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I Love Your Stories is a soulful conversation series hosted by artist and creative guide Hava Gurevich, where art meets authenticity. Each episode invites you into an intimate dialogue with artists, makers, and visionaries who are courageously crafting lives rooted in creativity, purpose, and self-expression.
From painters and poets to healers and community builders, these are the stories behind the work—the moments of doubt, discovery, grief, joy, and transformation. Through honest, heart-centred conversations, Hava explores how creativity can be both a healing force and a path to personal truth.
If you’re an artist, a dreamer, or someone drawn to a more intuitive and intentional way of living, this podcast will remind you that your story matters—and that the act of creating is a sacred, revolutionary act.
[MUSIC]
Welcome back to All of Your Stories.
I'm your host, Chava Gervich,
and today I'm joined by Seth Leary,
a multidisciplinary artist,
entrepreneur, and the creative force
behind Gallery 1624,
a tiny gallery with a big presence.
Seth's path is anything but linear.
From launching a print shop at 21,
to starting a school for gifted children,
to creating traveling museum exhibitions
seen across the country,
his career is a series of
bold experiments in
building something from nothing.
We talk about what it means to follow
curiosity instead of a blueprint,
how he approaches both art and teaching
with a sense of openness and play,
and why success for him is simply waking
up and wanting to keep going.
Yes, we also get into the story behind
the exclamation point in his name.
Seth, welcome to the episode.
Now, quick word from our sponsor,
and then we'll get
right back to the show.
When I started selling my art,
I had absolutely no idea how to actually
turn it into a business,
a professional business.
Then I came across art storefronts and
that was a game changer.
I've been a customer now for years,
and they've been
instrumental every step of the way
of helping me succeed.
I have a gorgeous,
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I have marketing tools and
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that is very supportive and teaches me
how to succeed as an artist.
Check them out, artstorefronts.com and
tell them how I sent you.
Welcome back to all of your stories. And
I have today's my
guest, Seth Leary. Seth is a
multidisciplinary artist, entrepreneur,
and educator. And we met
what, like two decades ago?
Yeah, probably about that. Yeah.
Yeah, we met when we were both working in
the museum service
industry. And I'm excited to talk
about that a little bit. But first of
all, Seth, welcome to
all of your stories.
Thank you very much. Lovely to be here.
And why don't we start with you just
saying a little bit about yourself and
we'll go from there.
Sure, yeah. Well, yeah, as you mentioned,
I mean, I consider myself an
artist and an entrepreneur.
My career path has been extremely
circuitous. I mean, I've
done a lot of things. Yeah,
it's interesting. I'm actually back in my
hometown, which I swore I would never do.
I'm in Springfield, Illinois, currently.
And that's where this
lovely 1931 English Tudor revival
house that I live in is located. And then
I was actually when I was first born,
my parents were renting a house maybe
half a mile from where
I'm sitting right now.
But my path has taken me all the way out
to Seattle and down to South Florida and
all of a sudden back here. Yeah, so my
father was, I grew up in a
household with a couple of
scientists. My father was a museum
curator. My parents were
still living, but they're,
of course, retired. He was a museum
curator at the Illinois
State Museum, which is just a few
minutes from here. Everything's just a
few minutes away in Springfield. So I
grew up kind of behind
at a museum. I got to see the, I spent
more time in the
laboratories and all that than I did
at wandering the galleries. So yeah, so I
got to see that and I got
to see what it was like to,
he was a museum curator and a scientist.
He's a paleobotanist.
That's really cool.
It was very cool. Yeah, it was very cool.
But he's also an artist. I
come from my grandmother,
wasn't, his mom was an artist. My dad's
an artist. And so I just kind of grew up
in this household of
creativity where it's like, oh, I'm just
going to make a thing. And
he's very handy. He's a good
craftsman. And so I learned at his knee,
ever since I got my first
toolkit for Christmas when
I was maybe five or six years old. And so
he taught me how to use
a handsaw. And I would
build stuff ever since I was little. It
was crazy the things I
was doing, taking high C
juice cans and using metal shears and
cutting them up. When I was
in third grade and making a
telegraph set, it was kind of an amazing
little childhood in many
respects. So there was always
wood and wire and metal and screws and
nails and stuff just hanging
around so I could just start
making stuff. And I think that sort of
gave me this sense of
there's no barrier to entry.
It's just like, hey, other people do it.
I'm just going to do a
thing. I mean, I haven't tried
surgery, haven't built an aircraft. But
it's just like, well, I don't know,
somebody did it. I might
as well, I can do that probably. So that
was sort of the mindset.
