. Flagstone columns support the ceiling.


Photography by Caleb Plowman

But what can support an upstart art gallery in the basement of an engagement-ring store?

“We were talking about selling our [Bellevue] condo, moving into our parents’ basement,” recalls Hall. Spassov nods in recollection. “It was grim.”

Hall moved into the space in 2002, when “the tallest building around was the Hyatt.” Spassov joined him in 2006. Self-taught artists without MFAs (she studied interior design at the Art Institute of Seattle, he studied finance but dropped out), they did not loom large in art’s stuffy establishment. Hall showed his landscapes — methodical and melodious, with built-up layers of primary colors echoing Barry Masteller’s dark whimsy — at Kimzey Miller in Seattle. Spassov’s work, inspired by Sherry Markovitz and Willy Heeks, is powered by impulses both spiritual and childlike. Her pointillism borders on Klimt-like opulence.

They’ve made a go of exhibiting since 2006, when they converted part of their space into a gallery. Hall, Spassov and ten artists they represent sold almost a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of expressionist landscapes and figurative work last year. While they’ve been able to pay their “nut” (rent and overhead costs) under Emerson Robbins’ generous lease, they have also longed to “go streetside,” as Hall puts it, into the new world of possibility at their doorstep. To bow out now, when Bellevue is effecting its master plan to become the Eastside center of arts and culture, would be not only highly unfortunate, but stupid.

So last February, Hall auctioned one of his own paintings, Spassov sold one of hers, and Hall was providentially awarded a $25,000 Washington State Arts Commission project. A fledgling gallery was saved.

“There’s not a city in the country that has the kind of money this place has and without some semblance of an art scene,” Hall says of Bellevue, where half the population have college degrees and more than 25 percent of household incomes top $100,000 (more than all twelve Hallway Gallery artists put together). “So it’s just a matter of time.”

The 2005 resurrection of the Bellevue Arts Museum as a premier arts-and-crafts venue with the hiring of the Smithsonian’s Michael Monroe was just a beginning. Bellevue’s got a biennial sculpture exhibition, a philharmonic, operatic and jazz performances at the Meydenbauer Center, Rosalie Whyel’s collection of three thousand dolls at the Museum of Doll Art, and the wildly popular Factoria KidsQuest Museum. And that’s not counting the planned two-thousand-seat, $160 million Performing Arts Center Eastside (PACE), opening in 2012 at the corner of NE 10th Street and 106th Avenue NE in 2012. Fundraisers have amassed $31 million; when complete, PACE will be Bellevue’s arts-and-culture killer app.

“That says to me that there are people in this town who really want this,” Hall says. “They are putting their money where their mouth is. And the fact that Gunnar [Nordstrom] moved here rather than downtown Seattle is huge.” After seventeen years in neighboring Kirkland, Nordstrom moved his gallery late last year into a Kemper Freeman development called Bellevue Place next to the Hyatt on Bellevue Way.

More than twenty-five hundred high-rise residences are planned in downtown Bellevue through 2010. Hall and Spassov see them as a sea of blank walls that will need art. “The cork is about to pop” on the Eastside arts scene, says Hall. They want to be around to drink its bubbly. What’s holding them back? Real estate.

While commercial ground-level real estate in Seattle’s art center, Pioneer Square, averages about twenty dollars per square foot, downtown Bellevue’s starts at around thirty-five dollars and can easily exceed fifty. “In other, older cities many facility needs might be satisfied in low-cost vacant space in old warehouses or lower-quality office facilities,” reads the Bellevue Arts Commission’s exhaustive Cultural Compass plan. But Bellevue is too new to have such art-friendly spaces.

Downtown Bellevue developer John Su has invented an arts corridor in his northeast corner of downtown. Called the Ashwood Arts District, it extends from 108th Avenue NE to 112th Avenue NE and from NE 12th Street to NE 8th Street. Su worked with Seattle’s Lead Pencil Studio to create the novel exhibition space Open Satellite in his 989 Elements building, and he created a black-box theatre (still awaiting a tenant) in Ten20 Tower on 108th Avenue NE. But the numbers just don’t work for Hallway Gallery. “Erik’s ambition is admirable, but he wasn’t ready for this space [in 989 developments], which even larger galleries would have trouble maintaining,” says Van Diep, who helps Su develop workable arts-oriented spaces.

Galleries like Hallway may forever struggle to find affordable homes in downtown Bellevue. Seattle gallery owner Greg Kucera warns that if developers want to transform Bellevue Way into Rodeo Drive via luxury retail, Bellevue is “not going to get very good galleries. Galleries tend to need to have grittier space and atmosphere to flourish in.”

If Bellevue developers can’t afford to give start-up gallery owners a break in their first couple of lease years, perhaps the city can. Bellevue will soon revise its FAR Amenity System for Downtown Development, which essentially tells developers what kinds of amenities will earn them extra development space. Art galleries are not currently on the list. “The arts and cultural dimension in downtown Bellevue is going to be increasingly important,” vows Dan Stroh, planning director for the City of Bellevue.

But where’s the “grit” Kucera mentions? Close. Hop across I-405 into the Bel-Red Corridor, a depressed nine hundred acres of post-industrial land wedged between downtown Bellevue and Redmond, and you’re in it. The corridor is targeted by the city for a major overhaul in the next decade. It will supply much-needed affordable housing and developments clustered around light-rail transit nodes. The project is being touted as a model for growth — and its brochure calls out a “potential arts district” close to Microsoft’s Overlake campus.

The revised Bel-Red will be blessed when it arrives, but that won’t be until sometime between 2013 and 2030. Meanwhile, Erik Hall and Amy Spassov’s ticket to “streetside” may have arrived. After Kemper Development got wind of this story, it offered Hall and Spassov a six-hundred-square-foot space in Bellevue Place across from Gunnar Nordstrom. “We asked for the moon,” says Hall. And this time they were met halfway. “If there’s an art scene in Bellevue,” Hall says, “I want to be a part of it and I want to be up top. Not for ourselves. But for our artists. That’s why we started the place.” Hallway Gallery’s streetside experiment begins June 1. •