About Formato Fine Arts
Formato Fine Arts is a women-led contemporary gallery at 100 West Main Street in Wytheville, Virginia. We show original work by artists from across Appalachia and the wider country, alongside handmade goods from independent makers, in a building that used to be a jail.
The Building
Our home is one of Wytheville's oldest structures, built as the original courthouse and jailhouse. The early brick and limestone are still here. After sitting vacant for years it was restored with care, keeping its character intact rather than smoothing it out.
It is now a working building. Artists rent studio space here and keep the gallery open while they work, which means someone is usually here beyond our posted hours and you may walk in on somebody mid-painting. Studio photographer Madeline Lenore works out of the building.
How it started
Lily Formato opened the gallery in 2018, at eighteen years old.
She had finished high school, taken a job at Cracker Barrel, and spent her free time helping her father renovate a historic building downtown. Standing in it, she saw what it could be, talked him into letting her try, and put her savings into it. The first sign on the door read Local Artists & Sellers.
Eight years later the gallery carries work from more than thirty artists and studios, hosts exhibitions and openings, and runs lessons and classes in the same rooms.
Why we do it
The point of this gallery is to make art accessible to people in Southwest Virginia.
That means original work you can afford, on a street you already walk down, explained by a person rather than a wall label. It means a $25 print and a $3,500 painting in the same room, and nobody made to feel they are in the wrong one.
It also means connecting artists to each other. Working artists in this region are often isolated, and a gallery is one of the few places where a potter in Wythe County, a printmaker in Chicago, and a painter who has never shown anywhere end up on the same wall.
What we show
The collection is built on what Lily actually wants to look at. Most of our artists are Appalachian, and the rest come from Chicago, from travel, and from the people she has met making work elsewhere. Painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, ceramics, fiber, and performance.
The work is not decorative by default. Our artists make paintings about mountaintop removal and rural poverty, prints of Appalachian folklore, clothing designed to push the body toward something other than human, abstract work on raw canvas, and hand-bound brooms made by traditional technique. It sits in one room on purpose. We program with an emphasis on women and female-identifying artists, and we work with emerging artists as readily as established ones.
How We Work
Every artist here has a name, a studio, and usually an address within driving distance. We can tell you who made a thing, where they work, and who they are. Artists are paid on consignment. Shipping and crating are billed separately so they never come out of an artist's share. Nothing in the gallery was ordered by the pallet.
Lily
Lily Formato is a painter and ceramicist as well as the gallery's founder and director. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting and ceramics, and is a graduate of The Second City's Grad Revue improv program in Chicago.
Come see us!
100 West Main Street, Wytheville, Virginia. Thursday through Saturday, 11 to 3.
Sunday through Wednesday by appointment.
Someone is usually here beyond posted hours, so it is always worth stopping by.
