The former Al’s Transmission on North 7th held its grand reopening as Alchemy & Earth Gallery last Friday, drawing an estimated 200 attendees across the monthly art walk. The space retains its original concrete floors and hydraulic lift, now repurposed as a display platform for reclaimed barn wood sculptures. Owner Maya Hensley, who relocated from Portland in 2021, described the renovation as “honoring the industrial lineage while inviting feminine reclamation.”

“I feel like the lift holds the energy of all the trucks that passed through,” Hensley said, adjusting a quartz cluster near the register. “Now it holds a $4,200 driftwood mandala. That’s alchemy.” The mandala sold within 45 minutes to a couple from Big Sky who declined to give their names but mentioned they winter in Costa Rica.

Down the block, the longtime Frame & Canvas Gallery featured watercolors by Tom Vandevelde, 78, who has painted the Bridgers from his porch on Durston since 1972. His works were priced between $300 and $800. “Used to be you’d trade a painting for a side of beef or a cord of wood,” Vandevelde said, sipping sparkling water from a compostable cup. “Now I take Venmo. The beef was easier to store.”

A pop-up kombucha bar operated from a converted horse trailer in the alley, offering flights named Grounding, Expansion, and Sovereign. The line stretched past the new luxury condo construction where the old Miller cottage stood until March. Nobody mentioned the cottage. The condos start at $1.2 million and face the mountains Vandevelde paints.

City Commissioner Sarah Holmquist attended briefly, telling reporters the arts district “embodies our community’s creative vitality.” Her opponent in the November race, a third-generation electrician, was seen loading a purchased mandala into a Subaru with a “Native Montanan” bumper sticker.

The hydraulic lift holds the mandala at exactly the height of the Bridger ridge line.