June 24, 2004

A new home for art in the Village opens

New Assistant Fire Chief Denny Powell joined Miami Township Fire-Rescue in 1989 as a student at Antioch College and was promoted to the full-time position in April.

Local residents Michael Jones and Karen Shirley, principals of the new Shirley/Jones Gallery, want to spark a passion, light a fire and create a movement of art lovers who like to see the definition of art pushed past the edge.

The more people seriously interested the better, said Jones, who thinks the area needs a gallery to support not-so-popular art that makes you think and feel.

“We’d like to create something important, vigorous, difficult,” he said. “There’s serious art out there that deals with complex, difficult ideas that are hard to take, and we’re not afraid to bring it in.”

Jones, a sculptor and ceramic artist, first came up with the idea of turning the old Ehman’s garage and equipment store at 235 Corry Street into a gallery a year ago after the building’s owner, Burnell Ehman, died. The building, squat and square, could be considered dull, he said, but it fit with his aesthetic preference for minimalism and promised to complement the kind of art he and his partner, Shirley, a former Antioch College art professor, envisioned for Yellow Springs.

Financing the project was initially an issue, but when he explained his ideas to his longtime friend John Hawke, a former silversmith turned high-powered stock broker, Hawke agreed to purchase the building and let Jones turn his vision into reality. Hawke purchased the property from Mike Ehman, Burnell Ehman’s son, on July 1, 2003, and Jones and Shirley spent the year remodeling.

Today the building looks somewhat like it has for the past 50 years. It’s still squat and square and has a large front window. But the couple has rebuilt every feature except the original metal post and beam frame Burnell Ehman built for his garage.

They poured a cement slab floor, put on a new rubber roof, added all new windows, doors, insulation and interior pilasters, and stuccoed the exterior walls. The usual snags of any remodelling project have pushed their opening date back several times, but with the gallery’s first show, featuring artwork by Michael Fajans, scheduled to open this week, Jones and Shirley are making a push to be ready for the artist reception on Friday, June 25, from 6 to 9 p.m. The show will be on display through July 31.

As an Antioch College student, Fajans organized a public mural painting group in Yellow Springs that included Jones. He went on to complete large-scale public mural commissions, including three 90-by-80-foot panels, which will soon be installed in the Seattle Federal Court Building. Jones calls Fajans, who is now based in Seattle, a “staunch populist” who experiments with the unselfconscious image of a person in thought and the self-consciousness that it evokes for the viewer.

To be sure, Jones and Shirley want to support experimental art that strikes a chord with people’s emotions, as Jones said, and “reaches beyond the confines of physical objects.” They are interested in some political art and have reserved the month of August each year for an exhibit promoting peace. But the political bent is only secondary to Jones, who says that he hopes to revitalize ideas from the late ’70s and early ’80s when artists used sound, projected beams of light and created sculptures that brought the exhibition space itself into the art piece.

“In the second half of the 20th century there was an explosion of knowledge in the sciences, and some artists have been interested in exploring ways in which these frontiers might run parallel to their art,” Jones said. “The best art isn’t illustrative but is somehow related to other things.”

The gallery principals also plan to host exhibits that public galleries might not carry because of adult content, level of abstraction or sheer size of the pieces. The gallery property includes swaths of grass that fade into gravel for parking on either side of the building. Jones hopes to use the lawn for large-scale sculptures. He has even bigger ideas for the space in Beatty Hughes Park across the street, where he envisions an audience could sit and view a projection through the gallery’s large front picture window.

The gallery will work with many obscure artists, Jones said, and therefore prices “won’t be astronomical.” Jones expects to feature about eight exhibits per year and so far has the gallery scheduled through December. He said he hopes people will get excited about the art the gallery shows and that the energy will build momentum for art in the area in general.

Jones said he mounted over 200 exhibits as the curator for galleries at Wright State University and the University of Akron from 1978–1991. But for most of that time, he could never tell if those who came to see the art actually got excited and passionate about what they saw and experienced.

With his own gallery, Jones and Shirley want to see if it is possible to draw out a small body of passionate collectors to fuel a small explosion of art that keeps pushing further and further from the edge.

—Lauren Heaton