So I studied art education
when I went to the University of Illinois
many, many, many years ago.
But right after I graduated
college, that my first wife and I, we
started a copy shop, a print shop in
downtown Springfield.
Again, just right down the street from
where we're sitting right now.
And I'd always wanted, I'd always kind of
wanted to own a business in
downtown Springfield. And so
when, you know, she was, we did that
because that was a field that
she was in and whatever those
reasons. But anyway, we got, we just, we
just decided, we're like,
hey, we're going to do this.
And I was like, you know, how hard can it
be? You know, there's no overhead. You
know, it's just like,
we just rent the copier, we buy paper as
needed. You know, it's
like, it seems super simple. And
you know, and keep in mind, I'm 21 years
old, you know, so, you
know, I'm just a punk ass kid,
but I was like, you know, I, I was
blissfully naive, you
know, it was great not knowing,
you know, what I was getting myself into.
And I was like, this
can't be so hard. You know,
so we borrow each bar, we borrowed, what
do we borrow? We borrowed
like, I think we borrowed
like $3,000 from each of our parents. So
we had $6,000 to start a
business, which by the way,
folks, I learned what under capitalized
meant very early. So yeah,
don't try to start a business
with $6,000. No matter, no matter how
much enthusiasm you have. But anyway,
so yeah, I mean, we signed a lease on it
on a on a space downtown. I called up
Xerox. And, you know,
Becky was like, tell him we wanted Xerox
1090, which at the time
was their top of the line
duplicator, you know, the really big one
that you see, and what
used to be called Kinko's now,
it's FedEx office, but those giant
copiers, you know, and they thought we
were joking, you know,
and so they put this new kid on the
phone, I'm like, no, for
real, I want to rent that. Well,
I had to have my dad cosign the lease on
this copier, because I was
just some 21 year old kid
with no credit. And yeah, but we opened
this print shop in
downtown Springfield in like,
I don't know, in a matter of like, two
weeks, we just cobbled it
together. And I asked, you know,
the guy was like, you know, you need to
20, you know, power to run
this copier. I'm like, oh, yeah,
that's totally no problem. Yeah,
absolutely. We definitely have that. And
so then I called a friend
was an electrician like, hey, Ron,
hypothetically, let's say I needed a 220
circuit to run for to
power a copier. What would I need? You
know, and so he came down to my shop,
bless his heart. And
he was like, well, first, you need to put
an additional breaker box
in here, you know, and I'm
like, okay, breaker box, uh, and then you
need to I'm like, and what
cage of wire would that be? Uh,
uh, you know, and so he's telling me how
to do this. I'm like,
again, I'm thinking, hey,
people do this. Ron's an electrician. I'm
not an electrician,
but how hard can it be?
And so I bought all this stuff. And I
went back to this shop we had
just leased the day before. And
I shut off the power from the street, you
know, and I'm just cutting
holes and screwing in wires
and drilling holes in the wall and
running it all out to the room where we
were going to put this
machine, you know, put it, you know, put
the outlet in for it and
turn the power back on and
no power, no fires started, the building
didn't burn down, you
know, so I was like,
it's probably fine. And sure enough, a
few days later, we opened the
business without the copier,
by the way, we had people dropping off
orders, we're like, we're
going to get a print coppers,
you know, don't worry, when you come back
in a few days, your work will be ready.
And Xerox shows up, they put the copier
together, they hit
the power button, boom,
powers right up. I'm like, I'm an
electrician, add that to the resume. So
we did that for a few years.
And it was great. It was really cool. But
we grew too fast. Within a
couple of years, we were like
we were in the top 10 highest grossing
print shops in our
county. You know, we were doing,
I mean, this was keeping my, this was
like 1987, you know, and so
we were doing like a quarter of
a million years, quarter million dollars
in sales, based on a
$9,000 or a $6,000 investment.
I was we were in over our head, we were
under capitalized, I
quickly found myself underwater
with all these lease payments. So anyway,
after four, four and a
half years, it imploded,
unfortunately. I just I had, you know,
leveraged too much and just couldn't
couldn't keep it going.
So, so the marriage, the business, the
whole thing went bust. But I learned a
lot. I learned a lot,
everything's a learning experience. I
leave Springfield and move
move to the Seattle area,
beautiful Pacific Northwest. What took
you there? A girl, everything's always
about a girl. So if I
don't, if I if I'm vague, just assume
there's a girl involved.
