Priscilla Fowler Fine Art, which has closed after eight years, left its owner in debt—and doubting the viability of the Las Vegas Arts District.
LAS VEGAS, NV—When Priscilla Fowler relocated to Las Vegas from Denver, Colorado, in 2016 to open an art gallery that bore her namesake, she thought, “How hard can it be?”
Harder than one might think. On July 1, the gallerist announced the closure of Priscilla Fowler Fine Art, citing “serious financial problems” among health problems and other personal reasons in an email. The gallery officially closed its doors on July 5.
Over the course of the gallery’s eight-year tenure in the Arts District, Fowler worked with as many as fifty or sixty artists, the majority of them local. “As far as emotions, I’m mostly just pissed off,” says Fowler of the closure. “The rents keep going up.”
18b, the Las Vegas Arts District, is located just over a mile north of the Las Vegas strip. Named 18b for the roughly eighteen-block area originally demarcated in the 1990s, the district has grown past its original parameters.
Since opening in 2016, Priscilla Fowler Fine Art occupied four different locations in the Arts District, including the South Main Street location it filled at the time of its closure. When she opened the gallery, rent was around $1,500 a month. By this year, rent in her final location was almost $4,000 a month for a 2,800-square-foot space, more than doubling in less than a decade. According to Fowler, the gallery’s total monthly operating expenses, including rent, utilities, and payroll were about $10,000.
“Nobody can afford that, least of all art people,” said Fowler, expressing frustration that the City of Las Vegas has not done more to mitigate the expense of running a business in the district. “I underwrote the gallery with my own savings for eight years. […] I’m no spring chicken—that was my retirement savings… I am in a terrible amount [of debt]. No way I can ever pay it off. It’s disgusting. I won’t even say the number. I could lose my house. I could declare bankruptcy.”
Nancy Good, artist and founding gallerist of Core Contemporary, said she opened her gallery outside of the Arts District in 2018 in order to avoid the expense of renting there. Core Contemporary is located only six minutes from the Las Vegas Arts District itself, but even this distance considerably reduces rental costs. While Good’s lease agreement prohibits her from sharing her exact rental rate, she told Southwest Contemporary that she pays between $1-$1.25 per square foot for the 2,200-square-foot space each month.
While Good acknowledges that the City has historically supported the district through marketing and beautification measures, she feels more could be done to protect lease rates, increase grant access, and provide financial incentives to arts businesses like those offered previously to other types of businesses in the district.
“Locals joke that it’s the brewpub district,” said Good. “Developers start seeing the value of it, and then they start buying the properties. And then the artists and creatives are priced out, right? You know, a tale as old as time.” According to the 18b website, the Arts District features almost thirty arts-related businesses, with around a third of those housed in The Arts Factory warehouse, more than fifty food and beverage vendors, and nearly eighty other vendors offering other shopping and services.
The City of Las Vegas is currently working to address complaints and financial challenges like these. Since 2022, the City has employed Jamie Giellis, Denver-based president of consulting firm Centro who has helped address challenges in Denver’s River North Arts District and numerous arts districts across the country.
In Las Vegas, Giellis has put together a steering committee of local artists and business owners in the Arts District to identify what improvements should be made. The steering committee has begun taking steps to set up a Business Improvement District in 18b. If established, property owners in the BID would be assessed fees to create a fund overseen by a committee separate from the City of Las Vegas. That BID committee would then decide how the funding should be used to improve the district, whether that be through street cleaning, trash removal, or something even more directly impactful to art galleries. Whether or not that committee would offer membership to arts businesses that pay rent in the Arts District is to be determined.
“If [the BID committee] wanted to decide to subsidize galleries to keep them in the Arts District, that would be up to that committee,” said Maggie Plaster, director of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs for the City of Las Vegas. However, as many gallerists do not own their gallery properties and instead rent them from landlords, Plaster said it would be up to the property owners—who would be the ones paying the BID assessment fee—whether they would pass that cost on to the gallerists renting their spaces.
The City of Las Vegas also intends to provide more affordable living and working space for artists through ArtSpace, a nonprofit housing developer that has facilitated affordable housing for creatives in cities across the country, including Reno.
Plaster pointed out that while the Arts District is not receiving any direct financial support from the city at this time, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the city council allocated $600,000 in funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to local arts agencies. Plaster estimates that half of that amount went directly to artists in 18b.
“We would like to see more grant programs like that,” said Plaster. “We are working with a local group right now with the hopes of establishing a granting agency in Southern Nevada that’s separate from the City of Las Vegas because we know that funding is the number one problem for artists.”
In the meantime, Priscilla Fowler said she is considering opening a virtual iteration of Priscilla Fowler Fine Art Gallery. When asked what her vision for this new online phase of the gallery looks like, Fowler said, “Ask me in about three months.”
Disclosure: Nancy Good is a member of Southwest Contemporary’s Community Editorial Advisory Board.