The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Jack Gunter’s History of the World Gallery is packing up after 30 years at the old garage next to the now defunct Tyee Mega Store. End of an era, end of culture as we know it on the now bleaker South End. For awhile we were the Paris of Camano Island, salons and studios, galleries and sculpture parks, art in the parks, a magnet for the annual Mother’s Day Studio Tour, a veritable mecca for the artistically famished. Now, probably, the beginning of an Exodus, leaving us once again the way it was when I first arrived, a cultural desert.

When the Gallery moved from its former location in East Stanwoodopolis, we all told Jack and Karla no one would drive hell and gone to attend fine art openings in an old garage 17 miles down a dead end island. They assured us naysayers we were wrong. Well, we were wrong. Pilchuck glass shows, Honey I Shrunk the Art shows, gala openings, Mother’s Day Tours, art auctions and 30 years of cultural extravaganzas kept the South End lively before social media supplanted that role. Karla moved a few miles north and opened the Matzke Gallery and Sculpture Gardens, a sophisticated appendage to the History of the World, the finest art gallery north of Seattle and south of Vancouver, B.C., bar none. The Jason Dorsey Fine Art Studio and Gallery opened in 2018, adding yet another piece to the South End’s cultural identity.

The way snowflakes and raindrops coalesce around a small nucleus, the History of the World expanded to create the Mother’s Day Studio Tour, the Camano Visitor Center and Sculpture Garden, the Camano Arts Association and gave inspiration to those of us who once were naysayers, that this backwash would never embrace fine art. We were wrong. I like to think that the Gallery is leaving the South End, but the South End isn’t leaving the Gallery. The legacy of those years hopefully will continue to expand outward, from art hangings in the Senior Centers to the new Art Center being imagined in West Stanwood. Cultural identity is an ever evolving work in progress and for those of us who may be disheartened at the loss of the History of the World Gallery, well, we’d be wrong. Once again….

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