HANOVER — In May of last year, Kyle Timothy Blood was doing some spring cleaning at his home on Prince Edward Island.
At the time, he and his husband, Dean Perry, were considering moving back to the U.S., and thinking about where they might land.
He interrupted his cleaning — scrubbing baseboards, he said — to join a call with some fellow Dartmouth College graduates, including some close friends.
“I got off the phone and went back to scrubbing the baseboards and that’s when I had my “Aha” moment,” Blood said in an interview. “That’s where I want to be.”
A year later, after he and Perry had visited friends in the Upper Valley, he signed a lease for a space in Hanover’s Nugget Arcade to open an art gallery. Kyle Timothy Fine Art has been open for a few weeks, and holds a grand opening from 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 23. The opening marks the return to Hanover of a private fine art gallery for the first time since Spheris Gallery closed in 2014.
In addition to wanting to be back in the Dartmouth community, he also plans to represent artists who graduated from the college.
“The mission of the gallery is to be a home gallery for Dartmouth alumni working in the arts,” Blood said. The gallery also shows works by artists who didn’t attend Dartmouth, and all of the art at Kyle Timothy Fine Art, abbreviated as KTFA, will have to meet a high standard, he said.
The airy, open space at 53 South Main St., already includes works by five Dartmouth graduates, including works in metal by Margaret Jacobs, former exhibition coordinator at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon.
Blood and his 12-year-old Cavapoo, Tucker, greeted visitors who stopped in during an interview Monday afternoon, including two women visiting from Blood’s native state, Maine. He grew up in Skowhegan and credits Dartmouth with opening the world to him.
“The biggest I could dream was becoming a lawyer and living in Portland,” he said. “Dartmouth really gave me the life I have today.”
He studied French, which took him to Toulouse, in southern France, as a sophomore, early for study abroad. He took his first classes in the history of art and architecture there, then continued them back in Hanover. After graduation, in 1990, he went back to France on a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Sceaux, just south of Paris.
From there he worked on the editorial side of magazines in New York, including Forbes, Country Living and Martha Stewart Living. Since 2005, he has run Kyle Timothy Home, a high-end residential interior design company based in East Hampton, N.Y.
He particularly enjoys designing second homes, which the families he works for tend to keep for far longer than their primary residences.
“The vacation homes are happy places,” he said. They tend to be “legacy homes,” passed down to children. “They’re not selling their beach house,” he added. “They’re selling their big, formal house.”
He and Perry, who’s from the Toronto area, were married in 2016. They bought a summer house in Prince Edward Island, and by 2018 it became their primary residence. The coronavirus pandemic effectively halted Blood’s work in New York, so he shifted his focus to designing interiors on PEI.
He became a gallerist there almost by accident. He was friends with the owner of the only gallery in Charlottetown. When she could no longer continue, her family asked Blood if he’d be interested in taking it over. “Ten days later, I owned an art gallery,” he said.
That was in 2024. He credited Dartmouth with giving him the spirit to see the opportunity.
“This is the Dartmouth education,” he said. “You don’t think, ‘I can’t do that.’ You think, ‘How can I do that?’ “
He revamped the gallery, now known as Details Fine Art Gallery, and it is “breaking all records,” he said.
Not everything was rosy in the Canadian Maritimes, though.
“We were finding that, post-COVID, we didn’t have a strong community on the island,” Blood said. “And I wanted a footprint back in the States.” To get to New York, where he still has design clients, required either a 16-hour drive, or a day’s travel on planes.
This led to his spring cleaning epiphany, which led to the gallery. The dramatic growth in Hanover, particularly in the college’s Arts District, and at places such as AVA Gallery and Art Center, were encouraging signs that an art gallery would do well here.
There’s more than enough room for a new gallery in the Upper Valley, Lars Hasselblad Torres, executive director of AVA, said in an interview.
“I’m excited about a new actor in what we think of as the ecosystem” of visual art, he said. It’s a different approach from AVA, which is designed to be a big tent for artists. Getting into a gallery like Kyle Timothy Fine Art is the “next kind of level up,” Torres said.
Blood and Perry, who’s a pianist and organist, are still living on Prince Edward Island and staying with friends locally. “I need to make sure this business is going to be viable before major decisions are made,” Blood said.
He sees Kyle Timothy Fine Art as the capstone of his life’s work.
“What I’ve learned from the other gallery is I want a certain level of work, to be consistent,” he said. But he also wants to have a range of work at a range of prices that makes it possible for everyone to find something beautiful.
One early patron has stopped in several times, just to look at the same painting. That’s also what a gallery is for. “I call it a visual vacation,” Blood said, “to come in here during a lunch hour and look at something beautiful.”
For more information, go to kyletimothyfineart.com.
Wherefore art thou?
The Chelsea Funnery, a long-running summer theater program dedicated to area youth and the works of William Shakespeare, performs “Romeo and Juliet” at 6 p.m. on Friday and at 4 p.m. on Saturday on the field behind the Tunbridge School (or in Chelsea Town Hall in case of rain).
The joy of these performances is that the roles shift from one person to another, so there will be multiple Romeos and Juliets, across a range of ages, 13 to 18. Admission is by donation, so give generously. This is a small nonprofit that provides scholarships to teens who otherwise might not be able to participate.
For more information, go to thechelseafunnery.com.
