The Rural We: Nico Dery
Some people leave their hometown and never return. Others come back and it’s a surprise even to them. Nico Dery is one of the latter. She grew up in Adams, Mass., and lived in Washington, D.C., New York and, finally, the Bay Area. She was heavily involved in the art scene in Oakland, and helped start the Oakland Art Murmur, which eventually got so big the city had to take over. She’s both an artist and a business consultant, and since 2017 has been back in the northern Berkshires, immersed again in the cultural community. Her latest project is Art Vending North Adams, a vending machine that sells locally made art on the campus at MASS MoCA.
How I ended up back here is, like a lot of artists, I was priced out of the opportunity of ever affording a house in a big city. So I cast a wide net, looking for a good place to land. I kept reading about all the cool stuff going on in Adams — plus my sister kept putting pressure on me to come back. When I compared the housing prices between Adams and the Bay Area, my eyeballs popped out of my head!
My husband and I made the move in October 2017, and there was no looking back. I became a member of Common Folk, an artist collective, and was music director for the O+ Music Festival. Historically I was a conceptual performance artist, but I kind of fell into jewelry making and now have my own jewelry practice.
The North Adams Artist Impact Coalition sent out a call for a grant supporting artists in North Adams, specifically for projects that would help local artists. I started thinking, what do artists need? Universally, artists need money. So how could I use this grant to get artists money? A vending machine got stuck in my brain, so I essentially wrote a business plan for this vending machine project, and my application was selected. MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists embraced the idea of the vending machine being on campus. Artists applied to be included and we started collecting submissions before the machine arrived. We were overwhelmed with submissions.
It’s literally a snack vending machine. The art has to be customized to fit it. There’s been a lot of trial and error. Once we had the machine installed, we had problems, with two pieces falling out at once, or a piece getting stuck in the coils. Things are going more smoothly now. But learning about the vending machine industry was a whole other story. The credit card processing is limited to $99.95, but currently the highest priced piece of art is $50.
Business has been great. All of the artists are selling, so we’re selling a lot of art, which was the goal. People seem to really respond to the project positively.
I have to give a shoutout to Aaron Oster and Andrew Nienow, who designed, built and painted the shed as well as the vending machine. I couldn’t have gotten through it all without those two.
It’s been a lot of fun. My day job is business consultant, so I know you have to be a little crazy to start a business. I approached this project as a fun, easy-breezy project, and fell into my own trap, because it’s not been easy. But it’s been so unbelievably rewarding.
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