Roberta Glidden and Mike Gardner outside Ogden’s Gallery 25, whose cooperative model—and shared labor—has kept the gallery open for more than 23 years.

In 2003, when we first wrote about Gallery 25, it was a hopeful experiment on a still-scruffy stretch of Ogden’s Historic 25th Street. Dubbed “A Northern Utah Artists Cooperative,” the gallery had been founded the previous August, when a local merchant bought a building to open a frame shop and realized he didn’t need all the space. Nancy Clark and Joe D’Agnillo gathered seven other friends, and nine artists moved in together to see whether a shared gallery might help revitalize the street while giving them a place to show and sell their work.

Twenty-three years later, the frame shop is gone, the street is busy at lunchtime, and Gallery 25 is still there—one of the longest-running galleries in Utah, cooperative or otherwise. Rather than fade away after a couple of years, as most gallery experiments do, it has become an institution.

When Gallery 25 first opened, Ogden was just taking its first steps toward a 21st-century revitalization. “25th Street is the upcoming part of town,” gallery member Mac Stevenson said at the time. “Everything else seems to be declining.” The members of Gallery 25 were, in other words, taking a chance on the city’s future, though with measured optimism. At the time, Stevenson noted that Ogden was largely a middle-class town, without the kind of disposable income that typically sustains a robust visual arts scene. “There’s a few local people [who patronize us]… though the majority of them, especially in the summer months—when things begin to pick up—are people that come from out of town.”

Artwork fills every available surface at Gallery 25, including Mike Gardner’s work above the front door—an emblem of the gallery’s dense, pragmatic approach to showing as much work as possible.

Ogden’s revitalization is an ongoing process. Over the past two decades, downtown has seen a steady layering of new development and cultural investment—from the transformation of the old City Mall site into The Junction, to the gradual reimagining of the Ogden River corridor, to the emergence of arts-anchored projects like The Monarch and Ogden Contemporary Arts on 25th Street. Streetscapes have been rebuilt, new housing has appeared near the core, and long-range planning efforts have tried to stitch together Union Station, 25th Street, and adjacent neighborhoods into a more walkable whole. At the same time, Ogden has never fully smoothed over its rough edges: empty lots still interrupt the urban fabric, construction zones linger, and downtown can thin out quickly beyond a few active blocks. The result is a city that feels very much in motion—neither fully reborn nor stuck in decline.

That growth, however, has not translated neatly into a larger market for original art. Mike Gardner, a long-time member of Gallery 25, has watched the city fill in with new apartments and housing developments, but he remains skeptical that population growth alone changes buying habits. “You could look at all these new apartments and new housings and scratch your head about that,” he says. “Where are these people coming from? But they must be coming.” Over the past two decades, Ogden itself has only grown by 13 percent, but the surrounding Weber County population has surged by more than 33 percent. “Even though there’s more people here,” Gardner says, “their buying habits have changed.”

According to Gardner, a former high school art teacher, younger, more mobile residents are less inclined to invest in original artwork. “People don’t want original artwork. They want throwaway art,” he says. Renters, he explains, tend to move every few years, shedding possessions rather than hauling them from place to place. “You’re not going to buy original art until you own your home… until you feel like you have some security.” And the age of new home buyers is increasing every year. At the other end of the spectrum, older residents with money are often downsizing rather than acquiring more. “People my age who have some money in the bank, we’re giving stuff away, because we’re trying to downsize.” The result is a market squeezed from both ends—more people in town, but fewer inclined to buy original work.

Gallery 25’s survival has less to do with outpacing these shifts than with accommodating them. The gallery has never depended on rapid growth or high-margin sales. Instead, it operates on a lean, cooperative model that allows it to absorb fluctuation without collapsing under it. Monthly costs are low, labor is shared, and expectations remain realistic.

Roberta Glidden’s work hangs alongside the gallery’s structural elements, underscoring how Gallery 25 integrates art into a building shaped by age, repair, and use.

