Gallery 221

Not long ago, a vacant house on Main Street of Goshen had beer bottles, scrap metal and wood piled on the dusty floor of the first-floor room. The mess is now gone, but dents in the wall still reveal the white plaster behind the yellow paint, the paint around the window frames is chipping away and the blinds are broken.

It's a rugged space, but a Goshen College student thought the space had potential, maybe not for living, but possibly for displaying artwork.

Abi Tsigie, a junior at the college, along with several friends, cleaned up the space he said had been abandoned for more than a year, and opened Gallery 221 a few months ago.

"A lot of people, when they imagine a gallery, they imagine something fancy or something expensive, but really all you need is space," Tsigie said, "and you can take that and make it its own piece of art."

It took Tsigie and several friends four or five days to clean the room. He then dubbed the space Gallery 221, using a piece of his address in Ethiopia. Tsigie still wants to improve the room more, but has been happy enough with its current condition to display his work for the past two months.

In October [2010], around 40 people toured Tsigie's photo display after he quickly invited people to an open house a night before the exhibit. He and fellow Goshen College art student, Claudia Phillips, offered a second show during the November First Fridays -- Tsigie's pottery setting on cut logs and Phillips' paintings hanging from the unfinished ceiling. Phillips sold six of her 10 displayed pieces that night and in the following few days.