What's in your closet? The Venue Fine Art & Gifts might be interested in the artwork

Sometimes a piece of art is better off in someone else's home. Maybe it's preferences changing or an owner moving to a smaller home. There's a new art refuge downtown at The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts, 114 S. Grant St., and it's connecting relinquished art with new patrons. For now, it occupies one front room in The Venue, and there are some high-quality finds at discounted prices.

Three of the artists are the late Rudolph (Rudy) Otto Pozzatti, Nashville, Indiana's Timothy (Tim) Greatbatch and Thelma Frame (yes, that's her last name), who was still painting at 104.

The refuge is a side-service The Venue offers in addition to its main galleries, which sell recently created art and gifts.

Low prices for high art at Venue's "refuge" room

This room is a "refuge" because the pieces have been rescued from garages, back rooms and all those places where art whose owners have tired of it — or died — gets hidden. Sometimes it's the piece that comes out when the giver is expected for dinner. After cappuccinos and ice cream, the painting or sculpture returns to the shed.

The Venue's refuge started with a garage-stored art collection that had belonged to the estate of a deceased CIA agent named Juan Noriega. It didn't complement Noriega's family's decor, but they wanted a safe and appreciative place to sell it (at a steeply discounted price.)

An art shelter wall: All part of the original Venue plan

"The refuge is actually part of our original concept for The Venue," said David Colman, co-owner with his wife, Michelle Colman. Now, 15 years later it has emerged this spring. He has already sold some pieces and is happy to buy re-homable art as a collection or piece by piece.

"Juan Noriega had a nice collection of Brown County art as well as some Pozzattis and other pieces."

Part of the good news for Bloomington is quality versus cost.

"This is a recycling of great art," Colman said. And the prices — for instance, for a Pozzatti or a Greatbatch — are very good. In fact, the refuge has allowed Colman to carry art he wouldn't normally consider, due to high price points.

"I'm learning about artists I don't normally see." Coleman saw what Noriega had paid for some of the Greatbatchs. Greatbatch markets his work in cities such as Chicago and New York.

"So we're going to see artists people don't usually see," Colman said, "because it's been in somebody's basement." And these pieces come to The Venue at a discounted price, partially because the people selling them have less of an emotional investment in them than did the original owner. That means "they're often willing to sell them for much less."

Master artist Rudy Pozzatti

"Rudy won every, and I mean all, the purchase awards," said the late Bloomington printmaker and multiple-award-winning artist Jim Sampson, past acquaintance of Pozzatti. Sampson, who died in 2021, was referring to a hosting museums buying a winning artist's work. "It was Rudy who developed IU's internationally admired printmaking department," Sampson said.

Pozzatti, who also died in 2021, taught art at Indiana University and served as artist ambassador for the U.S. Department of State on cultural exchanges to South America, to the Soviet Union and as a representative of the U.S. to global cultural conferences in Budapest and Belgrade.

His art has hung in dozens of galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibitions.

Monroe County Public Library has two books by or about Pozzatti: "Rudy Pozzatti: A Printmaker's Odyssey," edited by Linda Baden and "Rudy Pozzatti: American Printmaker," by Norman A. Geske. The library also carries a book Pozzatti illustrated, "More Hoosier Cooking" edited by Elaine Lumbra.

Nashville's Timothy Greatbatch's paintings now in The Venue

Seasonal landscape is Greatbatch's specialty. He also portrays the town of Nashville, Indiana, and other locations as well as doing figurative works outdoors and in.

At 40, Greatbatch was an established composer of contemporary orchestral and chamber music. In Philadelphia he worked as an adjunct professor of music at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a guest lecturer at Swarthmore College and Princeton University. By the early 1990s he had switched careers — to visual art.

Soon after relocating to Indiana, Greatbatch received a commission to create a 4-by-8-foot painting for the Columbus City Hall (2001). With Indiana Heritage Arts, he has won a variety of purchase awards (an artist's work being purchased by the organization), four merit awards, three Awards of Excellence, the Dale Bessire Memorial Award, the Carl Graf Memorial Award, the Adolph Schultz Memorial Award and the 2003 People's Choice Award. Indiana Heritage Arts Board of Directors, in fact, chose his "Afternoon at Ogle Lake" as their permanent collection's first piece.

Indiana Heritage Arts is in the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville and, among other duties, helps Indiana’s heritage-style impressionist artists.

"We're selective," Colman said. "We're not going to put up anybody's unwanted art on the (refuge) wall." Nevertheless, Colman welcomes people to show him their art.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Venue Fine Art & Gifts taking forgotten artwork for its 'refuge' room