For the celebration of the Berta Walker Gallery’s 35th anniversary, Walker herself — wearing a long good luck dress of green, “which is the heart chakra, love,” bedecked in the center with a big purple leaf and peacock blue feathers, “which is to give me voice,” along with a gold necklace supposed to create healing, a silver mandala necklace, and “energy balancing earrings” on her still beautiful, chiseled face topped with red hair — graces me with tales of her journey and her philosophy of life and art.
JOURNEY
Berta Walker has lived with art since childhood in New York’s Forest Hills, where her mother, a dancer, pianist and painter, and her father, a jeweler and distinguished art maven and dealer, ran an art gallery in Manhattan. Not only did they put Marsden Hartley on the map, but heading to Provincetown in summers, they, and Berta (and her sisters) hung out with everyone in the Provincetown world — artists, electricians, fishermen.
After college and business school, Walker worked in advertising. “I always liked that I could buy ‘time’ and ‘space.’ They were fun days where you interacted with people, not computers, and they took you out a lot and boy did they party. But I knew I needed to be involved in art.” She went back to New York as an event administrator for the Whitney Museum, staging Philip Glass for his first concert, jazz, children’s shows; she also fund-raised and did PR. Later she freelanced, working on membership and PR for museums, then creating a program which has to do with finding curators and directors for visual art non-profits.
“Remember ‘I got my job through the New York Times’?” she continued, “well I got my job through the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC)” in Provincetown. Her parents were co-founders with artist Sal Del Deo and his wife. She became chairman of the board there for many years. She was responsible for getting the word out. “It’s a pulse in Ptown but nobody beyond knew what it was about.” She did events, such as a private tour of a MOMA Cézanne show, taking people through Soho, partnering with Marisa Del Re’s 57th Street gallery in the 1970s. Del Re hired Berta to be her gallery director. But she’d never been a curator. She learned on the job.