Yeah, I've what can I say,
I follow my heart. I'm like that I follow
my heart anyway. So yeah,
so I went out there. And
keep in mind, I had this teaching degree
in my pocket, you know,
that I hadn't really used
very much yet. And so I get out there and
I thought I was going to
be an art teacher. Well,
they didn't have very many art teaching
positions. And so I started
writing a newsletter to some
friends, and it morphed into a business
plan. And suddenly, I'm
designing a business plan for a
gifted kids. Wow. Yeah, as growing up as
a gifted kid myself in a
school district, it didn't really
have, you know, back then, they didn't
have much, you know, for
kids like me, you know, and so I
mean, I remember in third grade, it's
like I was done with my work,
my teacher just having put my
head down on my desk, so I would be
quiet. So it's it's almost
like advocacy for your, your past
child self. Yes, exactly. You're right.
You're not wrong there.
Exactly right. It's yeah, I,
I kind of was advocating for my, for my
younger self. But by
then I had two stepchildren
who are, who are extremely capable kids
themselves, and had one on the
way. That was my progeny. And
so yeah, I was like, you know what, I'm
gonna open this one room
schoolhouse, you know, and so
I looked around at external places to do
it, and then landed on, well,
how about we turn our dining
room and our living room into a school.
And my wife was like, yeah,
that would actually, that's
actually a great idea, because then
you're not signing the lease
somewhere. So yeah, start, I
started a school. And turns out if you
have a teaching
certificate, you don't need a whole lot
of students. You can start a private
school. I started out with
our two kids plus, I think,
three or four paying students as well.
And so yeah, we I mean, I
could fit my whole school just
around one little table in our in our
living room. And it was
pretty awesome. I was pretty,
I'm really quite proud of the curriculum
model that I that I
developed for that. You know,
I advertise it heavily, the plan was, you
know, okay, let's try to
grow this and you know, maybe
have 100 students. The following year, I
ended up buying the house
down at the bottom of the hill
from us just a block away, I bought a
house and converted the
whole house into the school.
But it never had more than 14 students.
And part of the problem I found out was
parents expectations were, well, schools
truly must have more
students than that, you know.
And so I probably had 100 families call
up and be like, Oh,
your school sounds great,
but it's too small. You know, it's like,
well, if you would
just send your kid here,
then it wouldn't be as small, then it
would have a 15th kid and a 16th kid.
So you ran a private school for gifted
children. Yeah. And then what?
Oh, well, another recession hit. And so,
you know, it didn't take very many
parents to have to cut
back on their budgets for my school to go
from almost viable to
not at all viable. So yeah,
I had to stop doing that. And I put it
around with a couple of
other things. But then I thought,
you know, what do I really, you know,
what do I want to do, really,
you know, and I thought, hmm,
ever since I was a kid, you know, I just
thought, man, designing
museum exhibits would really be
cool. And I thought, well, I don't have,
you know, I don't have credentials to
like apply at a museum.
And also, even though my dad worked in
his entire career at
the Illinois State Museum,
he was always grumbling about it, you
know, and I thought, I think I don't want
to work at a museum.
Probably, I just don't want to work for
somebody in general,
because I haven't spent much of my
career working for someone. I own my own
print shop, I own my own
school. So I haven't had a boss
very much, you know, and I kind of like
that. And so I was like, I was like, how
can I, and I thought,
should I build my own museum? I was like,
no, I had a brick and
mortar business times two.
It's like, I'm going to spend all my time
worrying about HVAC
systems and blah, blah, blah.
I thought I don't want, I don't want
brick and mortar. I don't
want to work for somebody.
I can't convince somebody to just hire me
freelance. I thought I
just need to be able to
make exhibits without having a building,
you know, and without anyone telling me
what exhibit to make,
I want to do whatever I want. And I was
like, wait a minute,
traveling museum exhibitions.
That's a thing. I thought I could just
make whatever exhibit I want, and then
rent it out to people,
and no one can tell me what to do. And I
don't have to have my own museum.
So just for those who are listening who
have never heard of the term, because
I realized that I didn't know anything
about traveling
exhibitions and, you know,
what happens behind the scenes until I
started working in that
industry. So the way I like to
talk about it is people come to a museum
and they see the show. They
don't really think about, like,
how does the show get there? And if
you're a curator and
you're curating an exhibition,
it can take months, if not years, to put
together a show. But, you
know, the museum has shows
constantly. So what are you doing? What
are you doing in the
meantime? And one thing that museums,
most museums rely on are these temporary
exhibitions that are
already put together.
Everything's done. I think the term is
turnkey. Yeah, so ours was
two-dimensional photography
in frames. Very simple. Yours was
something completely different.
So yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's basically
the model. And, you know,
part of the beauty of it
supposedly, it looks great on paper. It
looks better on paper
than it does in real life,
it turns out. But on paper, it looks
great because you build
one product and then you
rent it out over and over and over again.
And in fact, my very first
exhibition did, you know,
the ROI, the return on my investment for
that was incredible. What was
it? So when I first had this
idea, hey, I'm going to make traveling
exhibits, I thought, okay,
well, what do I want my first one
to be? It needs to be really good. You
know, I want it to be something that
everyone's going to want,
you know, and it can't be dinosaurs
because everybody in their
sister has a dinosaur exhibit,
you know, so I thought, okay, it's got to
be super popular,
something that everybody in the
whole world wants to go see, but it's not
dinosaurs. And I think I
spent almost three years
just pondering this, you know, what can
be my topic? I was just
really hung up on what could it be.
And it hit me one day, I was like, wait a
minute, treasure. It's like, no one
doesn't like treasure,
you know, if you walk into it, you know,
it's like sort of the
opposite of being in a theater
yelling fire, you know, if you go into a
theater and yell treasure,
you know, everyone's going to
be excited, you know, they're all going
to want to go and they
don't know what it is, you know,
because treasure means a lot of things in
different ways to different people,
right? But you're not
going to find anyone who's like, no, I
don't want any treasure. That sounds
terrible. I wouldn't
want either. But so I thought, yeah,
treasure is treasure is going to be the
hook. That's going to
be the thing, you know, and the
exhibition is going to be about how
treasure, what treasure,
how treasure means so many different
things, you know, so I
designed it to be very modular,
partly so that it would work in a variety
of spaces, but also with
this sort of interesting
journey of topics. So the, you know, the
one that's sort of the most almost
esoteric and hardest for
most people to reach, but also the one
that grabs people the most,
perhaps is sunken treasure.
You know, people, you know, you know,
gold doubloons at the
bottom of the ocean, you know,
I mean, and pirates and treasure chest
that we see that in popular
culture all the time. Right.
But then I thought, well, also treasure
in popular culture in itself
is a topic. So I made an area
specifically about treasure in popular
culture, you know, with all
kinds of board games dating
to the 1930s, you know, just, you know,
games and movies and TV
shows and episodes of shows,
just treasure, treasure, treasure. It
just, you know, if you want
to make a board game and you
want to sell it, you just call it, you
know, Billy Bob's
treasure hunt, you know, because
everybody wants a board game that says
treasure hunt on it. So it's
when you say you're designing
an exhibit, you design an exhibition, it
starts with a concept. And
then if there's actually a
physical part to it, like you're
building, it's almost like
building sets. Right. You're
building sets. You're also putting
together educational
components, like maybe interactive
audio, video, tactile things.
The company was called NR...
And our energy exhibit is spelled NRG,
exclamation point, but pronounced energy.
Yes, energy. And how long
did you have that company?
So I started that around 2005. You know,
I came up, you know, of
course, I like to tell people,
you know, if you're going to start a
company, the first thing you have is
enthusiasm. The second
thing is a logo. If you have enthusiasm
and a logo, everything
else will figure itself out.
You know, it's like everybody's like, oh,
I have a business plan.
I'm like, yeah, but really,
a logo, a cool logo and enthusiasm are
really the best part. You
know, make yourself a business
card and the rest will follow. Yeah. So I
started it with just this
one idea for an exhibition.
Growing up with my dad, it's like I
learned how to do all kinds of things.
And so there's, I mean,
you know, brain surgery and aircraft
building aside, there's not
much I don't feel capable of
doing, you know, and if I don't know how
to do it, I'll just learn how to do it.
You know, so I, yeah, so all the things
in the exhibit, I came out
of my head pretty much. I
got, I bought, you know, I got 3ds max,
so I could learn how to do
make, make 3D models, computer
models and 3D animation. Yeah. So that is
when I met you,
coincidentally, art to art also started
in 2005. So how long did you have that
company and what happened
next? I mean, it's, I mean,
technically I still have it, but I no
longer have any inventory.
So I, the treasure exhibit,
I mean, I designed it on the computer and
made, you know, made flyers. I mean,
the first thing is make a logo, then make
a flyer, you know, and so
I would pitch, you know,
I would, I would go to conferences and I
would have flyers for
exhibits that didn't exist,
you know, but because of what's like, why
build it if no one's
going to rent it, you know?
No, that's that makes a lot of sense.
