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by Jeanne Mozier

In July 2001, the latest facet of the Berkeley Springs art scene took root. Packs of art lovers careened around the center of town on a five-hour orgy that was billed as a Gallery Walk. They ate, they drank, they chatted and mostly they ogled a wide variety of art in three quite different locales.

The walk began at Mountain Laurel Gallery, an historic building on one corner of the downtown square. Its wrap-around display windows are filled with art and the second floor is a wearable art boutique. For the Gallery Walk, Mountain Laurel was showcasing the whimsical copper wire and stained glass creations of Kathy Hanby.

After an hour or so of sipping wine, the art crowd moved two blocks down the street for the opening of a special exhibit at the Ice House Gallery. called "Light", it was devoted to paintings, prints, glass and mosaics all addressing the effect of light in various media. Again there was sipping and nibbling and chatting and buying. Finally, the gang of art lovers capped their evening at Tari's Cafe and Gallery where newcomer Jerry Czacko was performing as "artist in the window," duplicating in acrylics the abandoned piano sitting outside the Castle on the hill.

Czacko is a good example of the latest wave in the history of Berkeley Springs, art town. An artist who has lived, studied and painted literally all over the world for the past three decades, he decided to leave his most recent home in the U.S. Virgin Islands and relocate to Berkeley Springs. Czacko's astonishing decision speaks to an almost indefinable magnetism that draws artists to a town where there may not be a college but where every artist can have their own favorite masseuse.

National recognition helps create "buzz" and more than a couple artists relocation here in the past three to five years came after initially discovering Berkeley Springsin the book The 100 Best Small Art Towns in America". While we like to boast that Berkeley Springsis one of only 17 towns that have been listed in all three editions of the popular book, it's the credibility that comes when people actually uproot their lives and choose to relocate here that matters. Berkeley Springsis an art town because we were rated an art town but there is art juice and a community here to earn and keep the listing.

Recognition keeps rolling in.

A grass roots, e-mail campaign polled enough votes that, in June, Berkeley Springsrated #18 of the top 25 art destinations in the United States according to the slick, upscale American Style magazine. We beat out luminaries like Atlanta, Key West and New Hope, PA. The polling of 26,000 artists by a sister publication earned Mountain Laurel a rating among the top 100 art retailers in the country. The WV Governoers Conference on Tourism in 2000 awarded the Morgan Arts Council (MAC) a well-deserved Community Development award. Toting up the reasons why Berkeley Springs is an art town finds a good portion of the list due to the activities of MAC.

MAC and the art it produces means more than paper awards in attracting folks. Kicking off its 25th year, MAC has been packing Berkeley Springs State Park with nationally known musicians every Saturday afternoon. The Ice House Community Theater, only a couple years old, can virtually count on selling out all its performances for two locally-written, directed and acted plays each year. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded MAC one of West Virginia's four Artsreach grants for a summer and after-school youth theater program in partnership with the Boys and Girls Club. Plans have been discussed and will soon be implemented for MAC to host an Eastern Panhandle Arts Summit as prelude to a Panhandle Arts Assembly.

The art boom has legs beyond MAC's activities. Critton Hollow String Band began its second 25 years of playing old time music and New World Theater created a new performance piece to mark the beginning of their third decade as performers. The Star Theatre, still one of the first stops any artist makes when they come to town, will begin its 25th year of showing movies this fall. Jam night at Tari's Cafe is celebrating its 12th year and is bigger and better than ever.

Jam night is one of the best public locales for spotlighting the art scene in Berkeley Springs. A painter and his printmaker wife share a table with the editor of the local newspaper who is the author of prize-winning mystery novels. His wife, in turn, designed costumes for the spring musical and is curating a special gallery show on puppets and masks as well as performing "Punch and Judy" as part of the exhibit. They wave to the stained glass artist grooving by the stage who has a special promotion created by the local travel council that takes visitors on a self-guided tour of his public glass art. A weaver leaning against the back of a jeweler's chair is served by the bartender who can claim most of the tee-shirt art in town as his own. One of the waitresses is a potter who creates and sells the fanciful mugs that you can buy along with the non-alcoholic coffee drinks she invented for Tari to serve in them. Her husband is a photographer who is curating the third of this season's gallery exhibits, one called provocatively, "Naked Country." The man wailing on the harmonica during the jam directs plays at the Ice House, an occasional bass guitarist also makes cabinets, and Tari herself can often be lured from the kitchen and onto the stage, guitar in hand. Half the people in the bar at any one time can point to their artwork offered for sale either on the Gallery dining room's walls or in Tari's Wild Women Fine Art shop.

After a quarter of a century of watching this happen, I still wonder why. I polled a bunch of folks to see what they think about the phenomenon of a tiny resort town making it so big in the art world. The basic answer groups are no surprise: location, tourism, cheap land, good press and other artists. It's not too isolated but still very rural," explains Jean Pierre Hsu, a jeweler with his wife Carol and one of the first to relocate in Berkeley Springs in the mid-1970s. "Artists form a close-knit community that's interested in you and your work," he said. J. W. Rone, artistic director of the New World Theater Company and Vice President of MAC hits on one of the most unique aspects of the arts in Morgan County and a real draw for sophisticated artists. "You feel that you're living where the arts are considered important, not just for personal reasons but also for the community's well-being." Rone said. Of course, there are those few folks in town who believe it's all the fault of G-- d--- Jeanne Mozier who brings all her weirdo friends here. Honestly, they usually don't become my friends until after they arrive.