Step Back In Time With The Age of Nostalgia at Another Gallery

Taylor Herda, co-owner of Another Gallery, admits that five years ago he would have dismissed the notion of a worldwide pandemic as a science-fiction concept. Fast-forward to 2023, and Herda feels an overwhelming nostalgia for the time before COVID-19, an emotion that inspired his gallery's upcoming show, The Age of Nostalgia.

Herda is more than the gallery's co-owner and an avid art enthusiast: he's also an artist in his own right.  Since discovering his passion for art in high school, Herda has found an emotional, meditative release in the act of creating. "I've dealt with anxiety and depression my entire life, and what I found in art was that ability to keep the hands busy and kind of letting the mind wander and become my source of meditation," Herda says.
For several years, Herda tabled his dream of being an artist – placing it on what he calls his "dream shelf." Instead, he focused on finding a stable profession that included just enough creative spark to feed his soul, and studied graphic design at Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design.

After attending Rocky Mountain College, Herda began working at Market Digital in Boulder – now S&P Global – as a UX and UI designer for the financial industries research platform, a job that appeals to both his analytical and creative sides. But he began painting again on the side, dabbling mostly in abstract pieces that he created with spray paint and acrylics in his garage. "I have a love and passion for sneakers, so my initial direction was abstracting popular sneaker models," Herda says of his artwork. "I just found it was more appropriate for me to go after a lens that introduced joy into the viewer's experience, rather than a heavier topic."

He dove into the arts further in 2018, when he and his wife, Alicia Herda, began planning for an event and studio space. Their dream was realized in December, when they opened Another Gallery in the Art District on Santa Fe. Alicia has a background in events and currently works at Denver's Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, where she organizes networking events around town. "She's also had this dream of having an event space, and I think we both have this desire to create community," Herda says. "It didn't start with wanting to create a gallery, it started with wanting to develop a studio space to bring people in, to bring artists in. ... This idea of community-driven efforts has been kind of the fundamental shared pillar that we have."

The Herdas' goal is for Another Gallery to be an event-driven space where members of the community can explore their relationship with creativity through programming and classes that promote a sense of freedom. "We wanted to create this juxtaposition, this line in the sand between that messy process and that clean, gallery-finished product," Herda says. "Allowing the general public to be able to break that membrane and go into the messy process, and not just look at it as a fun thing that could have been if they would've grabbed life by their horns and taken a risk and done it themselves."

The Age of Nostalgia is Another Gallery's sophomore show and opens Thursday, April 6, with a collection of works by fourteen different artists. "The Age of Nostalgia came out of this desire to breathe a little bit of levity and air into our day-to-day," Herda explains. "But also, it's sad; nostalgia itself is a feeling of loss. It's this knowing and dealing with the reality that this image that we are looking at or this reality that we are reflecting back on that was, no longer is."

Herda connected with many of the show's fourteen artists through their social media platforms, and explained the concept for The Age of Nostalgia before asking for collaborations. "I think it was strategic because everyone that we reached out to has a little soft spot for nostalgia in their creative heart and in their practice, so it was speaking directly to what they're trying to do," Herda explains. "What I wanted to present was a show that showed the diversity of what nostalgia is like. It can be sad, it can be happy, it can be low-brow art, it can be high-brow art, it can be both."

The Age of Nostalgia opens Thursday, April 6, at Another Gallery, 345 Santa Fe Drive. RSVP for the show's opening reception from 5:30 to 8 p.m., or schedule a viewing.