WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — For the past few years, Ben Finer and Bevan Dunbar have been mulling over what they would want an art gallery to look like.

At first, they considered opening a gallery in a room of their Hartford Village apartment, which would have been homey. How, they asked themselves, do you encourage patrons to engage with the art, to spend time looking at and living with it?

“We thought a lot about traditional galleries and what makes you uncomfortable going to them,” Dunbar said. It’s just you and the art and bare walls, with a gallery sitter occasionally looking at you over their glasses.

Then their landlord in Hartford Village, Kim Souza, told them about a space opening up on Gates Street, and they very quickly signed a lease.

Kishka Gallery & Library, which opens with a reception from 5 to 8 this evening as part of White River Junction’s First Friday arts events, is at once unlike a traditional gallery, and also very much in the tradition of Upper Valley visual arts spaces.

By mixing art and books, Finer, who grew up in Norwich, and Dunbar, who is originally from Delaware, are trying to encourage viewers to take a moment to connect what they’re seeing on the wall to what inspires the artist. To that end, each artist is asked to choose a few books, which the gallery goes out and purchases.

In the case of the inaugural show, Contoocook, N.H., painter Lucy Mink, whose colorful and cleverly massed and crowded abstractions are on view at Kishka, chose books that appear not to resemble her own work at all.

Jay DeFeo and ‘The Rose’ describes DeFeo’s monumental painting The Rose, which she worked on from 1958 to 1966 and which contains about 2,000 pounds of paint.

The other two books Mink chose are Sketch Work, drawings by Native American artist Jim Denomie, and The Plant That Heals May Also Poison, the catalogue for a retrospective of work by Ree Morton.

Books encourage contemplation and research, and Dunbar and Finer said they plan to offer coffee and tea to visitors who’d like to sit and look, as if the art is on a living room’s walls. Kishka will be open Thursday to Sunday, noon to 8, a time that will overlap with the audience arriving at Northern Stage, across Gates Street.

After putting out a call for book donations, about 1,500 books have come in the door. They reside on shelves Finer built at his parents’ house in Norwich.

A huge number came from Patrick Fultz, of Woodstock, Finer said.

As with any library, the books will be on loan, one or two at a time, Finer said.

Its operators are registering Kishka as a nonprofit, which will make grants and tax-deductible donations available to them as revenue sources. They also plan to ask people who want to take books out to pay a membership fee.

Libraries are part and parcel of the way art is presented in the Upper Valley. AVA Gallery and Art Center added its Johnson Sisters Library during its 2007 renovation, and the Center for Cartoon Studies opened its Schultz Library in 2010.

For years, the most underused arts space in the area has been the reading room at the Main Street Museum. The high-ceilinged room in the former White River Junction firehouse the museum calls home, its walls painted a dark brown, contains a bewildering array of materials, ranging from maps and Vermont history books to art books to collections on culture. On top of a cabinet is a glass bowl half full of toy soldiers, like inedible dark green candies.

The museum, which will hold a low-key reception Friday evening, is open by appointment.

The museum’s welcoming atmosphere was formative for Finer and other artists who grew up in the Upper Valley, and it has rubbed off on him.

Finer emerged from art school into the Great Recession and has battled to make a living as an artist.

He and Dunbar moved to Hartford Village in January 2019, when he became director of the Aidron Duckworth Museum, which closed in October 2019.

Since then he’s been freelancing. Dunbar works as an administrator at Dartmouth College.

The gallery is a joint venture. Dunbar and Finer often put up artists who were visiting the Duckworth, and the Meriden museum was in the late artist’s former home.

Kishka is a quirky space. Finer was getting ready to buy vinyl flooring to put down over wall-to-wall carpeting, but wasn’t happy about it.

He pulled up a piece of carpet and found a vintage linoleum floor meant for gallery life.

“We’ve had passersby say, ‘Oh my god, look at that floor,’ ” Dunbar said.

And the gallery’s name also makes a statement. Across Eastern Europe, kishka means, roughly, “sausage.” Art-making isn’t always pretty, regardless of how nourishing the end result might be.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.

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