Prichard or Moscow Contemporary, Moscow’s favorite gallery director is still there

The old brick building on the corner of Main and Fifth Street in Moscow had recently undergone a facelift. What used to be weathered lavender window frames and a bland beige door was transformed into contrasting shades of deep grey with a lime green door.  

The words “Prichard Art Gallery” on the door and window morphed into “Moscow Contemporary.” A step through the door would reveal the thin, diagonal wood floors that led to an expansive space with a ceiling that seemed to go on forever.  

This is not the first time the sun around which Moscow’s art community revolves, one of the three galleries in the town of 25,000, has undergone a major change.  

When Roger Rowley first took over as the gallery director at the University of Idaho’s Prichard Art Gallery in 2004, there was a giant gap of nothingness running along the top of the large wall where it failed to reach the popcorn ceiling. There was also a crack running down the same wall, extending almost to the floor. The back room was designed as a half-finished live-in studio, split into three separate rooms too small to do much of anything in but store boxes. 

Even with its flaws, Rowley saw an enormous amount of potential in the space for galleries, exhibits and education.  

“We used to pile kids into this tiny room, and it was pure chaos,” Rowley said, chuckling. “It made for great photographs.” 

When Rowley proposed a renovation plan to the owners of the building, asking to open up the space in the back and turn it into one large room, they began the construction the next morning. 

Years after, the space is now being rebranded by Rowley after UI purchased the retiring police station, revealing plans to install the Prichard in the building down the street after the construction of a new police station is complete.  

“He’s a really interesting guy,” Gregory Turner-Rahman, associate professor of Art and Design at UI, said. “He has a vision of what he thinks, well not what he thinks, but what he knows, will really suit this region. We’re going to have the Moscow Contemporary gallery, we’ll have our university galleries, and there’s a host of other galleries, like the one at city hall, that have made a really vibrant art community for years. Roger made the Prichard the linchpin of that.” 

After spending a life of working in studios and galleries, he finally started up his own. But the path to his goal was a sometimes treacherous and spontaneous one.  

Rowley’s journey began with photography. After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Rowley traveled to Rochester, New York, to work at a visual arts workshop and earn his Master of Fine Arts.  

“That place was insane,” Rowley said. “It was basically a warehouse, and every semester the students would spend their first few weeks cleaning the place up, making sure we could work in it. There was no janitorial staff there to clean it for us. We did it ourselves.” 

From Rochester, Rowley turned his eye toward Washington State University after being offered a position as the curator of exhibitions and collections manager. He and his growing family moved to Moscow on Halloween of 2000. Three and a half years after accepting the job at WSU, Rowley’s position was terminated. He applied and was accepted as the director of the Prichard in late 2004.  

Rowley said the first time the dean of the College of Art and Architecture, who was Joe Zeller at the time, met him after Rowley accepted the job he was told “You were my second choice.” 

After 17 years as the Prichard director, Rowley had established himself as an icon in the community. Reconstructing the Prichard was just one of the feats he has accomplished. 

Toward the end of Rowley’s time as part of the university, one of the exhibits he brought into the gallery was one by world-renowned contemporary artist Zimoun, who filled the Prichard with a variety of sounds key to his artwork as part of his 2019 exhibit in Moscow. 

Imagine the giant wall, the same one that previously had a crack running through it to a void at the top, covered in over 100 boxes. Inside each of those boxes is a little electric motor spinning a wire with a cotton ball attached, bang bang banging constantly against the cardboard. Other rooms were filled with dancing sticks, clanging on the wood floors of the gallery as they spun around wildly.   

While the art exhibit itself wasn’t the most eye-catching piece with its monotony and industrial colors, the meaning it gave to the community was well worth the expense of exhibiting an internationally-acclaimed artist to Rowley.  

“There was one girl who came in with her mother, and she had some sensory issues,” Rowley said. “I was worried she might have trouble viewing Zimoun’s exhibit, but she walked in and looked like she was just so relaxed. She would come in and spend hours in one of the smaller rooms, listening to the sounds. Her mother brought her in several times.” 

Rowley said something many people get confused about art is trying to judge it by the works’ appearance rather than the substance of what it might mean, of what inspired the creation. He continues to make the gallery a place where the community can come to find inspiration and learn.  

After Rowley’s position at UI was terminated, he was once again booted out of a university art program. He now wants to continue on a new path with the Moscow Contemporary, where he can still be involved in Moscow’s art scene and be free of any restrictions that come with being tied to a larger organization. 

“I think he wants to bring the city, and all the good things that you get in the city in terms of art, to us around here,” Turner-Rahman said. “And I think what that does is it makes people, it broadens people’s worlds, their horizons, that shows them this kind of world outside the potential weird ideas that grow new art.” 

Anteia McCollum can be reached at [email protected]