The Carrack Modern Art gallery at 111 W. Parrish St. in downtown Durham looks like many other spaces devoted to art.

But the Carrack has an unusual business model.

It’s a commission-free gallery that lets artists pocket 100 percent of their sales – most galleries take a 10 percent to 40 percent cut – and counts on community donations to pay for its space.

“I feel really strongly that artists should not have to pay for space to show their work if it’s good work,” said Laura Ritchie, 24, the Carrack’s co-founder, partner and curator.

A Kickstarter campaign and donations raised $12,000 for 2012. Now the Carrack is looking to 2013. Its new annual fundraiser, “Community Color,” ended a week of events with a gala last weekend.

Artists donated original work for a live auction with all of the proceeds going to the gallery. Dan Ariely, a New York Times bestselling author and behavioral economist at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, led the auction.

Before the event, Ritchie said she hoped the gala would help keep the gallery going.

“Our model is completely idealistic, and I think very possible,” she said. “But I think it’s going to take some time to get our message out to enough people to make it work.”

Funky scene

Lindsay Gordon, artist services manager at the Durham Arts Council, said the Carrack serves an exceptional spot in the region’s art scene.

The Carrack “is a home for everything that’s funky and experimental and unique and underground in Durham,” she said. “What Durham would be losing (if the Carrack closed) is like an art start-up in a sense.”

For site-specific dance artist Alexis Mastromichalis, the Carrack provides a temporary home for diverse work.

“We haven’t had an open space like this,” said Mastromichalis, who created installation art and performed an interactive dance at the gallery during the fundraiser.

Sold pieces included a digital graphic design print by FRANCO, an acrylic on canvas by Saba Barnard and a photographic print by Michelle Gonzales-Green – all artists who have benefitted from the artist-focused gallery.

Risk taking

The Carrack’s commission-free model is risky but also its foundation.

Ritchie was a UNC-Chapel Hill art graduate with dreams of curating when she joined John Wendelbo of the Durham Sculpture Project two years ago to develop a different kind of art project.

Wendelbo said he wanted to “shift the collective community conscience of how an art project could be funded and completed.”

Ritchie saw a future for the space beyond the sculpture project. The Parrish Street room, she said, was “begging to be a gallery.”

While Wendelbo sculpts full time, Ritchie juggles jobs as an art teacher, co-gallery coordinator and research assistant. She works at the Carrack for free, but it’s her passion.

The fundraiser brought in more than $12,000 for the gallery’s 2013 year, but the Carrack needs $50,000 a year to help make it the best it can be. The money would give Ritchie a salary so she could focus on the project full time, as well as pay for an art hanging system, lighting system, artist support budget, competitive rent and signs.

The live auction format did not go as well as Ritchie hoped, but she plans on working out different ways to make future fundraisers more successful.

As she sits in a vintage, flower-print dress at her cluttered desk in the art-filled space, she’s proud of how far the Carrack has come and optimistic that more money will come.

“It’ll happen,” she said