That structure is deliberate. Today, the co-op consists of 15 artist-owners—referred to internally as board members—most of whom have been with the gallery since its early years. They occupy the main floor, pay monthly rent, staff the gallery themselves, and vote on how it is run and who else exhibits. In the upper and lower levels, additional artists rent spaces month to month. Board member Roberta Glidden says she pays less than $150 a month for her space, and the sale of one good painting will cover her rent for a year. The members keep costs low by handling many repairs of the repairs on their  themselves, partly out of necessity and partly out of pragmatism. “We don’t want to make trouble for the landlord, because we have a hell of a deal here,” Glidden says.

Gardner, also a board member, points out another advantage of the co-op structure. “This gallery is really kind of unique, because it’s not owned by a gallery owner, which takes 40 to 60 percent,” he says. At Gallery 25, the commission is 30%, similar to nonprofit spaces and designed to keep the building running. “We don’t make money,” he adds. “That’s kind of just to keep the lights on.”

Part of the reason the model works is simply that artists need places to show their work. “We have so many artists and just not enough galleries to show even a sliver of them,” Glidden says of Utah’s art market. The cooperative model spreads risk and responsibility across many people rather than concentrating it in a single owner. Pricing reflects that ethos. “We really are at the bargain basement [of] original art galleries,” Glidden says. “Compared to Salt Lake, sure, definitely. Compared to Jackson—oh, it wouldn’t even come close.” Few members expect to make a living solely from sales at the gallery. “I’d be in deep trouble if I relied on my income here,” she admits.

The basement level at Gallery 25 provides additional exhibition space for member and rental artists, reinforcing the cooperative’s philosophy of showing as much work as possible rather than limiting display to a single curated room.

Paintings, glass, and sculpture coexist closely at Gallery 25, reflecting the cooperative’s belief that visibility matters—even when space is tight.

But the value of the gallery isn’t measured only in dollars. “It’s such a privilege to be part of the street and to be part of the local galleries and the art scene,” Glidden says. For many artists, visibility matters as much as sales. “If it wasn’t getting shown, it’s not getting shown.”

Over time, Gallery 25 has become more than a shared retail space. Its members describe it as a kind of family—one defined by artistic life rather than social obligation. “We’re really family,” Glidden says. “I mean, we know about each other and we care about each other.” They step in to adjust responsibilities when a member is going through struggles. The group spans a wide range of personal backgrounds, but what brings them together is art. “I think half of us are LDS, for example, and I myself am Episcopalian,” Glidden says. “But I couldn’t even tell you which are which. We just know each other very deeply, artistically, within this circle.”

Affordable prints and originals sit side by side at Gallery 25, accommodating changing buying habits while keeping art accessible.

While Glidden discusses the gallery, Gardner drifts in and out of the conversation, greeting visitors and quietly doing what co-op members have always done at Gallery 25—staffing the space, tending to the building, and keeping things moving without much fuss. At one point he shrugs and sums up one of the gallery’s less tangible benefits: “It’s my social. Forty dollars a month for friends.”

Most of the gallery’s board members are now older. “The board members—we’re all at least in our 60s, I think,” Glidden says. The question of what happens next is unavoidable, even if it isn’t urgent. Unlike galleries that hinge on a single owner or vision, Gallery 25 has already built a mechanism for renewal into its structure. “We have people downstairs who are renting spaces monthly, who would love to step up as board members,” Glidden says. Change, when it comes, may be incremental rather than dramatic—new members replacing old ones, responsibilities shifting rather than disappearing.

Since Gallery 25 opened, many cooperative and artist-run spaces in Utah have closed. Commercial galleries continue to open and shut their doors after a few years, often undone by rent, staffing, and the unevenness of sales. Against that backdrop, Gallery 25’s persistence feels increasingly significant—not because it offers a triumphant model or a scalable solution, but because it demonstrates another way of lasting, one grounded in shared responsibility, modest expectations, and the belief that a physical place for art is still worth maintaining.

Mike Gardner, right, talks with visitors as they browse Gallery 25’s main gallery.

Gallery 25 is located at 268 25th Street in Ogden and is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Applications are available in person at the gallery or by contacting curator David Crowther at (801) 725-9701. Additional inquiries may be directed to gallery25utah@gmail.com.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.