Allyse and Mac Love have spent 10 years collaborating with local artists through their creative agency, Art x Love. Now, the married duo are giving Akron-area artists the opportunity to display their work in a new downtown gallery space.
In May, the Loves opened their new space at 35 S. Main St., just two doors down from their previous location next to the Akron Music Institute. Initially, they planned to continue with business as usual in the new location and use it as an office and as a studio for Mac Love, who is also an artist. But with almost double the room as their previous spot, they realized they had the resources to create a gallery.
“We weren’t really planning to change how we were operating,” Allyse Love said. “The idea just kind of happened, and we have such great relationships with artists. … We knew we wanted to have a space that people could display in, and now we have the space for it, and it just snowballed from there.”
Art x Love will host a free open house for the gallery Friday. Dubbed Forever Changes, the gallery takes its name from a previous gallery Mac Love ran in Connecticut in the early aughts — which in turn takes its name from a 1967 album by the band Love. At the original Forever Changes, Mac Love said, he sold enough art to pay for his master’s degree program. He attributed the success of that gallery to having artwork in an unconventional space.
“It was right across from a very popular restaurant in Connecticut, and it was above a deli. The people who came in and were buying the artwork, they were not art collectors. It was just everyday people who found something they loved and wanted to put it in their home,” he said.
The two were also inspired to create the gallery after reflecting on a 2024 visit to Asheville, North Carolina. The city’s thriving art scene strongly impacted Mac and Allyse Love. They would go on to curate an exhibit and create a card deck featuring the works of Asheville artists. Both helped raise money for the city’s artists who were affected by flooding from Hurricane Helene last year.
The success of Asheville’s artistic community pre-Helene showed them what was possible in Akron.
“We had come back from Asheville, North Carolina, where we had seen a lot of artists’ markets using commercial gallery spaces,” Mac Love said. “We don’t know of any spaces that exist like that here in Akron, and so we wanted to open up a commercial gallery space, but to make it very affordable and accessible for artists and anyone else who wanted to come in.”
Currently, 22 artists have work on display at Forever Changes. They hail from Akron, Cleveland, Green, Hudson and Hartville, among other cities. Artists can choose between free and paid display options. For a free display, Art x Love takes a 30% commission on any artwork sales. For a paid display, an artist pays $150 per month and keeps 100% of the proceeds. Artists can choose to display whatever they want, but all of it must be for sale.
“Our vision and hope is that artists who are emerging and have to start at a free display can sell enough work where it makes more financial sense to them to do the paid display,” Mac Love said.
With its new home in downtown Akron, Forever Changes is part of a neighborhood undergoing many changes. City officials and developers are pursuing redevelopment projects in an effort to once again turn downtown into a culture and entertainment hub.
“I’ve always heard stories of what the downtown experience used to be like: family-friendly, open at a lot of different hours, people who would travel great distances and spend the whole day in downtown Akron,” Mac Love said. “And my experience when I came here was that was no longer the case, and people were vocal about that. But it has changed a lot since the Main Street was redone, and we always wanted to be a part of that and to contribute to that.”
Forever Changes
35 S. Main St.
artxlove.com/forever-changes
Hours:
Tuesday – Thursday: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Friday: Noon to 7 p.m.
Saturday: Noon to 5 p.m.