Yes. And so, I mean, it
was how I would vet it,
it's like, I mean, I thought the, if I
thought the idea was really
cool, I would come up with
a nice basic premise for it, you know, on
a flyer, I would say, Hey,
would you read this exhibit?
You know, and if no one bit, then I was
like, Okay, well, I guess I'm gonna,
you know, just file that flyer away, you
know, but, but if
somebody did express interest,
I was like, I, you know, go, you know,
this, this will be
available, whatever, you know,
a year from now. And then I'd be like,
Okay, well, I guess I got a year to make
an exhibit, you know,
and the treasure exhibit, I pitched it
for a long time, and somebody actually
wanted it like within
a few months, you know, I was like, Oh,
snap, I, I guess I'm
building an exhibit really fast.
This was up and it was all ended up being
a 5000 square foot
exhibition. So it's big.
But yeah, that was that was pretty
intense. And of course, like, two weeks
before the exhibition
scheduled the ship, I got appendicitis
and then pneumonia in the hospital. So
that was really hard
to get that one. I had to call in a bunch
of favors. I mean, I
was, you know, I had all my
friends coming in cutting boards and
stuff. I guess I guess
that's the that's the other side
of being an entrepreneur and being your
own boss is that it all
falls on you. Yes, exactly. Yeah,
I made a bunch of exhibitions over a
period of several years, but
none of them really performed
as well as treasure. And as you probably
have experienced, too, you
know, over the last 20 years,
what happens is that the marketplace gets
more and more saturated
with content, you know, because
we're all out there building and
designing exhibits. But
there's not more and more
finite number of museums, the number of
museums is not keeping
pace with the number of
exhibits. So, you know, everybody in our
teeny tiny little industry,
we started finding ourselves
more and more often with stuff that was
sitting on the shelves, you know, or in
my case in warehouses,
you know, and so around 2000 17 or 18, I
decided, you know,
I'm, I'm going to mothball
some of these exhibitions and and try to
work for somebody else,
you know, so I can have a
steadier income, because it just became
really, really, really up
and down, you know, with these
exhibits. So what brought you back to
Springfield? My parents were still here.
So I was like, where
can I go that's affordable? Yeah, it was,
it was it was it was a
series of bad circumstances that
got me back to Springfield. There was
definitely no nothing positive that
brought me back here.
Well, the one thing that you did do since
you've been back is
open your own gallery.
Yes. So let's talk about that. Yeah, for
sure. So I guess it was on Instagram, I
stumbled across this
this miniature art gallery up in the
Chicago area. And I was like, well, this
looks like what kind
of like one of those little, you know,
take a book, leave a book, the little
free mini libraries that
people have in their front yards on a
post. And I was like, this
guy has an art gallery on a post
in his yard. I'm like, this is so frickin
cool. And, and, you know,
in Chicago, Chicago is just,
you know, three hours from here. And my
daughter lives up there. So
last summer, I was like, man,
I got to go see this thing. You know, and
so I went up there visit
my daughter, I was like,
we're gonna go check out this teeny tiny
little art gallery. And it's
like, it's under two square
feet. I mean, it's really very small. And
like a big birdhouse. Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Like a big birdhouse.
And, and I was like, this is super cool.
I was like, I absolutely
need to do this. I was like,
this is right at my everything about this
appeals to me. It's an
art gallery. It's a project.
Miniature stuff is cool. Things in your
yard are cool. You know, it's like,
everything about this challenge seemed
good. So yeah, so I got my
sketchbook and I, I, I drew some
you know, drew some little sketches for
it. Take my word for it that
it's a bunch of little sketches.
Oh, that's so cute. So you designed, so
you're basically an
architect, you can add architect
to your resume. But you know, I wanted,
so I had a couple of goals. One is I
wanted it to resemble
here a little bit. So there's a, there's
an archway in the, in the
mini gallery that has like
this relief feature around it. And that
matches inside of my house.
And I have hardwood floors
in here. So I used a linoleum carving
tool and cut little grooves
in the board and stained it
and sealed it to make it look like the
little gallery has a
hardwood floor. Yeah. You, you
did document the building of the gallery
on your Instagram. I've
seen it. So anyone who's
interested, the links are going to be in
the notes below. And it's
really fun to see how this thing
came together. Yeah, I like that video.
