Cinders Gallery is, pretty much, the ULTIMATE bad-vibe repellant!  Seriously, after reading this interview with founder Sto and Kelie Bowman, just walk into 103 Havemeyer and see if you're still pissed off about your friend who still hasn't returned that thing that he took a year ago. We dare you.


Sto Bowman:  My name is Sto and I run Cinders Gallery with Kelie Bowman.

Chief Magazine:  Where are you from originally?

Sto:  I grew up in Virginia, the DC area, and then moved to Richmond and went to school there.  Then, I moved to New York in like, 2000.

You guys started Cinders in 2004?

Kelie:  Yeah, in 2004.

I remember reading that it came about because of a fire…

Kelie:  Our house burned down.

Did you leave the stove on or something?

Kelie:  No, my roommate had a candle.  We were all home.  We had been talking about opening up a space.  Randomly, we were on Craigslist and saw a space right around the corner from my house, and went and saw it, and loved it.  It wasn’t this [current] space; it was different one out on Grand.  Since we loved the space so much, and it was the first one we had looked at, we were like “let’s just do it.”  We went to go get beer to celebrate and came back, and the house was on fire.  My roommate’s candle didn’t have anything underneath it so it burnt through these plastic shelves, which created like a plastic chemical fire because she had all of these photographs in the casing.

Sto:  The place went up so quickly.  We went to the deli, came back and couldn’t even go inside, it was already up in flames.  

Kelie:  We came up to the house and heard her screaming.  We thought maybe she was being attacked but then she comes barreling out with her two computers, in her pajamas, all singed.

Sto:  Yeah, she was totally blackened and in shock.

Kelie:  It was like out of a movie.  Then, I was like “I’m going in!” and they were like “No! You can’t go in!”  

Sto:  Then, the fire trucks came and their MO is destroy, so destroy the place… break all the windows, break all the walls.  They put the fire out but the house was just wrecked.  Kelli was homeless at that point.  We went back the next day and got her remaining stuff.

Kelie:  All of my stuff was in one large pile.  My computer was the only thing left standing.  Everything else was just a pile of rubble.  

Sto:  It was so crazy.  So, then we were gonna live at this new space and run the gallery in the front but then the landlord there decided not to let us rent it.  It’s a Curves Gym now.  It was a double whammy of tragedy.  In a way, it was total inspiration because it was like “Now, we REALLY have to do it because you never know what will happen.”  So, we ended up finding this space a few months later.  This was actually a better location, and cheaper, so it ended up kinda being for the best.

Kelie:  Originally, we lived in the back, in that small shoebox of a corner.

Sto:  It was like living in a jail cell.

Wow.  Did you guys have bunk beds or something?

Sto:  There’s a loft bed.

Kelie:  We’re a couple, so…

---

---

Gotcha.  For how long, now?

Kelie:  We’ve been dating for 6 years, in July.  I used to be in this circus in college and we traveled around.  The first time we met, we were at a BBQ in New York.  My friend said “Tell Sto about the circus” and I started talking about it and he was like “Did you ever perform in Richmond?” and I said, “Yes.”  He was like “I saw you!” and I was like “What do you remember?”  Then, he started telling me about this piece that I was in that he remembered, where I was a Victorian lady.  He said he always had a crush on me and the other dude in the performance because, essentially, we were wearing these Victorian dresses and we were attached to a table, having tea.  We would start to dance and it would get more and more like ruckus, and our skirts would fly up and we had this flowered underwear on…

Sto:  It was a crazy circus.  They performed at my school and I was totally blown away.  It was more like performance art; it wasn’t like a Barnum and Bailey circus.

Kelie:  It was more like we made sculptural objects and interacted with them.  It was more pathetic and poetic than high-flying.

Sto:  She had a bunny head and was like tap dancing, and someone would yank her off the stage.
[Laughs]

Sto:  It was really fun.  I didn’t meet them.  I saw them perform, and then they were gone.  I was always wondering about that circus because I never heard anything about them again.  They were called the Cloud Seeding Circus, from Gainesville.

Kelie:  We’ve been dating ever since [the BBQ].

Sto:  Yeah.  I was like “You’re that girl!”  So, we started hanging out.

And the rest is history…Did you guys move to New York together?

Sto:  No, we met in New York.  I had already lived here a few years.

You were both making your own art at the time, right?

Sto & Kelie:  Yep.

So there was this moment of like “We really should just get our own space and have shows…”

Sto:  Yeah, well you know, it was weird.  It was almost like “Why isn’t there already a space that we’re really into?”  I felt like there wasn’t really that one gallery that I really wanted to show at or hang out at.  There just wasn’t that space, you know?  It’s New York so you’d think there would be tons of spaces like that but there wasn’t.  There was the Chelsea thing but in Williamsburg, there really wasn’t a gallery I thought was our scene.  We were kinda waiting around for someone to do it and finally decided to just do it since no one else was.

Logistically, did you guys put away some money or did you talk to investors?

Kelie:  We got a credit card.  [Laughs]  We did all of the renovations ourselves so it probably cost us $5,000 in start-up money and another, maybe, $2,500 in deposits.

That’s pretty good.

Sto:  Yeah, pretty good.  And then, we knew a lot of artists already so we tapped into the people that we knew and the people that they knew.  We got art, zines, books and things to sell.

Kelie:  It was all consignment, so it was kinda like free in the beginning, in that way.