In a narrow space off Main St. in Northampton, a skinny building is crammed in next to the former Haymarket Cafe, which closed in 2024. There’s no sign above the door, but a piece of paper reading “Visions Video” is taped to it. To its left is a wide paneled window with a display case. Here at 183 Main St. lies one of the few video stores in Massachusetts: Visions Video.
The light navy-blue walls of the tiny space are lined with shelves of DVDs, VHS tapes, vintage movie posters and handwritten signs marking shelf numbers. Between the winding shelves lie worn, muted rugs and directors’ folding chairs.
George Myers sits in a wooden folding chair in front of the checkout counter at the video store, which opened in January. He wears clear glasses and short brown hair with a necklace bearing a golden emblem draped around his neck. The store is quiet on a late Tuesday night in April. Stacks of returned DVDs line the front counter, and shelves of empty DVD cases surround it. The amount of media in the store is dizzying.
Everett, Massachusetts, best known as the home of the Encore Boston Harbor, lies a few miles north of Boston lies the city of. Everett was far from the tight-knit small-town sense of community Myers would later find in Western Massachusetts.
Myers grew up playing sports, but he points to DIY concerts as the experiences that ultimately reshaped his path. His passion for the DIY scene developed alongside his cousin Justin, a fellow Melrose native, as the two began attending punk, funk and ska shows in Boston, eventually booking gigs and performing on their own.
After high school, Myers planned to escape to sunny San Francisco to become an artist. Still, he decided to apply to one college just in case he ever changed direction, the University of Massachusetts. Myers felt an immediate connection to the university. He recalls driving out of Boston and feeling the comfort and freedom in “the door closing behind him,” pushing him toward the kind of community fostered in the Pioneer Valley.
By the early 2000s, Myers had become deeply embedded in the local arts world. Packed into tiny, sweaty rooms, surrounded by dozens of self-described “weirdos” from the Western Massachusetts DIY music scene, Myers performed in an experimental noise art band while also taking on nearly every other role the scene had to offer.
Myers was involved in a range of bands and activities during his time at UMass, running the UMass Poetry Society and forming an experimental noise group called Grey Skull, both with his friend Ben. The pair performed at open mics in Van Meter Residence Hall, house shows and even an on-campus festival in the field outside the student union. Grey Skull became an outlet for Myers.
Beyond Grey Skull, Myers found solace in performance art. He recalls one open mic night when he sloppily played a Hank Williams song while Ben slowly poured house paint over him. “We got paint on the floor, and people were so mad at us, rightly so, and I had to try to get the paint off my body. It was just so dumb,” Myers said, laughing.
He was a student, concert attendee, booker, performer and organizer. Myers found a sense of belonging in the Valley that had felt harder to access growing up in Everett. As a student, he took full advantage of the community-centered opportunities in the area and began to recognize and appreciate the network of spaces that sustained the region’s creative culture: friends and collaborators at Hampshire College, venues like the Flywheel Arts Collective and the broader accessibility of a tight-knit community built around DIY music.
Amherst’s smaller scale lowers the stakes for experimentation and makes community formation easier. The local arts scene relies heavily on word-of-mouth, creating faster and more organic connections between artists, organizers and audiences. For Myers, these institutional spaces became the foundation for a much broader life in community arts.
The accessibility Myers found at UMass made the university feel less like a campus and more like a community. The university’s rooms, basements, galleries and student funding structures offered low-risk ways to test ideas publicly, whether through music performances, poetry readings or collaborative events.
After graduating from UMass, Myers felt a connection to the Pioneer Valley that urged him to stay in the area.
Today, Myers still wears many hats: he runs the blog Musical Episode, which highlights American soul music; works as a DJ; co-founded the Northampton Print and Book Fair; serves as Arts and Management President of the Northampton Arts Council; works as general manager at The Quarters arcade in Hadley; programs films at Amherst Cinema and, most recently, co-founded Visions Video.
Yet, sustaining community space has become harder. “It’s so hard to run a business and make it work,” Myers said. “People just don’t want to take the risks. Everybody gets priced out. It’s unaffordable for people to have a job where they work 35 hours a week part-time, even minimum wage, and afford or create anything. It feels very hard.”
