All aboard! The Gallery Night ArTrolley rolls into its eighth year By Bill Rodriguez

Experiencing art isn’t supposed to be hard. Artists are supposed to do all the suffering for us ahead of time.

That’s what makes Gallery Night Providence’s ArTrolley such a sweet deal on the third Thursday of the month from 5 to 9 p.m. — no sore feet. The project will begin its eighth year next week (September 18).

Gallery-goers hop onto gleaming red trolleys, where a guide gives them an idea of what they might find up ahead if they hop off. There’s something for the connoisseur and the seascape appreciator and everyone in between. On the glossy brochure map are college art museums, commercial galleries, artisan shops, galleries run by artists and artisans themselves, as well as wall space set aside in a bank. If you like 18th-century furniture, the John Brown House is open extra hours on Gallery Night.

Guides — and knowledgeable trolley drivers — on the August runs could tout Japanese woodblock prints at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Haitian folk art at Peaceable Kingdom, Palestinian and Iraqi artists at AS220, and paintings by Czech painter Helena Stockar at Gallery Z. There was even a separate van run to the Culinary Archives & Museum at Johnson & Wales University, to peruse exotic menus and see a Russian chef’s bed — learning what it’s doing there would be enough reason to make that trip.

"We’ve found that 50 percent of the people who ride the trolley, it’s their first time," says Catherine Little Bert, co-chair of Gallery Night Providence. "They’re trying to get the geography down, get an overview of where the galleries are, what they like."

A founder of the event, she runs Bert Gallery on South Water Street, which specializes in 19th- and 20th-century New England regional art.

"In the very beginning, we started out with nine spots and one trolley," she says. "We’re now up to four trolleys and 26 venues. And [with the run] to the Johnson & Wales Culinary Museum, there are actually five different routes every Gallery Night."

The program began in 1996 as an offshoot of a gallery walking tour conducted as part of the city-run Convergence International Arts Festival. But the distances between locations in Providence made obvious the need to organize transportation.

Last year a longstanding oversight was rectified: the art shows at Rhode Island College’s first-rate Bannister Gallery and other places in the West End were finally part of Gallery Night.

"It’s so far between spots that it wasn’t walkable at all," Bert says of that section of town. "Also, sending people out there to do a loop didn’t work — you would get dropped off and you would be sitting there for almost an hour before the trolley could get back to pick you up and take you on."

So now two trips per evening are made (at 5:15 and 7) to Bannister Gallery, Gallery Z, Gallery I.N.S.A.N.E., and the Silent Pictures Gallery at the Castle Cinema; Providence College’s Hunt Cavanagh Gallery will join the list next week. On this loop, the guide gets off with passengers, they look around — though only for 10 or 15 minutes — and everyone boards the trolley for the next stop.

"It’s not as free-flowing as the other loops are, where trolley riders can get on and off at will, but it made including remote galleries practical," Bert says.

The cost of Gallery Night Providence is not inexpensive: each trolley costs about $450 per evening, and more than 50,000 brochure/maps are distributed each year. The event is sponsored mainly through assessing galleries a $600 yearly fee if they participate in the organizing and attend board meetings, and $750 if they do not. A dozen or so volunteers help out every third Thursday, and the project has received a few state and city grants over the years. From year one, the parking lot behind the silo-shaped building at 1 Citizens Plaza has generously donated free parking.

The organizers are still tinkering to make the event more efficient.

This year, the Providence ArTrolleys will remain garaged in January and February, in addition to the December sabbatical. The organizers resisted, but the drastically lower number of visitors in the winter couldn’t be argued with.

"We said, ‘Well, maybe we should save those three months and put our energies to try some other programs,’ " Bert says. "Like, should we try doing a guided walking tour?

"Newport Gallery Night tried to run all year round their first time," Bert mentions. "And they decided that it didn’t make sense for them to run through the winter months. So they went down to a shorter schedule."

Paula Martesian, co-chair of the board with Bert, has also been with Gallery Night from the beginning. As an artist herself, she has a personal interest in helping Providence be a practical place to make art.

"My big deal is that you have these marvelous arts organizations in Rhode Island and they have no marketing budget — even the RISD Museum," she says.

"I look at the mistakes that we all make in the arts community," she adds. "Artists spend how many years developing a body of work and how much time marketing?"

Martesian is concerned that building an audience of art lovers is necessary if art studio rents are going to continue to be paid. "You really have to sell what you do. We forget that as artists. We spend so much time with blinders on making art and not sharing it."

Bert agrees that the event is a big plus for artists as well as galleries.

"We all feel very excited that this is a good introduction to the arts," she says. "It’s very accessible. There’s a very diversified range of things that you can see. The more we can build that and promote that, it’s better for the arts community in general."

On the next Gallery Night Providence on Thursday, September 18 and continuing for two days, a "Celebrate Women" art show will be held at the Providence Tourism Council’s visitors’ center at 10 Dorrance Street. The 27 participating galleries will each display a work by one of their female artists. For more information, go to www.gallerynight.info