Little Arthouse on the Prairie

TWO BLOCKS EAST OF THE SOLE STOPLIGHT on Main Street, just past the Icehouse Restaurant and the First Christian Church, that’s where you’ll find it: an unassuming, two-story limestone building veiled in a curtain of mesquite trees. A passing motorist could be forgiven for zooming right on by.

But through a set of glass doors, the Old Jail Art Center, so named for the old-timey county jail that serves as its anchor, reveals itself to be a 17,000-square-foot compound of polished stone floors, high ceilings and painstakingly curated galleries. There’s also an in-house woodworking shop and a reading room with more than 3,000 art books and periodicals. The center is notably distinct from the slice of West Central Texas immediately outside its walls, where the tiny town of Albany and the sprawling ranches that surround it appear a little rough around the edges. Down the street from the museum, there’s a Dollar General with 19th-century metal hooks still in the sidewalk out front — a hitching post for shoppers inclined to travel to the store by horseback.

Steve Waller, a mustachioed rancher who runs a bank