"Let's do the right thing first," Bellevue high-rise developer John Su said in 2007, "and then see where that is leading us."

Su and the ingenious local and international artists and curators he bankrolled for more than three years did the right thing—and it led to this point: The strong program they created, Open Satellite, will be dead by the end of the month. (Saturday is the last day to see Mitzi Pederson's installation the still night air.)

Su was a prince to do Open Satellite, paying probably near to $1 million for the about $250,000-a-year-budget contemporary art gallery that changed shows quarterly. Each quarter a new artist came to stay for about two months in an apartment above the first-floor, glassed-in gallery, spending that time imagining and then creating a temporary installation for the first floor.

Each installation (and each residency) was different, but for the most part, the art that materialized was magical—and often it related to its immediate environment: Bellevue, with its rapid, dramatic development, and its reputation for being a cultural wasteland compared to the urban center of Seattle. The first exhibition, by LA-based artist Olga Koumoundouros, was a tender homage to the more modest suburban Bellevue that's disappearing—one day, wandering outside the Open Satellite tower to find a cafe, she came across two condemned ranch homes squatting in the shadows of new luxury high-rise towers all around them. She saved a segment of one of their roofs, and used it to build a makeshift dwelling inside the gallery. She printed limited-edition posters with slogans like "Beyond Living Just"—a twist on "Beyond Just Living," the catchphrase Su Development used on the building that housed Open Satellite, called 989 Elements. (The building's tag line is still "For Artful Living.")

Probably the highlight of Open Satellite's three-plus years was the late 2009 residency of Meiro Koizumi, a Japanese artist who came to Bellevue and immediately went to work on creating an installation that referenced Bellevue's history as a home for Japanese strawberry farmers before the internment—as well as the current situation he found, where he noticed migrant workers looking for work outside nearby Home Depot. Meiro decided to hire one, an undocumented immigrant who appeared in a video learning and singing the American anthem with a hot dog stuffed in his mouth while fields of strawberry plants grew inside planters that nearly covered the gallery's floor of nearly 2,000 square feet.

Heather and Ivan Morison of England bisected the double-height gallery with an almost entirely freestanding screen of charred wood. Their Frost King was in honor of the first kite ever to carry a human being aloft.

Just months before, a 50-foot long Godzilla you could walk inside, made of salvaged construction materials, had laid across that same floor, created by the peripatetic artist-architect team SIMPARCH.

Artists came from Brazil, Brooklyn, Portland, Philadelphia, and California, covering the walls with paintings, turning the room into small new worlds. On display at one point were meticulously crafted building models by renowned architect Steven HollBrad Cloepfil. There were 15 shows in all.

If Su was the prince who made all this happen, then this Cinderella story ends after the ball—there's no slipper scene.

In January, Open Satellite incorporated as a nonprofit and hoped to start raising money from outside sources—but even with a hefty dose of optimism, it would have needed much more time for a shot at succeeding, said current director Yoko Ott.

"It’s like, you know, we started working on this too late," Ott said. "And the business plan and rethinking about the business plan happened too late. It should have been worked on from day one."

It was under discussion from day one, Ott and founding director Abigail Guay agreed.

"I can say that I believe everyone involved wanted it to be sustainable," Guay said. She added that Open Satellite didn't have much of an Eastside audience. She, like Ott, worked hard to make Open Satellite what it was, and tried to reach out both to Seattle and to Bellevue.

But there was nearly always disagreement about what the business plan for Open Satellite should be amongst the parties involved, including Su, the directors, and founding artists Annie Han and Bellevue-born Daniel Mihalyo (the Stranger Genius-winning Seattle-based pair of artist-architects who go by the name Lead Pencil Studio; Su approached them after reading about them in Architectural Record—they hit it off, and Han and Mihalyo are still involved).

"There were several thoughts, and competing thoughts, and I think that the different ways that we went about it, well, they didn’t contribute to allowing us enough time," Mihalyo said. "First, we thought we would do it simply privately, without going nonprofit, and of course we started to do that right as the recession was in full effect."

Open Satellite commissioned and offered for sale limited-edition works (still available) by visiting as well as local artists including Victoria Haven, Jeffry Mitchell, Maki Tamura, Eli Hansen, Gretchen Bennett, and Dan Webb. Ott and Guay organized outside rentals and events; Ott also put out two full publications.

"Then we decided to become nonprofit, and it just became obvious that we weren’t going to get enough money to keep it exactly the way it was, and I don’t think anybody was willing to see it be a shadow of itself," Mihalyo said. "I think John really did want to see it get to a place where it could become more self-sustaining, and he and we felt that was probably going to require an additional two years of support, and I think the economic reality was just pointing directly away from that."

Frustratingly, this is the second job Ott has lost for economic reasons. She was laid off by the Frye Art Museum in 2008 despite having created innovative education programs joining teens directly with working artists both local and national.

"I’m proud of what we did do, and I really commend John’s dedication," Ott said. "In reality, he could have plulled the plug a lot earlier—a lot earlier—because it was clear for a long time that it wasn’t going to be commercially viable."

And Su is a businessman who, from the beginning, admitted to knowing very little about contemporary art, and approaching its non-businesslike economic conditions warily.

Su returned a call for comment, but declined to say anything about what happened. He said the gallery space will be rented out commercially. (Despite the economic crisis, Su still has projects underway; he specializes in the apartment market, which is relatively strong compared to condos.) Su seemed to hint that he may be working on an art project in the future—but one that serves a business model may do little more than that.

The fact is, it was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the memories, Open Satellite.