Georgene Riedl

Georgene Riedl is the owner/director of Cross Rip Gallery in Harwich Port, a fine art gallery featuring abstract and figurative art by well-established and emerging Cape Cod artists. Riedl opened the gallery in 2017 in an 1830’s Cape which has been in her family for 50 years and uniquely displays art in a residential setting so that visitors can more readily visualize art in their own homes.

Georgene Riedl spent the early years of her life in central Massachusetts and graduated from Anna Maria College in 1970 with a BA in English Literature. After traveling in Europe and the United States, she opened Port World Travel Center in Harwich Port in 1972 which worked with individual and group clients, such as the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Insurance Agents of Cape Cod as well as handling the Dennis-Yarmouth High School band’s trip to the Rose Parade in the late 1980’s. During the 25 years which she owned the travel agency, she developed fundraising venues for different organizations and hosted public events for the traveling community. In addition to managing the office, she also was in charge of all the promotion for the agency including voicing radio advertisements and writing a travel column for a WQRC newsletter.

After selling her travel agency in 1997, she opened an art-garden oriented business in Brewster with her partner, Ralph S. MacKenzie, called Moss Cottage. MacKenzie created one-of-a-kind garden containers and sculptures while Riedl handled the business aspects and did container and garden design. In 2008, they discontinued the business due to the downturn in the economy and Riedl concentrated on the family property in Harwich Port and its rental units which she now owned.

It was during the operation of Moss Cottage that Riedl nurtured a visual artistic side of herself and began painting, as her earlier life had been focused on literary pursuits, having written poetry from an early age and attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference with mentor Howard Nemerov in the 1980’s. Learning to work with colors, composition, and textures in garden design tapped a new source of creativity and her interest in painting put her in touch with the visual artist community on Cape Cod. Her awareness of the need for artists to have outlets to display and sell imaginative work became the motivation for the opening of Cross Rip Gallery.

Georgene has served on the WOMR Board of Directors shince 2018