After Thirty Years of Showing Art on the Edge, Bill Thelen Bids Goodbye to Lump Gallery

Bill Thelen loves to draw. Hamburgers, crabs, knobby knees, limp wrists, chairs, snails, torsos—everyday life, in its most specific form, is Thelen’s muse. 

In projects over the years, the medium with which these forms are depicted has varied—sharpie, embroidery floss, shoelaces pinned to a wall—though the end result almost always has the loose, kinetic feel of a drawing. 

For 30 years now, Thelen has lent that conceptual sensibility to Lump, the grassroots gallery he founded in 1996 on South Blount Street in Raleigh. With a small footprint and offbeat hours, Lump never set out to be the biggest or splashiest gallery in the Triangle, but it has embodied all the things it endeavored to be: idiosyncratic, anti-commercial, and earnestly engaged with the ideas of the artists it showcased. Or, as its Instagram bio puts it: an “anti-capitalist artist’s space” that is “not dead yet.” 

Like many arts spaces, the gallery has had many iterations: In 2016, 20 years into his tenure, Thelen handed the curatorial reins to Kelly McChesney, who merged her gallery at the time, Flanders Gallery, with Lump. When McChesney was hired as the public art director at the city’s Office of Raleigh Arts in 2018, the gallery’s management changed hands, hot-potato-style, between several different artists, from across the Triangle and Triad—all trying to make it work on a small budget, all making variously unsustainable commutes—before Thelen stepped back into the role in 2023. 

Over the years, with its cerebral sound installations and politically conscious shows, the cinderbox gallery has helped launch the careers of numerous local artists, all the while offering a counterpart to what Thelen describes, delicately, as “weekend painter” art.

But returning to run it, he said, was always temporary: At the end of the day, he’d done his time helping to keep Raleigh’s experimental art scene afloat and was ready to get back to his studio to draw. In June, he announced that Lump would, for real this time, close at the end of the summer.

“I’m turning 60 in May,” Thelen said. “I’ve been there for 30 years. I started it in 1996, I thought: ‘Synchronicity with numbers.’” 

Even with this turn, the space is still not quite “dead yet.” After Lump closes on August 31, plum, a new interdisciplinary arts space will take over the building—which remains owned by Thelen’s partner, Med Byrd—for an initial yearlong pilot. plum is helmed by Madeleine Lyon, Mary Beth Eisenstadt, and Marty Rogers (a former gallery Lump gallery assistant); the Raleigh trio plan to use one half of the building as a flexible events space meant to hold exhibits, workshops, and performances; the other half will host Mend Mother, Lyon’s clothing repair and alterations business.

Thelen welcomes the transition. 

“I’m just ready to go,” he said. “They’re all in their 30s or younger and it felt good. The best part about it is that all the people involved are from Raleigh. They’re living close and connected. And that makes it more sustainable.”

Thelen has an open call out for submissions for Last Rites, an ‘evolving, social monument’ to the gallery and the art that has come through it, which may end up in an exhibit—or book, or VR experience, or something else entirely. On the occasion of the closure, the INDY spoke with Thelen about his reflections on Lump and what lies next. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

INDY: Could you share a little bit about your memories of the Raleigh art scene, when you first started Lump? What was the ecosystem like back in 1996?

THELEN: The Raleigh Contemporary Museum was there putting on amazing shows—it was their last couple of years before they closed and then refigured, l later. There was a lot to see, and also I was very interested in UNC’s [MFA] program at that time. I had made a lot of connections at that school, in the art department, and all the galleries. There were good things happening, I just didn’t know a lot of artists at the time. 

ArtSpace was happening, and they had their own scene, and Antfarm was starting out then. There was a store on Glenwood Avenue that sold art supplies, Askew-Taylor Paints, which was amazing. I met so many people by going into that store. I  found a home there, and I loved Askew Taylor’s aesthetic—you had to dig through stuff, upstairs in old bedrooms filled with art supplies. It was the best place on earth. 

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What has the relationship between local MFA programs and Lump been like?

I got my MFA at UNC-Chapel Hill in visual art. I wanted to develop a connection there, and everything going on there was a lot more conceptual. 

It changed the direction of Lump, after the first three years. We were doing these painterly installations, more street savvy work, and then after I went to grad school we made a big shift and lost a lot of people because they didn’t like that new work. That’s when Lump really bloomed, having these super conceptual shows where there was no price list or anything. 

