Downtown gallery gets new name, new owners, new art

Jun 07, 2024

Oli Gallery Petaluma: 132 Petaluma Blvd.

Oli Gallery Guerneville: 16215 Main Street #1

Hours: Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays: 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays: Appointment only; Fridays 11 a.m. - 7 p.m., Saturdays 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Information: OliGallery.com

Petaluma’s Steiger building – a 153-year-old architectural icon in the downtown area – has housed an art gallery for over a decade-and-a-half. Recently renamed Oli Gallery – formerly known as the Riverfront Gallery – with its signature showcase windows on Petaluma Boulevard across the street from Putnam Plaza, the place has long been something of a stop-and-look location for sidewalk pedestrians.

For the gallery’s new managing artists, Rohnert Park’s Beverly Haley and Guerneville’s Donavan, the hope is that as the fresh name and branding takes hold, people will do much more than just stop and look.

“We think people will be a little bit dazzled, or surprised, or delighted by what they see through the windows, maybe even a little shocked once in a while,” suggested Donavan (who uses the single name), on a recent Thursday morning. “Then we want them to step inside and find themselves surprised over and over again. We both feel that art is fun, and we are doing everything we can to make a visit to Oli a fun experience, with something unexpected around every corner.”

Calling a visit to Oli “fun” is no overstatement.

To make that happen, the gallery displays and sells a diverse array of work from dozens of Bay Area artists. Once a visitor has taken in the detailed industrial whimsy of Ken Berman’s oil-on-mixed-media canvases – featuring gears and gizmos adorned with the stenciled silhouettes of leafs, insects and animals – they might turn a corner and find themselves facing one of Sharon Eisley’s semi-apocalyptic oil-on-panel images of an otter in straw hat, leaning on a garden tool while harvesting grapes. Haley’s own soul-lifting landscapes of flowers on hills might give way to Dan Kabanuk’s shimmering photographs of downtown Petaluma at night, its images almost bouncing from the shiny metal plates on which they are reproduced.

A bit of traditional calm might be offered by one of Diana Majumdar’s soothingly crisscrossed mixed-media painting of birds hiding in a tangle of barely-leafy branches.

Then, just when one has moved on and adjusted their focus to the rich, arboreal exuberance of Dominque Pfahl’s mixed-media paintings of flower-bedecked women, they turn around and there in front of them is one of Donavan’s own vividly rendered paintings of featureless people acting out the horrors of war or the necessities of imagination in an unimaginative world.

“People look at my work and think it’s a little cuckoo-crazy, or that I probably have a lot of mental issues,” Donovan admitted with a smile. “It makes some people a little uncomfortable. I get that. But between my work and Bev’s, and the other artists we’ve brought in along with us, we do seem to have a mix that is resonating with a lot of people.”

Donavan also owns the original Oli Gallery in Guerneville, named for his dog Olive, nicknamed Oli for short.

“I had her for almost 23 years,” Donavan said. “I was a marathon runner, and she ran along with me.”

Though always interested in art – initially attending art school, focusing on the commercial side – Donavan found himself working in corporate advertising for almost 30 years, primarily in the San Francisco technology sector. For the final eight years of that stretch, he worked as Global Brand Manager for a company called Bright Talk, ultimately leaving to devote his time to art.

“I’m basically self-taught,” he said. “I have no formal training in the kind of art I do. But I always did it on the side, and like all artists, I was always looking for a place to show my work.”

Donavan did show some of his work at Riverfront Gallery several years ago. It was then a membership-based gallery, its artists paying a fee to show their work there, and though that’s not a model he prefers, Donavan did become a member finding a space in Guerneville and decided to open his own gallery,

"It started off as a little studio space with just my work,“ he said. ”Then COVID rolled through, and galleries were closing, and I knew some artists who needed a space to show their art, so I invited them in.”

Donavan eventually expanded the Guerneville space to accommodate even more artists, along the way adopting an “artists first” philosophy, giving participants a more generous commission than most galleries do.

“I wanted to make it a little easier on artists who are trying to make a living,” he said. “At the original Oli and now in Petaluma, we’ve created a space where a lot of the premiere artists in Sonoma County want to be part of it. Which is why we have so many crazy-cool artists in both galleries.”

Bev Haley worked in the insurance industry for 25 years, holding up her family as a single mom for much of that, and retired early, at 50. She and her artist husband set up a “part time household” in Mexico, but she found herself wanting more.

“I felt kind of felt like there was this hole in me, with nothing to do,” Haley said. “So my husband, who I was probably driving crazy, said, ‘Why don’t you take some art classes and start painting or something?’”

Soon after starting some basic classes in the art department at Santa Rosa Junior college, Haley found that she had a knack for painting.

“I really loved it,” she said. “It filled a need in me. It gave me a purpose.”

Still, Haley said she mostly saw painting as a casual pursuit, something to do with the group of women artists she joined as a social outlet. Then, in the fires of 2017, the Haleys lost their home and all of their paintings.

“We lost everything,” she said. “I truly believe that art is healing for many people, and after the fires I started painting in earnest. It helped me through that healing process, and I have been painting passionately ever since.”

Looking for places to show her work, she found the Riverfront Gallery and became a member there.

“COVID threw things off for a while, but eventually, my work began to sell pretty well,” Haley said. “I’ve had a nice response to paintings, which does a lot for an artist’s confidence.”

It was around then that Donavan and Haley met and recognized a shared vision of how to serve the needs of artists and the collectors who discover their work. About two-and-a-half years ago, Donavan formally bought into Riverfront Gallery, establishing a partnership with previous owner Jerrie Jerne. Then, several months ago, as Jerne decided to step away, Haley began talking with Donovan about taking over the gallery together, with plenty of ideas about how to re-think and re-brand the operation.

“It’s been a great experience,” said Donavan. “If you’ve got really great artists doing things that are truly unique, people are attracted to that.”

One move they made right out of the gate was to end the former gallery’s membership system, simply seeking out the best artists around, counting on the quality of their work to find its audience, paying those artists a majority percentage of all sales.

“It’s Donavan’s model at Oli in Guerneville,” Haley said. “The first time I went there I knew it was different, it was unique, it was fun - and I liked that. We’ve really clicked. I trust him wholeheartedly, which is good because this is a scary step. We both worked in the corporate world where you have a lot of money backing you, but here we are on our own. It’s been a month now, and I’m calming down and am really starting to enjoy it.”

Though only open about five weeks now as Oli Gallery, Haley has discovered that downtown Petaluma’s after-dinner crowd is an art-friendly audience. With hours structured to capture some of the pedestrian traffic in the evenings, she happily keeps the doors open after closing time if people are still wandering in.

“A few nights ago, I had 25 people suddenly come in after a show let out at the Big Easy,” she said. “We’ve started opening our back doors by the river so people walking along Water Street can look in and step inside to see what’s happening, too. Every day is exciting.”

Oli Gallery Petaluma: 132 Petaluma Blvd.

Oli Gallery Guerneville: 16215 Main Street #1

Hours: Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays: 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.; Tuesdays and Wednesdays: Appointment only; Fridays 11 a.m. - 7 p.m., Saturdays 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Information: OliGallery.com