Arts & Entertainment

After 15 Years, Tyme Gallery To Close Its Doors

The Tyme Gallery will be closing its doors Saturday, Sept. 8.

For Edna Davis, she is .

And closing that chapter in her life will not be easy for her.

During a phone interview with The Haverford-Havertown Patch, Davis said that closing the art gallery on Eagle Road was not taken lightly. The email that she sent to her contacts Thursday afternoon to inform them of her decision—which is how Patch first discovered the news—took her about a month to write she admitted to Patch.

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“Due to ongoing health problems and two upcoming surgeries it is with much sadness and a very heavy heart that I am announcing as of September 8th 2012 Tyme Gallery is closing,” Davis wrote in the email.

The Havertown resident said that after 15 years in Haverford Township she will be closing the store due to health reasons. Starting in October of this year she will have the first of two operations to replace both her knees.

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But since Davis suffers an autoimmune disease, which also causes stress in her life and sometimes prevents her from working full time she explained, having her knees replaced will be even more of a challenge for her, she said.

Now the 60-year-old Davis said that while closing her beloved gallery was a hard decision for her, it was not hard for her to decide not to sell it to anyone.

“I don’t want to sell. I am the Tyme Gallery. I don’t want anyone running it,” she said as her voice broke with emotion while speaking over the phone.

What makes it harder for her to close the gallery is that people are still discovering it, she said.

And she said that it is too bitter sweet to recall the wonderful times she had with the gallery, she stated.

“I can’t go through the memories or I would cry,” Davis said as her voice quivered.

But there is one memory that she was able to vaguely share, which was when she took eight artists from her gallery to the Venezuelan Embassy in New York City for a show in February of 2005.

While she opened the Tyme Gallery on Aug. 15, 1997, the mother of two adult sons said that although her previous careers may seem vastly different from one another, she insist that there is a connection that eventually formed her gallery.

In her first career she was an x-ray technician, a job that offered her the thrills that come from working in an emergency room that she still misses. She said that she took that job to help put her husband through college.

Davis said that once she finished with that one chapter in her life, she went back to college where she majored in behavioral science where she found employment as a social worker once she graduated. Davis worked with young children who came from troubled backgrounds and she used a camera to take pictures of them.

And once that chapter finished, she started the Tyme Gallery, but the grandmother of two boys said that photography took some form and played an important role in all of her past and current careers.

“It’s all an evolution,” she said, adding that photography has shaped her life.

But she plans to create a new chapter in her life though.

“I do intend to reinvent myself after the surgeries,” Davis cryptically said, without giving any hints as to what the next metamorphosis will be.


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