Sometimes It Takes A Vision: New art gallery bridges past and present, art and underserved neighborhoods

Again and again, all signs pointed Dee Dee Tebeau to 2nd Avenue. Dee Dee was first drawn to the North Highland neighborhood by the example of Rob and Carrie Strickland, who help bring housing and educational opportunities to the area through their Truth Spring ministry. As the months went by and Dee Dee brought her son to Godwin Creek Golf Course to play, the question recurred, “how can I help the neighborhood?” She did not yet know how, but the ideas began to take shape.

Dee Dee’s connection to art in Columbus runs deep. Her grandmother, Mary Passailaigue, was an accomplished still life and landscape painter, one of the first women to be inducted into the prestigious Salmagundi Club in New York City, and instrumental in the founding of the Columbus Museum. With her grandmother’s vital influence, Dee Dee developed an artistic eye of her own, which she put to good use as an interior designer for twenty years. And here the idea of the gallery began to coalesce: a place to connect her children with a matriarch they never knew, a place to connect artists to one another and the larger Columbus community.

“For a city of this size,” Dee Dee says of the community of artists who call Columbus home, “I think it would rival any larger city.”

Dee Dee saw 2nd Avenue as a corridor. Connecting north Columbus to Uptown, and in its path North Highlands and the historic Bibb Village. On her own commute, she saw the people moving north and south, from work to restaurants, from home to shops. She passed the many promising brick buildings, many under-utilized. When she learned that Murray Jones was renovating the former Stone Furniture building, everything seemed to fall into place. 

The idea and place are both beautiful. Up front in the newly renovated Mill District Studios building is the bright and airy Highland Galerie, where local artists can show their work side by side, uniting artists of various styles and backgrounds under one roof. Behind the Galerie, eight studios house artists who work on-site, plus a classroom for community projects; adjacent is a pottery studio. 

Dee Dee is clear: the Galeries is “not meant to be exclusive at all.” For her, the space is all about “celebrating the incredible talent” in the community. She revels in the variety of styles—the perspectives, palettes and mediums. As a non-profit honoring her grandmother, the Galerie provides artists a space in which to collaboratively show their work, and a portion of each sale is reinvested into the neighborhood’s continued development. Proceeds go to programs such as Truth Spring Academy, Mercy Med of Columbus, the Highland Housing Initiative and the Bo Bartlett Center’s “Home Is Where the Art Is” program. 

Highland Galerie gives artists and art patrons a unique opportunity. Artists get to participate in a community, showing their work together, building enthusiasm for the local collective. Patrons can find in one place incredible splashes of local talent. Everyone involved can participate in the continued, and much needed, revitalization of historic Columbus neighborhoods still reeling from the closure of the textile mills decades ago. Highland Galerie is, at its core, a mission brimming with optimism—and it’s brimming over with excellent art.