Etherton Gallery in Tucson barrio to close in December

He will then have until Dec. 31 to pack up the 3,250-square-foot space that Etherton Gallery has called home since 2021 and move to a building a third the size two blocks away.

“The good news is that we will still be in Barrio Viejo, so I still will have my relationships with the people here,” Etherton said Friday, a day after he posted the pending closure on Instagram. “But it's so small; we're going to have an exhibition space that's about 10 feet by 15 feet. There's just no room in there to really run a proper gallery.”

Etherton’s move from 340 S. Convent Ave. will come at the end of his lease with the property’s owner, Bacon Industries, and in the middle of the busy holiday season. He said he tried to get the landlord to extend his lease by 100 days, giving him until April 2027 to move, but they declined.

“We just fully expected that we'd be able to extend our lease or renew it, and they're just not going to let us do it,” he said. “They're forcing us to leave during Christmas.”

Bacon’s Anne Shiff, whose father, Kelley Rollings, started buying and renovating property in the historic barrio in the early 1970s, said she couldn’t extend Etherton’s lease because Bacon has a buyer lined up.

“He chose a one-year renewal, and then came back five or six months later to change his mind, and I couldn't do that,” said Shiff, who runs the family-owned business with her sister. “The property had already been promised to a buyer.”

The sale is expected to be completed once the gallery is gone, she said.

Bahti Indian Arts also will move

It is one of 10 buildings in Bacon’s portfolio of more than two dozen commercial and residential properties that it plans to sell over the next year, Shiff said.

“We'd like to reduce the footprint of the number of properties that we're managing,” she explained. “We've been here (in Barrio Viejo) 55 years. Several of us are facing retirement, and that's why we wanted to reduce the number of holdings, make it easier to manage.”

Etherton Gallery’s neighbor, Bahti Indian Arts at 350 S. Convent, is expected to close its gallery next June and relocate when owner Mark Bahti’s lease expires. That building also is being sold, Shiff said.

“What they told us is that they are going to divide up the properties among themselves and occupy the spaces, not sell them,” he said. ”There was never any discussion about selling the properties, so I personally don't believe that's true. None of us do.”

Bacon in June listed three properties with CBRE, a leading commercial real estate broker, including an L-shaped complex with three apartments and office space on the corner of South Convent and West Simpson Street. The three properties were advertised as the “Barrio Viejo Portfolio Opportunity” with a price tag of $2.1 million if bought altogether.

Shiff said she is using other local real estate companies, as well, and any building that has tenants will be sold under the condition that the Bacon leases are honored.

Evolution of an arts enclave

Etherton moved his internationally recognized arts photography gallery to the barrio in 2021 from downtown’s historic Oddfellow Hall, where it had lived 33 years. A year later, he convinced his old friend Bahti to relocate the gallery his father started in New Mexico in 1949 and brought to Tucson in 1952 from St. Philip’s Plaza to Convent Avenue.

Before long, the two galleries had company on the historic stretch next door to the Tucson Convention Center when Andrew Smith Gallery, Decode Gallery and Studio light/space moved in, creating what Bahti described as an emerging arts district.

“It's basically very reminiscent of what used to exist in Tucson in the post-war era area called Ash Alley,” he said. “Kaibab (Mexican handcrafts and Southwestern gifts) was there, Jack Petty Studio (Art Gallery) and several small artist studios. It's like the artistic life is coming back to downtown Tucson again.”

The arts enclave has attracted the attention of Tucson residents and visitors alike, Etherton said.

“We're all benefiting by being next to each other because … we were coordinating our openings, doing events together,” he said. “We were all collaborating, and it was mutually beneficial not only to us in this block but to the Coronet (Restaurant), Exo (Bar Crisol/Exo).”

In the spring, Etherton and Bahti launched the monthly “First Saturdays," where restaurants, galleries, bars and shops in the barrio stay open late. It’s an opportunity for people to explore the neighborhood businesses and experience the galleries.

“We had four or five and they’ve been amazingly big. Our ‘First Saturday’ in July we had 150 people,” said Etherton, whose gallery will host the next event from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 5. “Half of those people had never been to the gallery before, but they heard about this first Saturdays, and there was enough galleries open and enough businesses open where it made sense to come here.”

Etherton is not the first gallery to leave Convent Avenue. Andrew Smith, who operated his fine arts photography gallery for more than 40 years in Santa Fe before relocating it to Tucson in 2018, closed his gallery at 330 S. Convent Ave. in 2024. He said that after nearly 50 years in the business, he was scaling back to appointments only out of his home.

Etherton said he feels like he’s being forced to leave his gallery on South Convent.

“I'm 75 years old. I knew this day was coming at some point, but I always envisioned it as something that I would decide, 'OK, let's do this another year. We'll take care of all of our artists and we'll return work that's consigned. We'll have a lot of time to do this properly.' Now we don't have time to do it properly," he said. "There’s just a lot of things I haven’t finished yet that I want to finish.”

Shiff said she appreciates art galleries and artists. “We very much like Terry Etherton," she said. "He's been a good tenant. He's contributed greatly to Barrio Viejo, and I'm glad that, according to his release that I just read last night, apparently he's able to stay in the neighborhood in another location." 

Her late father, Rollings, who spearheaded the restoration and preservation of Barrio Viejo’s historic adobe architecture starting in 1971, had his own art gallery. For 44 years, Rollings, an avid art collector according to Etherton, operated his America West Primitive and Modern Art Gallery in Tucson and had a location in the barrio.

Etherton’s final exhibition at the Convent Avenue gallery will be “Lou Peralta: Expanded Portraiture, The Matter of the Invisible, with Elizabeth Z. Pineda: Maíz,” featuring “Yu Yu Shiratori: In the Cases.” The exhibit opens Sept. 22 and runs through Nov. 28.

Once he closes Bahti Indian Arts next summer, Bahti said he wants to find land and build a new gallery somewhere in Barrio Viejo.