I'm pretty pleased with it. It's a pinned
video. So it's right,
it's always going to be right there at
the top on the social media. And I'm
still pretty pleased
with how it turned out. I have, it has
little solar powered
lights. So it lights up at night
for several hours. It really looks cool
at night. I love how it looks
at night. Sometimes I just go
out there and like, man, this looks so
cool. So do you have people
that just kind of stumble by
and like, Oh, look at this. Or are, are,
do you have people that travel
specifically to come
to the gallery? More, more and more of
the ladders. So of
course, originally I live in a,
I live in a cute neighborhood. It's a
historic neighborhood. A lot
of people walking their dogs
here. I mean, a lot of people walking
their dogs. And so there was a lot of
foot traffic already in
front of my house. And so it was, it was,
it was pretty easy to, to
grab audiences by just putting
it there. Because, and I also, I put out
a dog, a dish of water for
the dogs that he'd stop anyway,
because their dog stops to drink water
and they're like, oh, now you're a
captive audience. Turn
around and look at the art gallery. But,
but as it's getting more of
a following on social media,
and more and more, I'm seeing people
drive up, they'll drive up
in their car. The other day,
four people got out of their car, they
walked across, they checked out the
gallery and they got
their car and they drove away. So I am
getting more and more
people who come specifically to
see the gallery. And that's very cool.
And the very, like the inaugural
exhibition was your own work.
Yes. Yeah. And I, I'm, I was really
pleased that I was able
to do that because I had,
I had been participating off and on with
Inktober, which is every
October. What's his name? Jason? I
don't care who's name. Anyway, there's a
guy and he puts
together a list of 31 prompts
for the month of October. And the idea is
just to motivate people to
do a little sketch every day,
little ink drawing. Yeah, I've heard of
it. Yeah. And so, and I
think it was in, in 2020,
I guess it was that I, I committed and
did the whole month.
Since then I've done like
one or two. And I did them small and I,
and my challenge for
myself was I did them just in
ink pen. There was no pencil sketch
first. I just drew an ink. So
every line was a commitment.
I love that little gallery. And it's just
such a, such a
wonderful concept. And it's so,
it looks so great. And I know the most
recent exhibition is an
oil painter from Montreal,
does these tiny paintings. And, and when
this episode airs, by the
time you're listening to this,
I will be, or already, already will be,
or about to have an
exhibition at this little gallery.
So the gallery is called 1624. Yep. Which
is basically your
address. Right. Yeah. So the one
Chicago is called gallery 1619. And that
was his address. And I was
like, I was like, Oh my gosh,
my house numbers five days to itself. I
have to call up that
because it was a very specific
reason for calling it that it was an
homage to gallery 1619 in
Chicago. Nice. I'm so, I'm so
grateful that you invited me to do a show
at this gallery. And an opportunity I
just started a couple
of days ago, I just started making the,
the little miniature
paintings and I'm going to be,
you know, posting about them as I go,
sort of trying to build up some momentum.
Actually, one of my friends who has a
beta, she has several betas,
but one of them is going to be
in the exhibition. He's a black beta fish
and his name is Darth
beta. And she's, she's going,
she promised to come down. She's in
Chicago. She promised to
come down and FaceTime me.
So right on. That's awesome. Yay. Well,
be sure to let me know
when she comes so I can say.
Yeah, I will. Absolutely. I hope, you
know, as you're talking
about all the different things
you've done and this, this gallery, it
occurred to me and, and
maybe it's, maybe it doesn't make
sense, but could this gallery become a
traveling gallery?
Potentially. Yeah. It actually, I mean,
it certainly could. Yeah. I hadn't
really, I hadn't really gone
there, but I also don't know
what the future holds in store for it.
So, but yeah, obviously
it's pretty darn portable
in, in many respects. So yeah, so it, or,
or it, or a version
of it. A version of it.
Could certainly travel and that would be
a hoot. And as, and
as I get more and more,
you know, have more and more artists who
have exhibited in it,
then there'll be sort of this
curation, you know, artists that I could
invite, you know, to circle
back and be part of a traveling
version. A traveling version. So what
does it, what is it
like being a gallerist?
It's a hoot. It's really cool. You know,
cause I didn't really, I
mean, I, you know, I entered
this with just like everything. I just
was like, ah ha, enthusiasm.
That's what I need. You know,
there was no real plan or strategy. You
know, it was a logo. Yes,
exactly. Aside from you though,
you know, the other people who've
exhibited so far and the other people
who've expressed interest
and people who have stumbled upon it, you
know, online, you know,
people reached out on Instagram
and be like, Hey, I've got a, you know,
I've got some work I could,
you know, could I do a show?
