Twenty-One Artists Are Taking Over the Greely Building for One Weekend

The Ridgefield Art Association is carving a century-old downtown landmark into twenty-one small galleries. Painting, sculpture, collage, live music both days, and a whole lot of work that will not fit through a normal door.

The Greely Building is having the busiest year of its very long life. It got covered in photographs this month. It has been a pop-up history museum since August 21. In the spring it holds a plant sale. And on the weekend of September 19, twenty-one artists move in, each one handed a piece of the space and told, essentially, go big.

That is the whole premise of the Big Art Show. The Ridgefield Art Association is not setting up one shared room with folding tables. The building gets carved into twenty-one individual galleries — one artist each, painting, mixed media, collage, sculpture. Two days, eleven to five, and then it is gone.

What "big" actually means here

Every artist in this show was picked because they like working at a scale most gallery walls cannot handle. That is a harder ask than it sounds. Large work is expensive, awkward to store, difficult to sell, and almost never gets shown, because the average venue in a small town is a coffee shop wall or a library display case.

So this is the rare weekend where the constraint comes off. The City and the Port of Ridgefield handed over the Greely Building for it, which is the part I keep thinking about — a landmark with an uncertain future, loaned to a nonprofit art group for two days so the rest of us can walk through it and look at things.

The Greely Building deserves its own section

If you are new here, you have driven past it a hundred times and probably wondered what it is. Big, old, a little mysterious, right there on Pioneer near the historic fire station and El Rancho Viejo. It is not a store. It is not open. And yet things keep happening inside it.

Here is the short version. It went up around 1920 as an automobile garage and service shop, back when cars were the new thing and Ridgefield was in one of its early growth spurts. It spent a long later chapter as a school bus barn. The Port of Ridgefield acquired it in 2024 through a property swap with the school district, with plans to turn it into a downtown business hub, and the state put in a $3 million grant to help.

Then the walls got opened up. Early estimates for full modernization came back somewhere between $8 million and $9 million, and the Port has been openly honest that the project may not happen the way anyone first imagined. The building's long-term future is, at the moment, a genuine open question.

Which brings us to the interesting part. A hundred-year-old building with an uncertain future and a huge open interior turns out to be exactly what a growing town needs. It has become the default answer whenever somebody asks where. Where does the plant sale go in the spring? Greely. Where do you put a sixteen-day pop-up history museum and a 1920s jazz dance with a live orchestra? Greely. Where do you fit twenty-one artists who work at a scale nothing else downtown can hold?

And this month it stopped being just a big empty room. Ridgefield Main Street and the Port installed large-scale photo panels on the exterior — the refuge, the Chinookan plankhouse, the dragon boats — using images from fifteen local photographers and organizations. A building that opened as a car garage now wears photographs of plankhouses. That is a hundred-year arc and it lands about right.

So if you have been meaning to get inside that building and keep missing the window: the museum closes September 5, and then this is your next one. There is no guarantee about what the Greely looks like a year from now, or who gets to use it. Take the invitations while they are being handed out.

You have probably already seen some of this art

Here is what makes this show land differently than a standard gallery opening. A good chunk of the work Ridgefield has been quietly living with all year came from people on this list.

You have walked past a T-rex skull at the library. You have seen a very large banana at the farmers market and had a small moment about it. You have noticed the orange and blue cranes at Yoga Ridge. Those are not random. Those came from one guy on this roster, and he is one of twenty-one.

How to do this weekend right

The RAA also has a poetry reading on its calendar for September 20, so check their events page if you want to stack the weekend. And their gallery on North Main is open Wednesday through Sunday year-round, which is the part people forget between shows.

Questions you might have

Yes. Eleven to five on Saturday the 19th and Sunday the 20th. Same lineup both days.

There is no ticket link on the RAA event page and no price listed. Community art shows like this are typically walk-in, but confirm on their site or Instagram if you want certainty before driving over.

The RAA has not posted anything about sales. Assume some artists will sell and some will not, and just ask them directly. Bring a way to pay in case the answer is yes.

No, but same building. The Meeting History pop-up runs through September 5 and is a separate project from the Ridgefield Multicultural Initiative. The Big Art Show moves in two weeks after it closes.

304 Pioneer Street, downtown Ridgefield, 98642. Near the historic fire station and El Rancho Viejo. If you know where the new photo panels went up, you know the building.

Not specified. It is a historic building being used temporarily, so if mobility access matters for your visit, email the RAA at [email protected] ahead of time.

Why I am making a whole thing about this

Ridgefield gets a lot of new things — new stores, new parks, new roundabouts, new subdivisions with names like a shampoo brand. Those are fine. This is different. This is twenty-one people who already live here, making things at a scale nobody asked them to, inside a hundred-year-old building that nobody has quite figured out what to do with yet.

The Greely could have spent this whole year sitting empty and looking like a problem. Instead it has been a museum, a dance hall, a photo gallery on the outside, and now twenty-one galleries on the inside. That is a town deciding to use what it has.

That is the version of a small town I moved here for. Go stand in it.