We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Karen Ouzts. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Karen below.
Alright, Karen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
I don’t know where to begin, is there even a beginning- or has it always just been something in my mind and heart? I have this vivid memory of when I was 18 years old. I was laying on a blanket in the backyard, it was sunset, and I was looking through a collage catalog. I remember thinking, ” I want to open an art gallery” . Columbus, Ga. may have had one at the time, I honestly don’t know, and that was part of the problem. I told my mother, her suggestion, ” Be an Art Teacher. It seemed like an okay start but wasn’t the “big picture’. I told a friend at work, she literally laughed, LAUGHED. I knew whatever I did, it had to be creative. Eventually, I did become an art teacher. I wanted to give back. I had been mentored by an art teacher and because of that, I was able to attend CVCC on an Art Scholarship and that began my academic career. I was completely unfulfilled as a teacher. I had a few students that I felt were really part of my purpose and I was holding on for dear life to a career that was killing me for them. I remember walking down the hall one day at work. I was thinking, okay, 22 years until retirement…. WAIT, twenty-two years? Nah. I had spent a lot of the previous five years mourning my father’s death. He was a creative too. He died, at 59, in a car accident. He was just a few years from retirement. He was going to go back to woodworking. A career he left to work in the Mill, so that our family could have health insurance. Ironically, the mill shutdown and he died shortly after. He never saw his dreams come to light. Honestly, that was almost my fate. I had a near death experience (toooooo long of a story for here), but it truly made me reevaluate.
His death had been hard and to make a hard time worse, my best friend at the time had left town the NEXT MORNING, to pursue her creative dreams. Most of my friends had left. They were moving away in droves to New York, Atlanta, LA, anywhere but Columbus.
I knew firsthand of a few glairing problems in the community. No place to create, No community for young artists to connect and no place to showcase nontraditional art.
So, there I was faced with safety or jumping into the abyss of the unknown. A literal miracle fell into my lap concerning the prospect of a space and that was the deciding factor. I jumped. I quit my job, took my retirement funds (which were very little) and my husband did the same. He has spent three years completely renovating the space by hand, himself, and I have been trying to build the platform… Through a pandemic, extreme division, and economic turmoil. I know HAC is a living miracle so we continue to push through in faith that it will provide what the young artists of our city need to run their own programs, host their own shows, or just have a creative oasis. I want them to connect, I want them to promote each other, I want them to chase their dreams. I built the platform with nothing but grit and determination. I’m not giving anything away, but if they have the guts to chase their dreams, I have a place for them.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
A little about me? That’s hard too. I prefer to stay in the background, because I didn’t create Heritage Art Center for me, I want the light on the upcoming artists. Sighs Out loud…… I really had no choice but to be creative. I grew up in a small duplex in Phenix City. It was filled with love. I still long for that feeling of home. That tiny little place held more love than any place I have ever known. However, we didn’t have a lot of material things. It didn’t matter. I had a lot of creativity and imagination, I drew all over my walls, I wrote volumes of poems, I paid CLOSE attention to style and made my own creations. I married my high school sweetheart and we have been together a total of 27 years. I think those things are what sets me apart. I think I understand that a person shouldn’t have to come from the right status, the right background, the right family (which by the way, there’s no such thing) to be part of the arts. I understand what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong in the room, so it’s my mission that EVERYONE feels welcome when they walk into HAC. Our motto: ” Art for Everyone, Everything for Art”. When you walk in, you’ll see a gorgeous space, you’ll see fine art at our shows, but you’ll see every walk of life, every beautiful color of skin, every radiant color in the rainbow and…..you’ll see hardworking, down to earth people. You’ll see my husband, he probably just walked off a jobsite, and his friends will be there too and everyone else will be there happy to see each other, because we are all part of the masterpiece of humanity.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
I don’t have a business partner or cofounder……que anxiety (there’s no one but me). I do have a mentor. I won’t disclose them here, they know who they are. We’ve never talked about why they chose to mentor me or why they’ve given me the chances they have. I can only speculate. I think, besides it being an absolute miracle, it’s how we met that started our relationship. They met me when I was looking at the space for the first time. I knew of them because of a business they run. It’s very community oriented but I had never met them personally. I just knew how I felt in their establishment. When I drove up, I felt something inside of me say, ” Be nothing but yourself”. We explored the building like kids in the neighborhood’s spooky house. There were rooms and staircases everywhere. We went through them all, joking and cutting up like we had always just knew each other. I had no idea who they were concerning other businesses or community. I treated them like family, and they treated me like family as well. Later that afternoon, they met again with myself, and my husband and they have mentored me ever since. They never ever tell me how to run the business, they don’t dictate the shots, but they encourage us, build us up, and continue to push us to push this business, this platform and this community.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
……….A time when I had to pivot. That’s almost funny, if the gravity weren’t so heavy. Heritage started in LATE 2019. We had a little open house in our first building (there are three) in March 2020. MARCH 2020. Like, the weekend of the shutdown, MARCH 2020. Everything has been a pivot. The open house was to promote a brick-and-mortar gallery, a spring break art camp, summer programs, creative meetups, basically everything that was about to be shutdown. We did an immediate 180. We started doing online auctions. They went fantastic for several months. That kept the lights on and construction going in the permeant space. Summer rolled around. I still had no idea what to do. We had a grass lot. It became the Courtyard at Heritage, and we started hosting Sunset Markets. Then, we started doing shows last fall. It’s been a fight, to say the least. Little by little, the shows are getting bigger and bigger, and the artists are starting to realize, they can absolutely host their own shows, they don’t have to wait on me. It’s a flex space and totally rentable for shows. A lady once told me, ” Be like a palm tree, bend in the wind and you’ll survive the hurricanes”. I feel like I’m in a category six sometimes, but I bend in the direction of the wind and here I am, answering these questions about Heritage Art Center with over $45 thousand in ART sales over the span of six months almost all going directly to the artists. We’ve hosted international artists, one from Kenya, Africa and one from New York, but most are local. We’ve held dozens of Markets, and are fortunate enough that we are starting to become part of the city’s art efforts, a trend which we humbly hope continues.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.Heritage-Art-Center.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heritage_artcenter/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HeritageArtCenterofColumbusGa
Image Credits
Eliza Daffin