And I was like, well, let me see your
stuff, but probably, probably that. So
yeah, it's been fun to,
you know, to work with people. I mean, in
the young man up in, up
in Montreal and Quebec,
you know, he's super enthusiastic about
this. This is his very
first time having an art show,
you know, and, and so being able to, you
know, to work with him and,
and see him get his name out
there and then be on TV in Montreal.
Yeah, I saw that. I saw
that. Yeah, it's, it's very cool.
I worked in art galleries in Chicago and
in, in the Hamptons and in Manhattan.
And there's a big difference between when
you walk into a gallery, there's a
certain air about them
and when you start, when you start
working there, like you have these high
expectations and then
you get behind the scene and you realize
that in the back, there's
just like a person running it,
like, you know, seat of their pants, like
just kind of trying to make
things work. And, you know,
and that's, you sort of, that, that's,
that's the kind of spirit that I think
about when you describe
other businesses, like, you know, someone
else is doing it. It's, it's just a
person, you know, and
so you just do it. And it's, that's, it's
kind of like hacking an industry in a
way, at least to me,
it feels that way. It's sort of a
breaking down to this kind of hierarchy
or this, this sort of like
idea that we have about, you know, a
gallerist or, you know, a
museum curator or a principal of a
school or, you know, any of those things.
It's, it's just a person and, you know,
you can just do that.
Right. Yeah. Like you said, it's taking
away the barriers to entry, just be like,
no, just going all in. Yeah. Yeah. And
you also teach art. I do
teach. Yeah. Yeah. When I
came back to Springfield and, you know,
needed, needed some employment, I
thought, well, like,
I'm still a teacher in there. So, so I've
been mostly been substitute
teaching since last school
year and mostly K-5, but, and not just
art, but I mean, I do classroom stuff
right now. I'm, I have
a fourth grade class. As, as, as a child
who was a gifted child
yourself, who did not get the kind
of stimulation that you needed early on.
And as somebody who started
a school and believed so much
and I'm curious, like, what, what is your
philosophy on, you
know, young kids and art?
Yeah. I mean, with anything with
education, I feel like, you know,
whether it's for, with children or adults
is, you know, you have to,
you have to find that entry
point and meet them where they are. And I
try to do that with
exhibits too, is find a way,
you know, for people to spot themselves,
you know, for them to
have something to grab on to,
because if something is just too
unfamiliar, you know, it's hard, it's
hard to get engagement.
People need to see something, little
glimmer of something that
they recognize and understand,
like, okay, I know what that means. I
know what that is. I know
how to do that, you know.
And so really trying to understand your
people, your audience, your students, to,
To be at their level.
Yeah, to find, you know, to find their
level, to find what are
their strengths, what are their,
what are their interests. And so I try
to, you know, with teaching
art, you know, I try to do a
nice mix of not making stuff too
prescriptive, but also generally not too
open-ended, because,
because, you know, people approach
people, not everybody, but a
lot of kids and adults tend to
approach like artistic endeavors with a
certain amount of
trepidation, like, I'm not really sure
what to do, you know. And so if you give
them enough specific
instructions, be like, okay,
here's step one, do this, you know. And
they're like, okay, I can do
that, you know. I can trace
this and make a circle or whatever it is,
you know. But also, I
like to make sure that I have
opportunities for the kids who are just
going to run with it, you
know. And I've had kids, you know,
sort of, you know, take an assignment and
do it wrong, you know. But
it's like, I don't, yeah,
I'm not, I mean, I'm not into, you know,
trying to steer them back into the lane,
you know. It's like,
hey, as long as you're safe, physically
safe, as long as my
room's not getting destroyed,
as long as there's not a huge mess, you
know, it's like, it doesn't ever look
anything like what I
thought it was going to look like in the
beginning, because I just, you know, I
want you to have your
chance to, you know, to do your jam. And
that seems to work out pretty well.
And as a lifelong entrepreneur, what
advice would you give
someone who's just starting out
and is kind of trying to build their own
entrepreneurial business?
Yeah.
Get a logo.
Yeah, I do still kind of stand by, stand
by the, you know, be
enthusiastic and have, and make a
kick-ass logo is definitely a good
starting point. There
certainly is a lot of wisdom,
you know, to the idea that being able to
have a roof over your head
and food is important to you,
you know, then it's probably good to have
enough funds set aside, you
know, to be able to do that
for a year without your business making
any money, you know, because
if you're planning on like,
getting a draw from your business really
quickly, it's probably not
going to work out very well.
