Gray Room

It is easily missed: The work’s title fills only a small corner of the sign above the door, a parted curtain placed behind the space’s glass facade provides a narrowed view of the room and there was never any official announcement of its arrival back in January.

“It’s organic,” Naté told The Daily Progress, sitting in the lobby of the residential section of the building. “If you see it, lucky you.”

Before traveling down south, Naté’s “Gray Room” was on display at Mana Contemporary, an art center in Jersey City, New Jersey. Though the space it exists in now is different from its previous location, Naté said she believes the ever-evolving “Gray Room” fits in with the creative environment she has curated in the building, both for residents and the public.

“I’m really happy that being an owner, developer and artist that people inside this building get to live amongst art,” she said. “There’s a value to me in that, so how interesting that I can take it outside.”

Since coming to Charlottesville, the ever-evolving “Gray Room” has grown with the addition of a bar cart that Naté rescued from the building’s trash room after a tenant moved out.

“I didn’t want to put them in the garbage, I didn’t want to put them in the landfill, I didn’t want to contribute to that,” she said.

How long “The Gray Room” will be on display is not clear — an unknown that Naté credits both to the “organic” nature of her art as well as real estate demands.

“It’s here until it’s not here,” said Naté. “When the time is right, and the right person belongs there, I’ll take it out. It shouldn’t live there forever, no art installation should. When it’s time to go, it’ll go. It’ll tell me when it’s time to go, I don’t have a set time.”