08/22/2026
Have you ever wondered about the many jobs of Gately Gallery coordinator Dawn? Here's your chance.
"I’ve lived in Indiana, graduated high school in North Carolina, and went to college at Western Kentucky University. I earned my bachelor’s degree in television production with a minor in folk studies. After that, my parents moved from Durham, North Carolina to Jackson, Mississippi. So, I followed them to Jackson.
At first I just got some random jobs, but I started working with the Mississippi Outdoor Show. I was an associate producer on a hunting and fishing show on Mississippi Educational Television and was there for a couple of years. Also during that time, I worked at a bookstore coffee shop, and this gentleman came up and he had some books on Asian cinema. I had written a term paper on Asian cinema in college, so I started talking to him and he invited me to conduct interviews all over the state of Mississippi. This was in the late 90s, and we didn’t have streaming or anything like we do now, so we were sent around the state to interview artists and see cultural places that were then put on audio tapes with a map and handed out at welcome centers as people came into the state so they could listen to the stories of people in the region they were driving through.
I got to interview the head of the Walter Anderson Museum, McCarty Pottery, which was a really big pottery producing couple in Mississippi. In fact, she was a Winston cigarette girl back in the day, and I also got to interview this gentleman, Earl, from Earl’s Art who designed his own house and was an art curator for the House of Blues. I interviewed a projectionist from Jackson, Mississippi who loved westerns. So that kind of piqued my interest away from television and toward just arts and culture in general, and I ran a film festival—I was the Executive Director of the Crossroads Film Festival for a year.
It was my first step into the realization that maybe I’m better at helping artists rather than being an artist.
After only about 18 months, my parents moved to Florence and left me in Jackson. I stayed in Jackson for a few more years, but after 9/11 I moved to New Orleans because I had a friend living down there and I was hoping to work with the New Orleans Film Festival, but that was a lot harder to break into than I thought. Helping artists find a venue and an avenue to express their art was really intriguing to me, and it turned out that the University of New Orleans had a masters in arts administration program. And this was around 2002, when there were only a few of these programs in the country.
And so I thought, well, I like this work, so I’m going to go do this.
I got my masters in arts administration from the University of New Orleans and I had the opportunity to intern with the Telluride Film Festival for the summer. What I did for my internship was put together a survey because they’d never surveyed their attendees and clients. They didn’t know how much people made, then didn’t know where people came from. And back then, we didn’t have the same access to digital survey tools, so I literally walked around in lines handing out paper and getting as much information from people as possible in the festival. I then compiled all my findings into a senior project report.
This work got me set on a path, a direction, and I applied for a job with the Louisiana Arts Council, had an interview, and then the next day…
the state put a hold on all jobs.
So, my dad drove down to New Orleans and we packed up and he brought me to Florence, and I stayed here for about six weeks while I was applying for jobs. I ended up getting a job as the Executive Director for the Chowan Arts Council in Edenton, North Carolina, a small and very historic town—they even have a courthouse that the Declaration of Independence went around to. Their Main Street program was just getting going when I was there.
I was the director of the Chowan Arts Council for about two years and then I realized that being a thirty-something in a town of 4,000 people is pretty hard, and I decided to move on. I’d always wanted to move to Colorado, and I had some friends who lived out there. So, in January 2018, I loaded up my Pontiac Vibe and headed west to the Denver Area, but I didn’t get a job immediately.
I moved to Steamboat Springs and ended up being the go-to arts administrator in the community, working with the Steamboat Art Museum and Historic Route County. That’s where my interest in historic preservation really got started. I worked with the Emerald City Opera, which is a community opera they do every summer. I did all of that on top of working front desk at wherever I needed to. I stayed there for about 18 months, and it was a hard place to live because it was so expensive, and I was just piecing different places to work together.
It was insane.
I decided to move down to Denver, and funny story, I actually drove my resume and hand delivered it from Steamboat Springs all the way do Denver which is about a three-hour drive to get it to a place called Swallow Hill, a folk music venue that started in the 1960s. Bob Dylan and a bunch of other famous folk groups played there. But I came on the day they were cutting off resume intake with mine in hand, and I went up to the desk and said I was there to apply.