Because we shifted, we then got a lot of people who were interested in doing work that were not local—it became not really about the Raleigh scene, but more Chapel Hill and Durham, and even further, around Greensboro. Lump has gone through a lot of different phases and the MFA programs added a nice perspective to Raleigh and the Triangle area that, maybe, we weren’t seeing that much of because it was so isolated at the schools—these schools have amazing programs. 

I thought grad students were a good untapped audience to work before their MFA show. We did a lot of shows with the first-year MFAs at UNC—and that was me getting to know that department and going to all their lectures. They had all the artists I wanted to hear and gave talks. 

I’d love to hear your bird’s eye perspective on the Triangle art scene. Where is there overlap, where is there or no overlap?

I can’t speak to today’s things as much because I’m kind of out at sea and isolated. I was only filling in the last three years just to keep [Lump] going. I did try to develop some community there but I’ve just been out of the game. I could say that our core audiences were people interested in art that’s going to push a little bit more at the boundaries—there’s a core group of people post- or outside of academia that are really interested in that. 

I’m very happy to just leave the art world and focus on my own work. I never got any support for my own work here, because I never showed at the gallery—just a little bit here and there. I thought that was a conflict of interest. 

I would say that’s a pretty noble stance.

I’m a very idealistic person and art is my number one love in my whole life. That’s all I think about all the time, and I said if I can’t keep that as pure as it is, I might as well just give up. And so I’ve had to look otherwise, because a lot of people here don’t even consider me an artist. Even though I have my MFA, it’s always been a conflict for me. I thought I’d get shows locally, but it never came to be. 

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What’s it been like to see things roll in for Last Rites? 

Last Rights is a casual approach. Team Lump was in town—our collective, which always has been part of Lump. It’s not like I was doing it all by myself. Team Lump helped us keep going. We did an anniversary in May, and started thinking about what we were going to do for the rest of the summer, ‘til August, and then Team Lump came back in town and brought a lot of things—ephemera, and all the different stuff that we put up. 

It’s been nothing but really good feelings about using that space for 30 years. It’s all been very positive for me—it’s not been a sad thing at all. It just feels good,  giving these younger people a chance to try something out. Lump has always been like, “We’re going to take a lot of risk, and some things can fail, some things can succeed.” 

In reflecting on the space and the art scene in Raleigh, what are you hoping for? 

There’s a lot of younger artists, like Marty, that are very much involved in the DIY culture—which is what we really started out in, as this do-it-yourself space. In some ways, we still are, because there’s a lot that falls on the artist. There’s no handlers. Of course, we will help people out as much as we can, and so that’s the one thing that’s been hard in the current format. It’s hard to get a lot of people to work on other people’s things—everybody’s working so hard in their regular lives.

[Younger artists] are finding ways to bring people back in and form these collective strategies to make exhibitions. So I’m excited about that—people are like, you know, fuck the museums and whatever. We’re just gonna do it ourselves. 

I only can think about what I know of for plum, [but] what they have planned is very exciting. It’s an interdisciplinary space that sometimes doesn’t even show art. That’s what the community really needs—we’ve been finding that the thing we’ve had a lot of success in, the last two, three years, is doing a lot of sound, music, performance, theater, dance, poetry [shows].

Interdisciplinary space is something that Raleigh doesn’t have a lot of. Durham has better spaces—they are looking at perfect lovers as a good example, and Shadowbox. They’re hoping to maybe be that place in Raleigh.

It seems like people are really responsive to that right now—having elasticity. 

It’s also a way of incorporating being an active participant in an art-making process, whereas going to an exhibition sometimes is not. You’re just looking at the work. In some ways, I think having an exhibition, a white cube or whatever—it’s outdated and needs to evolve a little bit more. In the last couple three years, I’ve noticed a need for places for people to create and respond. 

What about your own work? What’s next? 

Oh God! Well, I don’t know. Part of me is not that interested in the art world as much as I am committed to making work. I’ve done a lot with my art career, whatever that means. I love to draw without thinking I’m making a drawing. Being engaged in the art-making process and living an artful life. Selling any amount of work isn’t going to make me a better artist, so I don’t feel like I’m going to head down that path. I just make stuff because it’s close to my worldview. 

I’m a social artist. I love creating, with drawing room projects, where it’s not about me sitting down making a drawing for people to sell, but creating this drawing community where we can get together and do these interesting projects. That’s what I’m all about right now. 

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