Dream No Small Dream

I am the director and a cofounder of October Gallery, an art gallery and cultural complex with a restaurant, meeting spaces, and a beautiful courtyard garden, located in a three-story Victorian building in the heart of London (Fig. 1). I work closely with Artistic Director Elisabeth Lalouschek (Fig. 2) and a multicultural team. October Gallery maintains a broad-ranging program of exhibitions of art from around the world and a flourishing education department. Other core activities include a wide variety of events embracing theater and dance performances, concerts, artistic and scientific talks, seminars, workshops, and more.

I was raised in the Rocky Mountains in Grand Junction, Colorado. Surrounded by striking vistas in every direction, I most wanted to travel. The cultural meme for my generation was to be on the road, and I knew that to escape that small-town mind, if I could speak other languages, I would have a toolkit with which to travel abroad. So, I studied languages: Latin, French, and Spanish, and later linguistics at Claremont Graduate School in California. But the lasting impact on my life came from a year spent in Paris in the early 1960s, studying French literature at the Sorbonne. It was there that I was introduced to the world of art. When, for the first time, I visited the Jeu de Paume Museum and saw works by Monet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh in the flesh, I was exhilarated. Those famous artworks produced a dramatic physicochemical change within me.

Later, I worked with others to form the Institute of Ecotechnics, a registered charity in the UK and United States which set up ecological projects in seven different biomic regions. I was managing our Mediterranean farm project, outside Aix-en-Provence, when the opportunity to run a new project in the city of London presented itself. The initial projects were designed to operate in different biomes: desert, ocean, savannah, tropical rain forest, and the Mediterranean region, with most located in remote areas. This new enterprise, an art gallery in central London, was the Institute’s first project in an urban environment and was intended to investigate the ecology of cultures. To start this project, the Institute had recently acquired an old Victorian school building in Bloomsbury, designed by the architect S.S. Teulon in 1863. So, in October 1978, I arrived in London from the south of France. I vividly remember my first impressions on entering the building. The wooden floors were black with tar; the splotchy painted walls were toilet green. Worst of all was the pervasive smell of the dry rot, which covered one whole quarter of the building. I broke down in tears, thinking, “What have I gotten myself into now?” I’d just left the beautiful autumnal weather of southern France and was now facing that rainy, gray October weather particular to London. The Houses of Parliament, which we’d passed on arrival, were black with coal soot, as was the whole inner city area. I already thought it was really depressing—even before the taxi arrived at that cold, damp, derelict building.

Somehow, it got grayer and colder still. Yet, the idea of creating something entirely new to London gave me energy, and together with several artists attracted by the idea of opening a gallery to exhibit work from all around the planet, we began wherever we could. We attacked the dry rot, built living spaces on the first floor and dug the basement out (by hand) so one could stand up in there to seal and replaster the walls. In November, more members of the Institute of Ecotechnics arrived. These were all people I had worked with for years and knew well: John Allen, Margaret Augustine, Bill Dempster, Mark Nelson, Kathelin Gray, Marie Harding, Edward Bass, and Robert Hahn. The group was a mixture of artists, architects, and engineers by training and knew building work first hand, having run a construction company together in New Mexico. The team set about getting the place ready to open the new gallery by February of the following year. That meant all hands on deck from first light to late...