Daniel A. Bruce photograph by Nancie Battaglia 

At first glance, Step Mother Nature looks like it could have been plucked from any downtown in the Adirondacks. The building dates back to the 1870s and has been carefully restored, with classic red wooden siding and light yellow trim. 

But look more closely, and you’ll notice a few oddities from the outside. There’s a boulder-sized, bright blue head sitting tilted on a bench out front. In a window, there’s a neon sign depicting two Winchester rifles crossed at the center. A massive pencil has been contorted into unnatural angles and hung on the side of the building.

Those are just a few of the works from more than 50 artists on display at the gallery, which is owned and curated by Daniel A. Bruce. 

If the art outside is meant to pique your interest, the inside’s eccentric floor-to-ceiling displays run the risk of overwhelming it. Bruce describes the diverse collection of art at Step Mother Nature as a kind of “cabinet of curiosities” that he curates by asking himself a series of questions: how do the works react to one another, how do they activate one another, not just color and compositionally, but also the content within the works? 

A portrait of two suckling pigs is hung below a painting of a pastoral landscape interrupted by a Cybertruck. Those works are next to an abstract, geometric piece bursting with overlapping colors. The store’s original built-in shelves and drawers display even more artwork: woven rugs, baskets, a kinetic light sculpture that cycles on and off every few minutes. 

The artists represented at Step Mother Nature come from within the Adirondack Park as well as around the world, including Australia and Ghana.

One of Bruce’s goals is to give visitors an “expanded view of the art world,” both through the style of art on display and the diversity of the artists represented in the gallery.

For Bruce, his emphasis on diversity is a product of the political moment, which he says can make him feel “sad and trapped, but this space and the sense of diversity here gives me hope.

“Especially in light of our current administration’s anti-DEI platform, diversity needs to be supported and celebrated at all costs because it’s what gives both nature and humanity its strength.”

While Bruce spent much of his adult life in New York City, he grew up in the North Country, starting in Altona before his family moved to Bloomingdale to be closer to his father’s job at the federal prison in Ray Brook.

“I was through and through a Bloomingdale boy,” says Bruce, who remembers his childhood fondly, with summers full of baseball games and mosquito bites.

When Bruce was 15, he came out as gay. “Artwork was a way for me to illustrate and express that part of me that I didn’t really understand and that wasn’t really accepted at the time.”

After graduating from high school, Bruce moved to Utica to study at Munson Art Institute, where he was introduced to an array of artistic modes, from 3D design to color theory to figure sculpture. He says that early introduction to diversity in the art world was pivotal.

He then earned a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), a “playground for artists,” as he describes it. At RISD, Bruce was exposed to an even wider range of artistic styles, further opening his eyes to the depth and breadth of the art world.

In his mid-20s, Bruce moved to New York City. “The buzz, the hum, the activity, the art—all of it excited me,” he says. “It just jazzed me to no end.” 

To make a living, he worked as an antique furniture dealer and an art handler at prestigious galleries in Chelsea. Meanwhile, Bruce was also making his own art.

A few of the neon signs on display at Step Mother Nature, including the two Winchester rifles crossed at the center in the front window, were part of a collection he created in 2011 called “Rustic Room.” That collection also included neon signs of a campfire, an Adirondack chair, and a deer’s head trophy. 

Like so many facets of life, the art world came to a screeching halt during the coronavirus pandemic. So Bruce did what countless others did during that time—he innovated and pivoted. He created Step Mother Nature while still living in the city, first as an online art gallery.

Bruce borrowed the name from a sculpture he had created. He liked the name’s obscurity and how it could be interpreted in different ways. “Is it Step Mother ... Nature? Or is it Step … Mother Nature?” says Bruce.

In 2022, Bruce took another leap of faith when he decided to leave New York City and move back home to the Adirondacks. “After 20 years, I grew very tired, and the same things that were exciting to me about the city actually gave me stress and anxiety.

“It was no longer healthy for the young country boy to be in the big city anymore.”

Bruce bounced around the Adirondacks for a while, faced with the reality that real estate within the Blue Line is often expensive and elusive. Then he noticed that the restored 1870s building in the center of Bloomingdale was available to rent.

Since it was an old country store, with original beadboard walls and shelves that ran from the front of the building all the way to the back, transforming it into an art gallery might have seemed like an impossible task. But Bruce didn’t see it that way.

“As an artist and as a sculptor, you find a way to embrace what you’re given. The fact that it wasn’t a white wall wasn’t a detriment. It was an opportunity.”

He added a few temporary walls in the center of the room to display special exhibits that he rotates through the gallery every few months. “One thing led to another and, like an artwork, the space turned into something of its own,” says Bruce, who describes himself as the gallery’s caretaker. “I’ve been tending to it ever since.”

Step Mother Nature is one of a handful of new businesses that have opened in Bloomingdale in the last decade, including Hex and Hop, a brewery across the street that began serving customers in 2019.

“Like any community, this community needs a jolt of artwork,” says Bruce. 

Step Mother Nature is open Wednesday through Friday evenings and during the day on Saturdays and Sundays. Bruce works full time at a furniture store in Saranac Lake, so the additional hours he spends at the gallery are a “labor of love.” 

Curating and managing an eclectic gallery in a tiny town in the Adirondacks is anything but easy. It’s also not lucrative. “I doubt myself every day,” says Bruce. “Am I spinning my wheels, am I wasting my time?”

But as an artist, Bruce knows that there are other, more meaningful ways to measure success. “Creative expression isn’t really about a dollar amount. It’s a daily practice. It’s a life lived.”    

Step Mother Nature is located at 1720 Route 3, in Bloomingdale. Learn more at www.stepmothernature.com.