Galerie Marie: Kimberly Camp's South Jersey Homecoming

Her 45-year career in the art world has taken Kimberly Camp from South Jersey to the Pacific Northwest and everywhere between and beyond.

In that time, she’s acquired a collection—of experiences, filtered through the lens of her own work; of accolades, personal and professional; of encounters with artists as lauded as Christo.

Now Camp is bringing all that to Collingswood with Galerie Marie, a Haddon Avenue storefront named for her late mother and packed with works she’s either curated or created herself. 

Camp, a Camden native who has also directed Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation and the short-lived Experimental Gallery art incubator at the Smithsonian, says her latest endeavor is something of a homecoming, and a timely one at that.

“It seems to me that this community, culturally, visual art-wise, is right about to explode,” Camp told Patch. 

With a nod to some of the existing arts businesses in town (Arts Plus is “wonderful” and Canvas Mixers is “a great idea”), Camp says Galerie Marie invites curiosity-seekers to “stop in because they don’t know quite what they’re going to find.

“A lot of things in the gallery are things from my own personal collection that I’m selling,” Camp said. 

“Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

Affordable, everyday art 

Many of the items are priced to go, starting around $10 and averaging between $300 and $500. Camp said she wants her work to be affordable, “so that everyday people can buy art,” bridging the gulf that sometimes exists between deep-pocketed collectors and mere aficionados.

The work at Galerie Marie “has to be really good-quality stuff that customers are going to be happy having,” Camp said; focused on “visual interest and diversity.

“There are things here from Asia, from West Africa and South Africa, Alaska, Thailand,” she said; a bronze Ganesha statue that she bought in Washington state "to clear some obstacles."

Enhanced giclee prints from Colombian artist Alberto Becerra and large photographs by Lonnie Graham hang alongside her own colorful rendition of jazz musicians at Preservation Hall in New Orleans. 

There are mouse dolls dressed as kings and queens, glass vessels etched with winged cats; even a stained-wood motorcycle from Japan.

“There’s a lot of texture in the art world,” Camp said. “There should be something for everybody.

'I want people to feel comfortable'

“Sometimes galleries take themselves a little too seriously,” Camp said. “I don’t have to prove myself to the art world. I’ve already done that.”

“I want people to feel comfortable when they come in that they can ask questions, and have an open mind and be willing to listen and learn.”

Accessible work is especially important, Camp said, in a time when “art has become a playground for the rich and famous and the elite," producing “work that is so self-centered that other people are not comfortable trying to enter into the dialogue.” 

“If you’re not engaged in the community, then all you do is end up talking to your navel,” Camp said. 

“Does it have to speak to the masses? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t," she said. “But it should have something to say.”

“The beauty of learning to love Albert Barnes,” she said, “was about building a better democracy for people by learning how to see.”

The public opening of Galerie Marie will be Saturday, July 13, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at 709 Haddon Ave. in Collingswood. Light refreshments will be served during Second Saturday hours.