YES owner Leigh Medeiros held her opening reception last month in the space on Water Street, which was once the studio of author and illustrator David Macauley. Below, two oil paintings by artist Cynthia Guild.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

The cutest little building in Warren just became home to a sweet new art gallery named YES, and it already looks like a match made in heaven. Leigh Medeiros took up residence earlier this year in the Water Street building that had once been the studio of illustrator/author David Macaulay, and last month she held her opening reception. The building, which dates to 1883, has rows of eye-catching arched windows on two floors and a roof that slopes back steeply, making the front look like a façade on a stage-set.

One Forty Six Water Street has always been a building that makes you smile when you look at it, and now that it’s been freshened up with pale green paint highlighted with coral, it’s more endearing than ever. It’s just the place to showcase the quirky contemporary artworks that now grace its walls: mixed media shadow boxes by Jim Henderson, playful paintings by Japanese artist Kana Ito, found-object metal lamps by Lisa Nolan, and richly detailed framed photographs of plants by Gene Gort, among others.

Even though Warren has for some time been gaining a reputation as an artists’ colony, YES Gallery + Studio is only the second art gallery in town, the other being Imago, a cooperative gallery run by local artists in the Cutler Mills building off Child Street.

The two galleries make a good pair because while Imago specializes in the work of local artists, Yes represents some 30 from around the world and the country, including a few from Rhode Island. Most of the artists represented don’t have their work in any other Rhode Island gallery. Works on view include small sculptures such as sandblasted bronzes (by Jim Henderson), pottery, prints, framed photographs, paintings and Nolan’s lamps. Prices range from under $100 to over $1,000. Because the gallery is in a tax-free arts district in Warren, buyers don’t pay sales tax.

Medeiros, who is herself an artist, is concentrating on the gallery for the moment, but expects eventually to have some of her own mixed-media artwork for sale there.

She grew up in East Greenwich and in ’94 graduated from the University of Hartford with a BFA. For several years after that, she worked at Block Island’s Eisenhauer Gallery, beginning as an assistant and ending as its director. (The gallery has since moved to Martha’s Vineyard.)

A new show opens Friday, with a wine-and-cheese reception from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.

The show is titled “Birdbrained/Harebrained,” and 10 percent of sales will go to support the Rhode Island Audubon Society. The following week, on May 17 at 2 p.m. (weather permitting), an Audubon naturalist will present a program including a live owl in the garden courtyard behind the gallery. There will also be a silent auction of an owl painting from the YES collection, from which 100 percent of the proceeds also will go to Audubon. It is Medeiros’s plan to create a charitable tie-in for every new exhibition at YES.

YES Gallery + Studio, 146 Water St., Warren. (401) 245-7174; www.yesgalleryandstudio.com. Open Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.,

and Sat. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

After Memorial Day, open Sunday afternoons.

kimbrie@projo.com