One-woman whirlwind
Allison Wolf Hertzler can't stop creating.She paints, designs clothing, launches Web sites, runs a NoDa gallery – and that's just the start.
By Richard Maschal
rmashcal@charlotteobserver.com
An exhibit of her artwork was scheduled to open in just two hours, and Allison Wolf Hertzler was still painting.
“If it was any other artist, I would have kicked their butt,” says Hertzler, a gallery owner who's hung many a show and whose artistic side is joined with a no-nonsense business sense.
After working until midnight for two months in her NoDa studio, the heat
wave hit and her air conditioner broke. That hardly dented the determination of a former Peace Corps volunteer who once lived in a hut with no electricity.
Two hours before the gallery crawl in early June, Hertzler put the final daubs on a painting of trees, stepped back to look at what was on the walls of Green Rice Gallery, and felt contentment. Threaded through the art, she thought, were the strands of her life.
The color green represented the rice patties of Sri Lanka, the island nation off
the coast of India where she had been in the Peace Corps. Her use of patterns reflected the precise cast of mind of the young girl who dreamed of becoming a doctor.
The space itself spoke to her entrepreneurial spirit. Green Rice Gallery has reached a milestone. She opened it five years ago this month. Her first show there marks the anniversary of a gallery that's become the hub of a business network with Hertzler, 34, at the center.
She paints, designs clothing, runs a gallery, designs Web sites, rents space to
artists and has plans to spread the Green Rice brand beyond funky NoDa.
She's also designing clothing for the men and women in her fall wedding.
“I never do anything simple,” she says. “I wish I could, but it's just not me.”
Taking a leap
Growing up in Greensboro, Hertzler ran for vice president of her fourth-grade
class. She thought that would look good on her medical school application.
She saw a future of helping people. Looking back now, she can see signs of a different path.
She loved to draw, took private art lessons. Every school project had an art element, evidence of an early flair for marketing. Her mother, who had her own business, was a role model. But Hertzler couldn't see any way to make a living from art.
She'd have to get some experience under her belt before that possibility bloomed.
Pre-med at N.C. State, she got good grades. But when she was a senior, she looked at her fellow students applying to medical school and realized she wasn't as driven in one direction as they were. She got a glimpse that medicine might be too confining.
“Something clicked in my head,” she says.
A self-confessed good girl who never got in trouble, Hertzler decided she needed to see more of life. She took a leap.
Three days after graduation in 1996, having had her wisdom teeth extracted as a precaution, the 22-year-old who had never been overseas except for a brief trip to Mexico headed for Sri Lanka.
Her assigned village was two hours by bus from a big city. It had no running water. She bathed in an irrigation canal with the water buffalo. Hertzler, benefiting from her openness, jumped into village life.
She went from being the honoree sitting on a stool being served tea to one of the servers. She learned enough of the language, Singhalese, to tell jokes. Total acceptance came when she and best friend, Madu, argued and yelled at each other and didn't speak for three days.
Her work on community health – programs for children, a health center, building toilets – gave her satisfaction, but she was coming to see her future wasn't in that field.
In two years, she'd had the experience she hungered for and learned that despite their differences, people were pretty much the same. She discovered she liked running her own show, and, if something didn't work, it was OK to try something else.
Creative energy
When she moved to Charlotte in 2002, Hertzler didn't intend to open an art gallery.
During her four years post-Peace Corps, she worked for nonprofits and her childhood interest in art pushed to the fore. Doing some graphic design, she saw a way to make a living using her creative skills. At UNC Charlotte, she took classes in art and computer design.
Hungry for the marketplace, she opened a design business, renting an 800-square-foot space from Paul Sires and Ruth Ava Lyons, the artists/gallery owners who pioneered the arts district north of uptown.
“I don't think (Hertzler's business) would have happened anywhere else,” says Lyons. “Like a lot of businesses in NoDa, they start as a kernel and they need to be planted and watered, and they evolve.”
Hertzler wanted clients to feel creative energy when they came in the space. Art on the walls would work. Pressured by a looming gallery crawl in June 2003, she put up some of her own. “Someone wanted to buy a piece, and I didn't know what to do,” she says.
Then, she showed paintings by Nancy Prator of New York firehouses, work inspired by 9-11. That got a big response.
She began working with local artists and now deals with about 100, local and national. In 2004, a larger space became available near the corner of 36th Street and North Davidson. Hertzler took the lease.
Her entrepreneurial instincts kicked in.
She subdivided the space and rented studios to artists. Looking for ways to increase artists' income, she printed designs from their work on scarves and dresses. She began the Milkweed Collection, designing clothing and having it manufactured.
When the building next door became available, she and a partner leased it and turned it into the Boulevard at NoDa, an urban marketplace. All this has left little time for her art, and, in recent months, for her fiance, George Heck, owner of an IT business. So although she had to work long days to produce work for her show, she was grateful for the chance.
In her use of patterning, bright colors and realism with a certain fanciful quality, Hertzler draws on influences such as Asian art from the 1700s, early 20th-century Austrian artist Gustav Klimt and French illustrator George Barbier. Moving ahead with her business, she's hired an artists representative to take her artists' work to businesses and interior designers, not relying solely on potential customers walking in the door.
Last year, she worked with developer Clay Grubb on a visual art program for Morrison, his mixed-use development near SouthPark. Now, she wants to extend the Green Rice brand to that area.
Things are moving. Hertzler is juggling.