It’s Monday. Five days before the new exhibit opens. And the group gathered at Julia’s Gallery for Young Artists has a lot of work to do.

It’s quiet – no time to talk. In one room, gallery coordinator Erin Dorey measures, mats and frames. In the next, Erin’s sister Kinley hauls out a 5-gallon drum of paint and covers the nail holes that she patched over the weekend. Briana Borkowski and Rose Jeffers take turns measuring walls and paintings, calculating dimensions on Post-it notes, marking the walls with pencil dots, nailing in hooks, and using an eraser to ensure that the crisp, white paint remains flawless.

“The center of every piece has to be exactly the same,” Briana explains.

At Julia’s Gallery in Rockland, everything is precise, from the color of the mats to the paint on the walls to the blond wood frames. They do things right. Usually the first time. Because that’s the way galleries are supposed to be.

But Julia’s isn’t like most galleries. Here, the average age of the staff is 16. Most of the artists are in high school. And though Julia’s is an arm of the Farnsworth Art Museum, the teenagers call the shots. The gallery will hold an opening reception for its latest exhibit, “Walk Forward Look Back,” from 1 to 4 p.m. today.

“Julia’s Gallery for Young Artists is an outstanding place,” said Olney Atwell, a freshman at the University of Maine who served as the gallery’s co-coordinator last year. “It is one of the few places where a teenager’s art can be fully appreciated, a teenager’s voice can really be heard, and most of all a teenager’s presence can valued as an asset to the community instead of a detriment.”

The gallery was started so that teens who were interested in the arts would have a place that they could call their own. A place where they could come together after school to hang out

with like-minded people. A place where they could really experience every aspect of the arts, from painting to paychecks, and not feel like they were at the baby sitter’s.

“They have a huge responsibility here,” said Amy Philbrook, 24, a member of the Farnsworth’s education staff who oversees Julia’s. “For the most part, if there’s a problem, they’re going to deal with all of it. If they need help I’m here, but I don’t necessarily give direct instructions.”

When the gallery prepared for its first show, which opened in June 2001, the young artists worked more closely with museum staff, who held workshops on framing and matting and provided curatorial assistance. The teens who have been with Julia’s Gallery since its inception, such as Erin Dorey, have passed along that knowledge to newcomers, and those newcomers are now seasoned veterans.

It’s a role Atwell remembers well.

“At the age of 17, I became a coordinator of a teen art gallery,” she said. “The fame that came with it all was uncanny. I signed letters with my name at the bottom, I was introduced to the board of directors, I was interviewed on TV and featured in a documentary. Even Jamie Wyeth came to Julia’s because he loved our gallery.”

From an administrative standpoint, Julia’s is reasonably autonomous. Financially, it is supported by grants from the Cawley Family Foundation, which was used to purchase the gallery building adjacent to the Farnsworth campus, and the Chichester du Pont Foundation. The gallery gets its name from the granddaughter of one of the benefactors.

And though the proceeds don’t go to the gallery, much of the work on exhibit is for sale – as it would be in any other gallery. At Julia’s, purchase receipts, invoices and bills of sale are among the teens’ responsibilities. For Erin Dorey, that’s part of the appeal. She loves art, but she’s more interested in the business side of the operation.

“I think working here helps in a lot of ways for a lot of different things,” said Dorey, a 16-year-old junior at Rockland District High School. “It’s a lot of fun if you’re actually into it. Some parts are a lot of work, but for the most part it’s fun.”

The work for the current show started in late September with a call for entries to area high schools. Things really picked up in the middle of October, as the work started pouring in. In late October, a group of eight volunteers, all girls, met with Philbrook and graphic designer James Bartick to determine which pieces would be featured on invitations for the opening.

They spread out all the work on the floor and tiptoed around it, being careful not to step on anything – especially the ceramic Buddha.

“I think it should be good and really eye-catching and it should go along with the theme,” Theresa Nowakowski, 15, told the group.

The other girls agreed. The Buddha was a favorite, but a clay mask made the cut instead, as did an oil pastel portrait, a vibrant collage and a watercolor landscape. They also liked Briana’s portrait of young actor Josh Hartnett.

“I tried to make it part of the past, because that was when he was in ‘Pearl Harbor,'” she explained, in keeping with the “Walk Forward Look Back” theme.

Once the decision was made, Bartick and Tiffany Lufkin, 16, got to work on the invitations. In another room, Freya Levett and Lufkin’s sister Deena, both 14, started cataloging the work, giving each piece a sticker and a number, which will be entered into the gallery’s computer later.

Freya picked up a black-and-white photograph of a garden gnome and closely examined it. She found dents in two places, and immediately marked them on a damage report.

“If the artist gets their work back and it’s damaged, we can tell them that was there when we got it,” Deena said. “It’s just a way to keep track of everything.”

Deena had work in the gallery’s first show and has been involved ever since.

“I got a call saying they need a little extra help, and I thought it would be a really good opportunity to learn how to do matting and framing,” she said.

Now she knows how to catalog, too. And her sister, who tagged along on that first meeting, now knows a bit about graphic design, even though her interests lie in science. Tiffany Lufkin said that even if she doesn’t pursue a career related to art, her experience at the gallery has been valuable.

“I love it,” Tiffany Lufkin said. “It’s like, I don’t know, I get to get a sense for what goes into the show behind the walls.”

On Monday, Tiffany also got a sense of what goes into the show on the walls. As her counterparts quickly worked to mend wall paint and measure the distance from the center of each photo or painting to the floor, she scrambled to match each work with its tag. The tags are exact replicas of the tags the Farnsworth hangs next to Andrew and Jamie Wyeth’s paintings. They list the artist’s name and date of birth, the title of the work and its medium.

In the adjacent room, Erin Dorey was hard at work matting. She was a little stressed out, but not letting it show. Over the weekend, she talked to her predecessors, Olney Atwell and Erykah Jeffers, and they reassured her.

When asked if she thought everything would come together on time, Dorey took a quick break from her work. Of course it would, she said. It always does.

“There’s hope,” she said. “We have to be ready. But it’s still a lot of work.”

Julia’s Gallery is located at 16 Museum St. in Rockland. For information, call 596-6457. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays and 3 to 5 p.m. weekdays.