The former and new owners of a downtown Wilmington art gallery worked together Friday to prepare for a new show and the gallery’s 30th anniversary.

Merrimon Kennedy said Friday afternoon that she sold the gallery to Miriam and Lance Oehrlein a couple weeks ago as she prepares to retire from being at the helm for 27 years.

“I’ve reached the age where I’m ready to have the opportunity to enjoy being on the creative side,” Kennedy said Friday. “I’ve always been so busy selling other people’s art that I never had time to really pursue my own art interests. I felt like it was now or never.”

Kennedy, who is in her early 60s, said she and her husband, Tom, will likely travel first before she gets to work, some of which will include collaborations with her spouse, also an artist.

The gallery moved to 201 Princess St. from North Front Street three years ago, said Kennedy, who bought New Elements from Lizabeth and Tom Calenberg in 1988. New Elements leases the space from owner Wais Sutton LLC.

Miriam Oehrlein, a jewelry designer whose work is featured in New Elements, said her husband, a local assistant district attorney, was the main impetus for the purchase, the financial details of which were undisclosed.

Kennedy had sent a letter to the gallery’s artists letting them know that she planned to retire, and when Miriam Oehrlein shared the news at home, “my husband turned to me and said, ‘That would be a great job for you. You should call her' … So I did, and that’s how it all started because it’s not something that I probably would have thought of doing on my own.”

Since then Kennedy has been helping the new owners get to know the business. Miriam Oehrlein said she traveled with Kennedy on a buying trip recently to Philadelphia.

“It was nice because a lot of the things she was responding to, I was responding to as well,” Oehrlein said. “We had great conversations about what appeals to us, what appeals to our clients, and so that was a great learning experience.”

Working downtown appealed to Oehrlein, who said she and her husband chose a house in the Beaumont neighborhood because of its proximity to downtown.

“I think that the downtown area is becoming really revitalized – the moving in of the microbreweries and all the places that are opening up over in the Brooklyn Arts District. We felt like this was a really good time to be a downtown merchant especially,” she said.

The New Elements Gallery’s 30th anniversary celebration, and the opening of the gallery’s new show called Primavera, begins at 6 p.m. tonight, and Wilmington mayor Bill Saffo is expected to attend to commemorate the milestone with a ceremonial cake-cutting. The festivities are also part of this evenings’s Fourth Friday Gallery Night, coordinated by the Arts Council of Wilmington & New Hanover County.