By prioritizing nonprofit and privately run organizations that rely on outside funding, Myers helps sustain a network of third spaces that now make up a significant part of the Valley’s arts community. His focus is not on generating profit, but on continuing his long-term commitment to building a more connected community.
For Myers, the value of these spaces lies in what happens when strangers are brought together. Reflecting on the weekly events hosted at The Quarters, he described the audience as a sort of living ecosystem.
“If you teleported all 40 people in that room into a white, empty cube, and you had to figure out how they were connected, you couldn’t do it,” Myers said. “It’s almost like a biology thing, like your biome … it literally fundamentally changes you. Having a space where you invite really anyone in can really affect you.”
That perspective shapes how Myers understands DIY and nonprofit arts spaces more broadly. Along the increasingly commercialized stretch of North Pleasant and Amity streets, he sees these spaces as resisting the logic of commodification.
“Everything’s expensive. Everything is turned into a commodity,” Myers said. “I don’t want to live by those rules. Once people turn a public space into something other than pavements or a telephone pole, you begin that process of redefining things.”
At Amherst Cinema, Myers served as both general manager and programmer for nearly 14 years, from 2009 to 2022. He stepped down from his role as General Manager in 2022 and now works exclusively as a programmer. He co-founded the Bellwether Series with Luke Meyer, a program that highlights nonfiction and experimental films while bringing filmmakers to engage with audiences in person. Myers explained that at the screenings, “You can have really meaningful conversations with directors and subjects in the film. A lot of those films aren’t getting picked up for distribution. You can’t get them on a streaming service. So these screens are sometimes one of the few times they’re going to play in this area.”
In recent years, the work has become more precarious. COVID-19 disrupted the third spaces Myers fostered to build community, and political budget cuts have made sustaining nonprofit arts organizations more difficult. In 2025, a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant tied to Amherst Cinema was reduced by two-thirds, threatening the cinema’s ability to provide hospitality for visiting filmmakers and maintain programming. Partnerships with Hotel UMass helped keep the series alive.
Upon his departure as General Manager at Amherst Cinema, he aspired to establish a video rental store somewhere in the Pioneer Valley. Throughout its early development, Myers turned to his fellow arts advocates and creators to help him execute his plan. For years, he would meet with his co-founders until Visions Video finally opened its doors to the public on June 27, 2025.
Today, Visions Video is on track to become a 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt non-profit organization. A massive expansion is also expected for Visions Video over the summer, opening its space into the old home of Haymarket Cafe. But even in its pop-up stage, Visions Video stands as a landmark for community, cinephiles and the overall well-being of Northampton.
Two people wearing mellow autumn colors burst into Visions Video, at 9 p.m. and browsed the small room, gathering a small stack of DVDs. They murmured to one another, carefully inspecting every shelf.
After browsing through Visions Video for nearly 20 minutes, the two customers approached the counter, to which Myers readily and passionately jumped from his seat to cash them out. Myers noticed one of the boxes was beaten up a bit, so he replaced the case.
He talked with the customers for a few minutes as he checked in their returns and marked out the pile of movies they were renting out. He excitedly talked to the customers about Cats, “Yeah. A friend of mine was just looking for some stuff, and he kept asking me for stuff that we didn’t have, which I hate. It’s a real pet peeve of mine. But I was like, just give it two months.”
Once the couple left, Myers sifted through the returned DVDs. “The people who just came in rented one of those movies someone on our advisory board suggested. It’s called A Haunted Cop Shop.” The disc was a Hong Kong import, its packaging entirely in Cantonese.
That kind of direct connection, Myers says, has changed him personally.
Myers recalls a therapy session where he told his therapist, “‘Oh, I feel pretty good, I think it’s actually just the video store.’”
The routine of running Visions Video has become grounding for Myers. “Twice a week, I’m there, and I get to meet like 30 strangers,” he said. “But I can get engaged with people really directly, you know, I’m basically impacting their lives. That’s the point.”
Crissy Saucier can be reached at [email protected].
