After 40 years in business, the Whitebird Gallery in downtown Cannon Beach is temporarily closed as the new owner, Allyn Cantor, remodels the scaled-down gallery space and prepares for a grand reopening early next month.

The gallery has long been known as a vanguard establishment on the Oregon coast, and is touted as the first commercial art gallery in Cannon Beach.

Under the direction of longtime proprietor Evelyn George, the Whitebird focused on elevating fine crafts, such as ceramic sculpture, to the level of art. Many Northwest artists, including printmaker Liza Jones and watercolor painter Scott Johnson, began their professional careers as a part of Georges cadre of artists.

New owner Allyn Cantor is a familiar face at the gallery. She has been working at the Whitebird since 2002 and has been co-managing the business with another longtime employee, Dawn Haberlin, for five years.

While Cantor is working to make the space her own, she learned a lot from George, her mentor, and has no intention of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Evelyn was very willing to give emerging artists a chance, especially crafts people. In many ways, she opened the door to fine arts and crafts being taken more seriously in the Northwest, Cantor said of her longtime boss and friend. A community built up around Evelyn and the gallery, with many of the artists becoming good friends over the years.

Cantor, an artist herself, believes these positive relationships serve as the cornerstone of the Whitebird Gallery. Part of her inspiration for taking the space on despite lagging sales in the past few years was to continue to provide a viable venue for artists to sell their work, because doing so provides a real service to them.

The space will look and feel different when it reopens in March. While the gallery was once big enough to lose some time in (if not exactly get lost in), the new Whitebird will be approximately half the square footage. While Cantor laments the loss of space, she is also practical enough to know that it is smart business to consolidate her operations instead of being strapped by a high overhead in Cannon Beachs notoriously slow off season.

One of the reasons George could be so generous with her use of the space, Cantor observed, is that she owned it — so she had the freedom to simply put someones work in a corner and see what happened. Cantor is trying to streamline her operations a little, a plan which includes cutting down on the sheer number of artists the gallery represents.

The Whitebird Gallery has a wonderful website, which Cantor has built up over the years. She will continue to bulk up her online presence and is currently adding more of her jewelers to the site, where the work of many artists can already be seen.

Cantor moved to Oregon in 1997 after being raised in New Jersey and attending college in Syracuse, N.Y. A multi-media artist who works with fabric and paint on canvas in both representational and non-representational styles, Cantor received the Cannon Beach Arts Association Individual Artist Grant to create a body of work entitled Flatlands. She also spent two months as an artist in residence at the Petersvalley Crafts Center in New Jersey.

One of Cantors goals for the re-imagined gallery space is for it to be instantly identifiable as a fine arts gallery instead of being mistaken for just another shop along Hemlock Street.

The Whitebird Gallery will reopen with a Ceramics Invitational in early March, probably by that months first weekend, Cantor said.

A member of Cannon Beachs Gallery Group, Cantor will also be participating in the Spring Unveiling Festival in late April, early May and the Plein Air and More event the last weekend in June.