Twenty years ago, after her husband died, Virginia Lynch began selling art out of her home to pass the time.
What started as a hobby has become a second career and source of renown for Lynch, who opened a gallery here at the age of 68. Fourteen years after its founding, the Virginia Lynch Gallery is widely considered to be the best contemporary-art gallery north of New York City.
“I would have never imagined all this when I first started,” said Lynch, 82, motioning to the works of famous artists that fill the walls and shelves of her gallery. “I tried to surround myself with beauty, and look what has happened.”
With an eye for talent and a steel will, Lynch has become one of New England’s most influential art dealers. She has done this at an age when most people are slowing down to enjoy the fruits of their labor, and she has done it far from major art markets.
“What Virginia Lynch does is miraculous,” said Theodore Stebbins, curator of American paintings at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. “She runs a very high-powered gallery of avant-garde art on a little country street corner. There is no gallery like hers in the world.”
The Virginia Lynch Gallery is located in tiny Tiverton Four Corners in rural southern Rhode Island. It occupies the second and third floors of the Provender Building, a Victorian house that looks more likely to house a country store than an art gallery.
“But as they say, looks can be deceiving,” said Lynch, a former model and university administrator with striking blue eyes and flowing gray hair.
Lynch greets everyone who walks through the door of her gallery, from Katharine Hepburn, who recently came to see the bulbous glass works of her nephew Mundy, to the hordes of school children who traipse through her gallery, to a curator of a major museum.
Recently Lynch gave an impromptu tour of her gallery to a group of high school students from Massachusetts. She explained many of the gallery’s paintings and sculptures and then asked the students their opinions of the works.
But Lynch wanted the students to do more than just look. She wanted them to experience art firsthand. So she handed a $15,000 glass vase to one of them and instructed them to pass it amongst themselves. “Don’t worry, Dale Chihuly is only the best glass blower in the world,” Lynch teased the apprehensive students.
Lynch spends at least six days a week in the gallery. When she is not there, she’s gardening at her 19th Century farmhouse in Little Compton or on the road setting up exhibits in cities nationwide.
“I just got back from a show in New York. At the opening, I didn’t know whether to sit, stand or do cartwheels,” said Lynch. “Tiverton Four Corners may be out of the way, but it is comfortable. It is home.”
Although idyllic, the gallery’s out-of-the-way location has caused Lynch some worries over the years. “There have been times I thought I wasn’t going to make it financially, like the winter before last, when it snowed all the time and nobody could make it down the road, let alone the gallery,” she said. “But I had to keep going for the artists.”
Each time her gallery has teetered on the brink of financial ruin, buyers have returned thanks to a clientele that extends from Rhode Island to Chicago, New York, Boston and Washington.
Lynch said she doesn’t run the gallery to get rich. “I just need to make my expenses and pay my employees,” said Lynch, who has turned down offers of free space in Providence. “I like being on my own.”
Lynch’s assistants said she is in constant motion. If she is not shuttling paintings up and down three flights of stairs, she is asking for updates on projects or when the next group of students will arrive at the gallery.
All this energy makes one wonder if Lynch has found the secret to eternal youth.
“Artists are my life. They are what keep me going,” said Lynch, whose parents instilled an appreciation of art in her from an early age.
Sadly, the death of her son two years ago was one blow that she almost wasn’t able to overcome.
“My world came crashing down around me when he died,” said Lynch, whose son, Eric Dennard, was a noted abstract painter. “But I realized I couldn’t stop doing what I was doing. I love the artists I work with too much.”
Molly Luce was a local artist particularly dear to Lynch.
“Molly and I became very close at a time when I needed her as much as she needed me,” said Lynch, whose friendship with Luce blossomed after the death of her husband.
In fact, it was Luce’s paintings that led Lynch to her first foray into organizing art shows. “Molly asked me up to the loft of her house. Up there she showed me stacks and stacks of beautiful paintings she had done over the years and put away,” said Lynch. “When I saw those paintings, I didn’t even think; I just said we are going down to the Stone House and having us a great big art show.”
Living on Social Security and in financial straits, Luce protested. Lynch insisted, buying a painting to provide Luce with the money to rent the small meeting house to display her paintings.
Despite having no formal training in exhibiting art, Lynch hung each of the paintings herself. “She didn’t think we would sell a single one,” said Lynch, who also did all the promotional work for the show. At the close of the show, Lynch had sold 17 paintings, providing Luce more than enough money to settle her financial affairs.
“She died in good stead,” said Lynch, pausing and adding: “It was probably the best thing I ever did in my life.”
Luce’s paintings live on in Lynch’s gallery, hanging beside the works of such famous artists as Jules Olitski and Robert Wilson. “This is where she belongs,” said Lynch.
Luce is not the only artist Lynch has helped.
“Virginia Lynch saved my life,” said Joseph Norman, a black artist from Chicago acclaimed worldwide for his paintings and drawings.
“Everything that has happened to me, from having my works in most major galleries throughout the United States and having my first retrospective at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is because of Virginia Lynch,” said Norman, who worked at a nightclub in Newport, R.I., before his first exhibition at Lynch’s gallery in 1988. “She saw my gifts and strengths and encouraged them. Many artists in Rhode Island don’t know what they would do without her.”
The arts community in Rhode Island recently paid tribute to Lynch at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) commencement ceremony. Lynch, who has been a trustee at the school for more than a decade, received an honorary degree.
“Getting an honorary degree from RISD is the highest honor I could ever imagine. It was like being queen for the day,” said Lynch, a graduate of Baylor University and whose children and many of her 13 grandchildren were there to see her get her degree.
Despite the accolades, Lynch has no intention of slowing down. In addition to planning the scheduled shows at her gallery, she is in the midst of planning a major contemporary furniture exhibit to tour the nation.
“I have to get better and better. Not for myself, but for the artists,” she said. “Plus, I live a very compelling life that I do not want to leave behind anytime soon.”
