Stranger Days Ahead
New Digs for the Stranger Factory in Algodones
The owners of the Stranger Factory, Kathie Olivas and Brandt Peters, on the grounds of the ever-expanding dream that is the Stranger Factory in Algodones. Photo by Clarke Condé.
Among the things that seemed to slip from our grip during the Covidtimes in Albuquerque was the Stranger Factory. A fixture in Nob Hill for nearly a decade, this space on Central Avenue was part gallery, part store and a whole lot of creepy stuff. Not like the kind of creepy stuff going on in other parts of Central Avenue, but well-made, high-quality art that veered towards the macabre. It was a welcome home to the odd, and elegantly so.
They are missed in Nob Hill, but it turns out they didn’t go far. 20 minutes north, halfway to Santa Fe (on the Albuquerque side), they can be found in Algodones, alive and thriving. The Albuquerque Courier’s editor Clarke Condé took the short drive north to Algodones to sit down with the owners of the Stranger Factory, Kathie Olivas and Brandt Peters, to talk about how it all started, why they left Nob Hill and what the future holds for the Stranger Factory. The following is an edited version of that conversation.
Clarke Condé: When you're sitting on a plane next to a stranger, how do you describe what the Stranger Factory is?
Kathie Olivas: We don't talk to strangers.
Brandt Peters: And we don't fly now.
Kathie Olivas: We wanted to be a toy store. We're both toy designers. We thought we could do small pieces of art. We, both had representation of a big New York gallery at the time so we weren't looking to sell as much of our art because we didn't think there would be a big market for it, but we thought the smaller items. Then [the work of] all of these artists we had met over the past 20 plus years working in the industry, we wanted to provide a place for them to show. When we first opened, there was a big problem with getting paid with a lot of galleries. It was right after the recession. A lot of galleries had gone out of business. We were actually doing well at the time. We needed more help with, you know, how do I pack and ship all my prints if I wanna paint all the time? We got a space where we had an assistant that was helping us do all that. You know, we might as well have a few paintings up, maybe people could come visit? It could be a showroom. And it just got busier and busier, to the point where all of a sudden we had four people and we realized we needed more space and that's how we ended up on central. Yeah, originally we were gonna be a toy store for adults, but we didn't make adult toys. That was always kind of hard to explain to people.
Brandt Peters: That was hard to explain.
Kathie Olivas: We're an art gallery that specializes in narrative art and illustration.
Brandt Peters: I think honestly the overall sort of vibe of the place is that a lot of people probably find the artwork and the visuals strange. So in a way, it's kind of a stranger factory.
So to your insurance agent…?
Brandt Peters: [laughing] I would probably describe it more like an art center than I would a gallery. First of all, we tend to focus on narrative-driven work, contemporary illustration and character design. That's predominantly the visuals that are in our place. It's not like top-down kind of safe art. A lot of us are illustrators. A lot of us come from comic book backgrounds, from special effects backgrounds. We've blended all of the stuff that we grew up with as kids into our own language. A lot of people, when they come to our place, they find the stuff strange. You would have a lot of people that would actually come in and say that.
Kathie Olivas: People would leave their little prayer tokens around the gallery.
Brandt Peters: To combat our strangeness and our evilness…How else do you describe it? We did, we've done something that really hasn't been done before. Even our toys are not toys you find at Target or toys you find at Toys “R” Us. They're basically additioned mini-sculptures that just happened to be in the same material as toys.
So when it comes to the work in the Stranger Factory, it's just like Justice Potter Stewart said about obscenity, “I know it when I see it?”
Brandt Peters: There is a look. But how would you describe that look?
Kathie Olivas: We always look for people who excel in their craft. It's not just about like, ‘oh, I make weird things.’ It's like, ‘Do you make weird things well?’ Are they well made? Are they built to last? For us, it's about making heirloom quality toys. Not necessarily meant to be played with, but avatars. Things that kind of represent you or a moment or something like that. I like the idea of having something that signifies a feeling. That's what I collect. Something that reminds me of a character that I grew up with, a character made me feel stronger, or there was something I got out of it as a child. A lot of the work that we show tends to have like a timeless quality to it. That's what I seek out.
In August of 2020, you closed the Nob Hill store. Why?
Kathie Olivas: We had purchased this place before the pandemic with the intention of it being our long-term project. We thought this would be our retirement project. When the pandemic hit, we basically paid for six months to have a space to just sit there that we couldn't use. The neighborhood had been really struggling for a long time. They ripped everything up since the ART [Albuquerque Rapid Transit] project.
ART’s impact on Nob Hill was part of this your decision?
Kathie Olivas: Oh, that was huge.
Brandt Peters: Huge.
Kathie Olivas: A lot of our neighbors went out of business. A lot of our customers stopped coming. We'd get a lot of orders from Santa Fe, but they'd just be shipped. Like, why am I paying for a space people don't want to come to because it's inconvenient? But because the pandemic hit, it's not like you could go look at other spaces down there. I hated leaving Nob Hill. We had such a presence there and we worked so hard to like to build that up for so long. There just was no other alternative. We had this space that was just sitting here.
So why Algodones? Was it the place or the property?
Kathie Olivas: We loved the property. We had had two older homes before. We missed living in an old house. This was always kind of like our dream project.
So this was Hacienda Vargas. Have you renamed it? Is it called the Stranger Factory?
Kathie Olivas: We talked about Hacienda Circus Posterus, but that’s hard Latin for people. The space is called Stranger Factory. When we open the whole hacienda, we're not sure.
Tell me about the place now. What will visitors see here?
Kathie Olivas: Right now we're just the gallery and the gift shop. We're starting to build our patio area out. We have our first artist annex space, which is like a small studio art gallery, where, when we have artists come out they can do a small residency. They can do an installation in that space. If they stay for a month, they could be working on the work they create and then have an exhibition afterwards where they can stage it. Our goal is to have several of these buildings. We're looking for installation artists who can do outdoor installations, maybe even things that will degrade over time as part of the process. Brandt's been working in AR with several people where we can create projections.
Brandt Peters: I come from theme park design, leaning into like, what are the next sort of digital playgrounds for artists? I love the idea that we're in this crazy rural area, but in the middle of this rural area, we could actually have a technology park for artists that end up doing more digital work or end up leaning more towards AR. So as a combination of our regular programming here, for instance, if we had an opening, it's not only gonna be in real life, a physical sort of exhibition that's gonna happen. We're also gonna be bringing it over to a virtual space online and we're gonna be incorporating more AR which includes having spectacles on the site. I'm gonna be working with this small group of artists to try and turn this into a virtual art center in some form. We have two acres here and the idea is to do something with that to connect what's happening in the arts right now. I keep bringing art center up because it probably captures more of our vision than just a gallery.
What else do people need to know?
Brandt Peters: We're not dead.
Kathie Olivas: We're just getting started.
Brandt Peters: We're still alive. We're excited. We miss everyone. We miss our old location, but we figured that this new location will allow us to do a lot more for the community.
Despite all these changes and all these new plans, everything is still gonna be elegantly creepy?
Kathie Olivas: Always.
Brandt Peters: That's never gonna change.
The Stranger Factory
1431 NM-313 B, Algodones
Open weekends 11am to 4pm
