Re-store Challenge in Roxbury becomes artist central. Three more designers join the Re-store teams to create retail stores this summer.
If you ever visited a gallery in our Central Catskills, there are so many names you will know: people who work in pottery, fabric, paint…This summer they have a new challenge: create a store with only an empty storefront, two days, a $1,000 budget and a generous serving of creative juices. The Re-Store Design Challenge storefronts will be selling you their designs as they open for “business” from August 21 to September 19 on Main Street, Roxbury, and your vote will help choose the winning team (and a scholarship or grant for that team’s participating student member.)
The Re-Store Design Challenge is on, and three design teams will compete to be the best, brightest and most creative retail designs ever imagined in the Catskills. Design team leaders Andrew Williams (architect), Donald Hill (interior designer), and Sean Scherer (artist and entrepreneur) have now chosen their design “sous chefs” to complement their own skills with some additional artistic heavy lifting as they tackle their Re-Store concepts for the former Enderlin Gallery spaces on Main Street Roxbury.
The envelope, please
For Re-Store design inventor/architect Andrew Williams, the choice was immediate: the easy-going Texas native Grant Collier. Fresh back from a sabbatical in Asia and probably the only artist in the challenge who combined religious studies with his artistic ones, Grant will have his own show at Chace-Randall Gallery in Andes in October. With considerable expertise in the arts of digital and stop-action animation, Grant brings to Andrew’s team a conceptual artist well grounded in the hands-on work of fine art, terra cotta, video and even music.
For a premier NYC interior designer like Donald Hill, what’s to add to the team mix? How about Nat Thomas, who has long specialized in his “home Louisiana” arts of quilting and fabric dyeing, and also has a long and respectable career as a landscape painter here in the Catskills. In the past half-decade, Longyear Gallery artist Thomas has ventured into large abstract canvases. To complement his own talents, Hill has chosen the perfect artist to help make his visions “materialize.” Thomas will have his own show of paintings and quilts at the Coldwell Banker-Village Green offices at 268 Fair Street in Kingston for the months of August and September.
Sean Scherer could almost be a one-man show. Scherer’s distinguished career as a widely shown artist in NYC venues has now come upstate in his own “Kabinett & Kammer,” an antiques and collectibles showcase in Andes, NY with a “maximalist, masculine” emphasis on the botanical, anatomical and curious in antiques. Appropriately, Scherer’s design teammate will be David Decker, who once owned a landscape design company as well as serving as a consultant to specialist millwork and high-end hardware firms. Decker brings to Scherer’s team an extensive knowledge of unique design/build solutions. Sounds like the very definition of Re-Store Design Challenge.