And they told me they had already cut off applications because of how many people applied for the position. I pleaded with them, explained how far I’d driven because I hadn’t heard from anyone through email and told them how much I wanted to work for them. What’s crazy is it was a part-time job doing front desk at night for the school, but they had an incredible venue and I got to se a lot of great folk musicians play there.
They ended up taking my resume, and I pull it out and realize I didn’t bring an updated copy.
So, I’m standing there literally cutting things out, adding things in, putting new references on, all this stuff, and I actually got the job. I worked there for a while before applying to the state of Colorado for a position with the Colorado Historical Fund, a granting agency of the state for historic preservation projects. I was a grants specialist, and I got to work on the other side of cultural resource management helping applicants with contracts, ensuring people knew what to do with the funding we were allocating. I got to work closely with historic preservationists that oversaw the projects I was granting funds for.
I remember my first task was to find three pennies.
That was my actual first assignment. My role was to essentially make sure all the pennies were accounted for. I did that for another couple of years before deciding to move on and I started looking for jobs. I was sitting on my porch in Congress Park and someone walked up campaigning door-to-door for PBS. I grew up loving PBS programming, and decided to volunteer and the local PBS station asked me to come to work for them part-time putting together an auction platform they were trying to revive. And before the auction project was even over, they offered me a full-time position running their sustained giving program. At that time, monthly giving was starting to gain traction, and I grew the program from 50,000 to 150,000 in annual giving, but I wasn’t making any money myself. So, I took on a second position as the development production liaison. I wrote commercials for the sustained giving program and wrote scripts for various people we had coming in from Deepak Chopra to Dr. Hyman. I even got to meet Temple Grandin and Judy Collins.
I was here for a few years and then took a break from the arts working in commercial property management in Denver, but then COVID hit and I was home for six weeks. We still worked from home—that actually gave me the chance to work on some policy documents and implement some systems, but things changed after that. I remember when we came back to the office, in this case the lobby of this upscale office building, we had two security threats, and it all just became too much.
I came back to Florence at Christmas in 2020, which honestly was probably the first Christmas I had come to Florence since my parents moved there. And I had every intention of going back to Colorado, but I was starting to get over being in Denver with everything going on at that time. People changed—they didn’t want to talk to you anymore.
I like going to the grocery store here, people here actually talk to other people. Three months after I came back to Florence, I left my job in Colorado, put my house on the market, and came here officially at the end of April in 2021 so I could watch my parents’ dog while they were on vacation. And my mom said before she left for her trip, ‘you really should check out this arts festival in Lake City while you’re here,’ so I took a day and drove down and it was just so cool. I loved it and really thought it was something special. And when my parent got back from their trip, I decided to head to the beach for a few days before I headed back west.
I sat on the beach, by myself, and I said, ‘Wait, I’m a beach girl. Why have I been in the mountains for thirteen years?’ And then my house sold in Colorado.
I started volunteering at the FMU Performing Arts Center as an usher, and then I got the job here at the Gately Gallery in 2022. I have to say one thing that isn’t surprising, but has definitely changed since my first Florence experience back in 2001, is that people say there is not a lot to do here, but there really is!
If you look around, you can find something to do. And after living in Denver where there is too much to do all the time, it’s nice to be able to take a breather. There’s enough to do, but not too much that it’s overwhelming.
And one of the things I’m really proud about is that in my role here at the gallery, I get to provide some of the opportunities for things to do, and I really enjoy that. I almost feel like an ambassador for Francis Marion University, as well as the city, because people can walk in when we’re open and I’m always willing to answer questions and offer a suggestion.
I just really enjoy providing an opportunity for people in the community to get out and see art, but also to experience other cultural things. And I’ve made a point to make sure that the gallery can be rented to other community organizations to provide others the opportunity to do things as well.
I don’t want to say I personally create community, to take that credit necessarily, but we’ve helped build a community around us through this space. I’ve made this sort of mission statement for the gallery, it’s not official, but I like to say that the Gately Gallery inspires art that inspires community.
I hope this space inspires people to gather together and inspires people to make their own art.”
- Dawn Fennimore, Gallery Coordinator at the FMU Gately Gallery (142 N. Dargan Street)
