Good things come in small galleries, Pamela Huffman has learned. The mixed-media artist is a big fan of the tiny works that are free for the taking from the Free Little Art Gallery in Arlington’s Dominion Hills neighborhood.
As one of the gallery’s repeat patrons, Huffman has a growing collection of little works on display in her Falls Church home.
“I tried to make it super beautiful. I put some shells and some candles and some crystal,” Huffman says. “There’s something about this tiny art that makes you want to just create these beautiful little spaces that honor them.”
These are the stories that make gallery founder Stacey Schwartz smile.
Ideally, Schwartz says, she would photograph each miniature work donated to her dollhouse-size gallery post it to the gallery’s Instagram account, which has almost 400 followers. But sometimes the art is adopted before she gets the chance. That makes it tough for her to know just how many works of art actually move through the little display space.
Still, the constant turnover is a good sign. “Art’s being taken, art’s being created just for the gallery,” says Schwartz, who set up the petite trove of creative works in her front yard last July. “I did this because I wanted to put something back out to the community…. I get stopped on the street by people thanking me for it. I also get a lot of positive comments on social media from people who maybe can’t participate locally, but they just tell me how much they love seeing the pictures of the art.”
The gallery works much like the now ubiquitous little free libraries, which encourage people to leave and take books. Schwartz doesn’t require trades, and she’s flexible about the size of donations, within reason.
After all, the Free Little Art Gallery (FLAG) is so named because the gallery itself is small. Perched on a pedestal, the house-shaped container measures 18 inches long, 18 inches wide and 14 inches deep. Most artwork is no bigger than 4-by-4 inches, although one ambitious donor contributed an 11-inch-tall shadowbox. The smallest piece to date was a postage-stamp-size abstract painting of a cloud on a 2-by-2-inch canvas by Cardinal Elementary School art teacher Stefanie Simmerman.
“I’m never going to say no” to donations, says Schwartz, a digital strategist at George Mason University’s Center for the Arts and Hylton Performing Arts Center in Manassas. She also co-chairs the board of Arlington’s Educational Theatre Company.
The gallery “is for everyone,” she says. “I never want anyone to feel like they can’t contribute.”
To date, the display space has showcased diminutive oil and watercolor paintings, miniature pottery, embroidery, and even a 3D printed likeness of a gaming console designed by the oldest of Schwartz’s three sons.
She’s decorated the gallery like a home, with wood floors, a fireplace and even two tiny inhabitants that Instagram followers have named Clare and Don. (The dolls are not up for grabs.)
Schwartz checks the gallery at least once a day for new items, and artists often contact her to say they’ve dropped something off. If they provide their name and contact information, she includes that in an Instagram post so followers can check out more of their art.
For professional artists, FLAGs can be an important marketing tool in that an art-lover who adopts a tiny piece of free art might later reach out to the artist to commission something bigger. That dynamic was the focus of Schwartz’s capstone project on FLAGs as a graduate student at GMU, as well as the genesis of this project. (Her husband gave her the gallery as a gift when she graduated with a master’s in arts management last May.)
She started her studies during the pandemic, which is also when a Washington Post article about a thriving FLAG in Seattle caught her eye. As the idea caught on, her interest grew.
“I saw more and more [FLAGs] starting to pop up,” says Schwartz, who has worked for arts and culture organizations, but is not herself an artist. “During the pandemic, they were really community-building. Then there was a shift to it really being a marketing tool for artists. I feel like the movement has changed in a good way. It’s catching on and getting more attention.”
Thanks to social media, Schwartz’s FLAG is now known well outside of Arlington. In less than one year, she’s received tiny art contributions from Australia, Chicago, Philadelphia and both U.S. coasts. “A lot of artists are starting to mail pieces all over to free little art galleries, which is so smart,” she says. It’s a way for their names and work to get noticed in multiple locales all at once. “I’ll look at Instagram and I’ll see this person’s pieces everywhere, like Chicago and D.C. and the West Coast.”
In fact, Schwartz’s gallery isn’t the only FLAG in the area. Alexandria, Capitol Hill, Del Ray, Reston and Rosslyn have them. Websites, such as this mapping site and this FLAG locator, are dedicated to helping people set up and find free little art galleries.
Schwartz has worked with a local community member to install a geocache in her gallery to make it more findable. (A geocache is a hidden container that people can locate using a device with GPS and a free app that shows nearby geocaches.)
Her next goal is to make the gallery more inclusive and accessible, featuring tiny art from a more diverse variety of makers. She’s working with the Veterans and the Arts Initiative at Hylton to offer a class where veterans can make art to display in the gallery. She also wants apply for grants that would help her provide materials to places such as homeless shelters, low-income housing developments and senior centers, inviting residents to make and contribute tiny art.
Currently, she spends at least an hour a day crafting Instagram posts and communicating with artists and the wider community. “I love when someone takes a piece and then the next day, I’ll get a picture from the person who’s taken the piece, and then I can make the connection with the artist,” Schwartz says. “I try to post about that a lot because I think that helps the community connect.”
That’s how Huffman was first introduced to the gallery. After seeing a fellow artist’s Instagram post about it, she went to check it out in November 2023. That’s when she found an empty Altoids mints tin that Schwartz had left, with a note inviting someone to turn it into art.
“I took it and made some little art on both sides so that it could stand up,” Huffman says. “Then I brought it back and it was gone in a day.”
Now Huffman makes the 12-minute drive from her home to the gallery every few weeks to see what’s new—unless she spots a must-have on Instagram and dashes over to grab it before someone else does. She’s also contributed a handful of her own pieces, including a painting of the ocean that a little boy took and gave to his mom, an art teacher.
“She actually used it to show [her students] you can put silver and black into the ocean,” Huffman says of the seascape’s color scheme. “That made me feel really happy.”
Before discovering the gallery, Huffman says she’d never considered working small. “It pushed my art into a new direction,” she says. “From a smaller piece, you can make something larger, and I think that’s what Stacey has done. She put this Free Little Art Gallery out into the world and through these little pieces, it’s made something so much bigger.”
Find the Free Little Art Gallery on North Longfellow Street, between Ninth Road and 10th Street, in Arlington.