In my experience, it doesn't work out
very well. And in most, historically,
most people will tell
you it doesn't work out very well. But
yeah, the other thing,
but the other piece though,
just like with teaching art is really
figure out who's your customer and, you
know, and don't make
assumptions about what your customer
needs to what your customer wants, you
know, really try to,
you know, do your research and don't be
afraid or don't be
ashamed. People like, you know,
it'd be like, well, it seems really cool
to me, but turns out
nobody wants that, you know,
and so be a little flexible and be like,
okay, well, what do they
want? And you might have to be,
you might, your widget, you know, might
look a lot different than what you
thought it was going to do
when you first started. But, you know, if
you really want to make
it, you're going to have to,
you're going to have to kind of give the
people what they want to assert.
Final question for you, which is
something I like to ask
everyone with all your different
businesses and the different industries
that you've had a foot in
and your current projects.
What is your definition of success and
how has it changed over time?
Um, I feel like this is going to sound
really trite or
something, but, um, but I, I think,
I don't know. I think I feel successful
if I wake up in the morning
and I want to keep doing that,
you know? Yeah. You know, it's like, and
I mean, obviously it's
really helpful if it makes money,
but, um, and you can live off of it, but,
um, but even if it does,
if you don't wake up in the
morning and be like this, yeah, I'm glad
I'm doing this, you know,
then, then you got to rethink it.
That's absolutely perfect. I think almost
everyone that I've asked has given me
some version of that,
but no one has put it quite so
succinctly. So I actually really love it.
Definition of being successful is waking
up in the morning and
wanting to continue to do it.
Yeah. That's, yeah, that's, that's really
great. That's really
great. And I've been,
and I've been fortunate to have that
experience in a lot of
different avenues of my life. So,
and, uh, continue to, um, thank you. So
can I ask you one more
thing? Um, I've been, you know,
I've been in trust for a long time. I, I
was told that the
exclamation point in your name
is actually part of your legal name. Is
that true? It's true. Yes.
Yep. Um, yeah. I added that,
um, in February of 1980. Oh my God. Yeah.
So I was, it wasn't not
legally, but I added it to my name
February of 1980. So I was 14 years old,
uh, 14 and a half. Um,
and I added it. I was at a,
I was at a junior achievement function
out at the mall here in
Springfield. Um, and we had those
hello, my name is badges, the little
sticker. Hello, my name is.
Um, and so I wrote, hello,
my name is Seth exclamation point,
because just, I'm kind of a stickler for
punctuation. And so,
you know, and I was like, I'm not going
to go to period. So I wrote the
exclamation point after
hello, my name is Seth. You know, and
then I looked at him
like, Oh yeah, that's, that's
staying. I still have that named sticker
by the way. Yeah. Um, but
yeah. So ever since February of
1980, um, so that's what 46 years. Um,
yeah. So I, but I did finally, like on
the 30th anniversary
of it or something, I, I, you know, went
to the courthouse and, and
made it legal. Because I was
not, you know, I've been doing it for 30
years and not giving it up.
So yep, it's really there.
I it's for me, like even without having
talked to you this much,
it's always been sort of, uh,
underlying part of your identity. Yeah.
As like, you know, because
there's just so much that
tied to a name when it's that unique,
like that is, that is
something you do on purpose.
Yes. That is an intentional, that is an
intentional thing that
you added to your name
that, um, sort of underlines to me
optimism. Yeah. Yeah. I've had
people say to me things like,
you know, I want, they're like, I
wondered about that for
awhile, but now that I've met you,
I can see why it's there. Seth, Seth,
thank you so much. This was really fun.
And yes, and, um, thank you again for,
um, letting like inviting
me to have an exhibition
at gallery 1624. Um, the gallery has its
own website, which, uh, we
will have in the comments
and an Instagram account with lots of
updates and really fun behind the scenes.
Um, well, if you, so if you Google Seth
exclamation point, Leary, you're going to
get a bunch of stuff
because, and I'll be the only one. Um,
there aren't too many
Seth Leary's anyway, but I'm
the only one with the exclamation point.
So that'll help. So it's
really hard to not find me. You
really, you really have to not want to
find me to know. Like, uh,
so far I am the only have a
garbage, but if you Google, have a
garbage, you, I will come
up. And when all the links
are exhausted of my name, then it will
start showing you results
for my twin sister and then,
or my dad and, or my dad. Fantastic. All
right. Thank you so much.
You are very welcome. Have a
great rest of your day. And, um, I'm
excited for your show. I am
too. Thanks. Thanks again for
tuning in. That's our episode. I hope you
enjoyed it. And if you did,
please help us out by leaving
a review, a comment, subscribing, sharing
it with your friends, every
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