With Lindsay Gallery set to move downtown, founder Duff Lindsay takes a final look back

Duff Lindsay recently announced that his outsider art gallery, Lindsay Gallery, which has operated in the Short North since 2001, would relocate downtown next year, becoming part of an envisioned new arts district currently being built by Edwards Companies.

Despite the work to be done – the new space is still under construction and Lindsay continues to sort through more than two decades of artifacts clustered in the basement of the current building – the gallerist said he has managed to take things in stride to this point, an atypically laid-back demeanor he traced in part to the circumstances of recent years. 

“It was more than four years ago that Jeff Edwards approached me about the possibility [of relocating downtown], and he laid it all out for me and told me what his intentions were. And then the whole world shut down with Covid. And then two years after that, I had my accident and almost died,” said Lindsay, who spent more than eight months away from the gallery beginning in 2022 as he recovered from a traumatic head injury sustained in a fall. “So, it seems like it’s all been delayed so much that I’ve basically lost my ability to panic.”

Once it opens, Lindsay Gallery will be joined near the intersections of Gay and North High streets by another Short North transplant, Michelle Brandt’s Brandt Gallery, along with Margaret Wunderlich’s Chaos Contemporary Craft. (Read more about plans for the nascent district in Columbus Monthly here.) Before making the move, however, Lindsay has scheduled a final exhibition for his current home dubbed “One More Time” and kicking off with an opening celebration on Friday, Nov. 22. The show gathers the work of nearly a dozen artists who have helped to shape the spirit of the gallery, including Ashley Pierce, Joey Monsoon and Terry Joshua, among others.

A year ago, as Lindsay worked to recover from his injuries, the idea of throwing himself headlong into launching a new space might have been unthinkable. In a May 2023 interview, the gallerist spoke of a desire to slow his pace, expressing interest in curtailing the number of exhibitions he hosted in an effort to lessen the physical and mental grind. “I don’t need another opening to work toward every four, five, six weeks,” he said at the time. “That’s a real treadmill to be on, and, let’s face it, my brain doesn’t work that fast anymore.” 

In the months since, however, Lindsay said he’s come to the realization that he’s simply not wired that way. “While I would like to, I guess, pull back, or slow down a little bit, the idea that I was going to be able to do that was a pipe dream,” he said.

The circumstances surrounding the gallery’s next genesis differ radically from the first time Lindsay relocated, moving from Upper Arlington to what were then the outer fringes of an evolving Short North. In recalling his surroundings in those early years, Lindsay described being adjoined by a half-block of vacant buildings in various states of disrepair. Across the street were two parking lots, one belonging to White Castle and the other owned by the city, which didn’t even bother to equip it with parking meters. Gradually, though, the neighborhood began to change, with more galleries moving in, followed by restaurants and a new building boom. And then, many of those pioneering galleries began to move out and the complexion of the neighborhood began to shift into something Lindsay said he can no longer recognize.

“It certainly doesn’t have the same feeling anymore, but that’s really nobody’s fault, except maybe part of the blame could go to the out-of-town landlords who rent to whatever bar needs the space and will pay it,” said Lindsay, who credited the actions of a now-deceased trio – developer Sandy Wood, Short North Tavern owner John Allen, and Doo Dah Parade founder Greg Carr – for helping to preserve the area as an arts district for so many years. “What I’ve realized as I’ve sold art in more cities and done cooperative things with galleries in Chicago and New York, is that there is a life cycle to a neighborhood that becomes an arts district. … Typically, galleries move into a neighborhood that’s in rough shape, because we don’t need much – just space and cheap rent – and then over time the neighborhood turns into something most galleries can’t afford. And I think the Short North has just lived through that cycle.”

The proposed downtown arts district is something entirely different altogether, with a developer – in this case Edwards Companies – essentially attempting to construct a new arts district whole cloth, and in real time. Combines with the plans for a two-mile Capital Line pedestrian loop, the first phase of which will extend along Gay Street from North Fourth Street to Front Street, the project could radically reshape downtown as it exists currently. And perhaps not always in ways that are for the best. (See the recent eviction of the vaunted DIY space Skylab Gallery from its longtime home on Gay Street, the timing of which feels inexorably linked with the massive financial investments being made by others on the block.)

As Lindsay Gallery moves into its new space, Lindsay said it will carry with it a familiar outsider spirit, which he traced to a chance meeting with Columbus artist Elijah Pierce in the early 1970s. “And I hate to say it, because it sounds so fucking corny, but it changed my life, and it opened my eyes to a world of art I didn’t know existed, which was created by people without any art education and without any connections,” said Lindsay, who grew up in an area of Appalachia where traditional art institutions were nonexistent, lending him an automatic connection with those artists who found ways to carve their own paths outside of the establishment. “As someone who himself had no art education, it was like, ‘Okay, if the art world is not closed to them, then I suppose it’s not closed to me either.’”