Sixth-floor surprise: A California couple's art gallery widens eyes

McCOOK – In a 100-year-old building in downtown McCook, push the round number six and an elevator ride takes you up, up, up to the highest floor in this railroad town’s tallest building.

The elevator lurches stopped. The doors slide open.

And here it is – an open concrete floor covered in hundreds of glittering metal sculptures, carved wooden figures, “outsider art” paintings by artists who have shown work in New York, Washington D.C., London.

The space is an explosion of color and texture. It’s a global contemporary art tour. It’s a four-hour drive from the closest major city and it is oh-so-cool.

“People come off the elevator and are like, ‘Whoa, I didn’t expect to see this in McCook,’” said Chad Graff, one half of the pair behind the gallery.

“Why not?”

Welcome to the 6th Floor Project, a contemporary art gallery located on the top floor of McCook’s Keystone Business Center.

Here, Joann Falkenburg and Graff are challenging the assumption that unique art spaces and talented artists don’t exist in rural places.

Both are Nebraska natives – he from McCook and she from Harrison, a town of 239 near the Wyoming border. But the pair has spent most of their adult lives in Oakland, California, Graff a lawyer, Falkenburg a doctor.

Traveling back and forth between McCook to see family and their California home, the pair felt like they had a foot in two worlds. They’d be in the Bay Area, hearing people criticize the “flyover states.” Then, they’d be in Nebraska, hearing friends and family disparage the coasts.

In the years surrounding the 2016 election, it felt like “America started coming undone,” Falkenburg said. “We can talk about this, or we can be part of the solution and bridge that gap culturally.”

In 2018, when Graff’s nephew showed the pair the empty sixth floor space, the vision became clear: Transport their collection to small-town Nebraska. Share it.

So, in July 2021, the couple moved from the Bay Area, pop. 7.8 million, to McCook, pop. 7,446.

For Graff, it was a return to his hometown after 36 years away.

Growing up, he watched his father support local businesses as the owner of McCook National Bank. Graff and his 10 siblings are still majority owners of what’s now MNB Bank. His mother was a school board member, and a church and Meals on Wheels volunteer.

But he and Falkenburg spent 24 years living in California, longer than their Nebraska childhoods. They know they’re outsiders, even with his family roots.

“It’s not that kind of, ‘boy comes back home’ story. It’s more, we’re attempting this bridge making …We realize that part of that bridge needs to be us ourselves,” Graff said. “It made sense for us to be here and do it in earnest.”

The collection itself is a walk through the couple’s lives.

There are the baskets and vibrant paintings of Navajo life, from the years Graff spent as an English teacher on an Arizona reservation, where Falkenburg did rotations with the Indian Health Service. It’s where they watched Native artist Shonto Begay set up shop in the school library, painting with students. Begay’s paintings are now a central part of their collection.

There’s the art they acquired in Oakland, at Creative Growth Studio, a place that “grabs ahold of you and never lets you go,” Graff said.

Creative Growth is a studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Its artists have had their work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian. Falkenburg and Graff have befriended many of the artists whose art they’ve purchased. Like Monica Valentine, who covers foam shapes with hundreds of multi-colored sequins and beads. Valentine is blind and can “feel” the temperature of colors through her hands.

When you know the artist “the art kind of comes to life,” Falkenburg said. “It’s like being with family.”

There’s art from Japan, Paris, the far-flung places they’ve traveled. And art from Nebraska, including Rastus Snow’s wooden benches, made from fallen Nebraska trees in the Litchfield sawmill he bought after serving in Iraq; film photographs of the Great Plains, taken by 90-year-old Jack Stevens of McCook; and farmer Lucas Kotschwar’s oil paintings.

Kotschwar often comes to the gallery. It feels like an escape, he said. A space to take his mind off the farming grind.

“I’ve seen so many people who haven’t had a place in rural Nebraska,” said Matt Sehnert, the longtime owner of famed area restaurant Sehnert’s Bakery, which he sold last year. “The 6th Floor has been the place that they either were looking for, or that they found that they didn’t even know they were looking for.”

Falkenburg and Graff own “about a thousand pieces” of art.

Their initial 6th Floor gallery idea has grown to fill five spaces in McCook.

Falkenburg and Graff recently bought the downtown Wells Fargo building to turn into another gallery and event space – the “Art Bank” is its working name. They also own the Morrison building, where former Gov. Frank Morrison long had an office. Now the couple live in the building, where they also created studio spaces for local and out-of-state artists.

They’ve had out-of-state artists come to town for residencies. They’ve formed a partnership with Omaha gallery Maple St. Construct. They’re working to bridge the gap between coastal and Great Plains artists.

“We’re aware of artists in urban areas being priced out of things,” Graff said. “Here’s affordable space. Here’s interesting landscape. And here’s quiet and the opportunity to be left alone and make art.”

With Sehnert, Falkenburg is part of a team working to get part of downtown McCook certified as a Creative District by the Nebraska Arts Council, which would open the door to grant money.

Falkenburg and Graff view their art collection as a long-term way to support their new home.

“The return on investment may be decades,” Falkenburg said. “We may never know if there’s a kid that gets to come up to the 6th Floor to do an art program and that just is a vivid memory that changes them into their 30s or 40s. But it’s worth it to activate a space like this if it influences young people that way.”

The collection is also a way to lure out-of-towners — and potential McCook residents — said Charlie McPherson, director of McCook’s Economic Development Corporation.

Like most small Nebraska towns, McCook is shrinking, having lost 7% of its population in the past 20 years. While the focus is on housing and jobs, towns also must focus on amenities, McPherson said. Like arts and creative spaces.

Visiting the 6th Floor has become a regular stop when prospective employees interview for jobs, said Ronda Graff, coordinator of the McCook Community Foundation Fund and the couple’s sister-in-law. Potential hires get to see the art and the best views in town.

“You use it, to put it bluntly, almost as a marketing tool,” she said. “To show what we have, and also what is possible.”

Rural America is at a tipping point, Chad Graff said. Only some towns are going to make it.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of the people who built this 100 years ago,” Graff said. “And it just goes one way or the other – either the bricks start to cave in and fall apart, or we take the next step of shoring it up. I think art is the way you do that.”

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