November 17, 2005

By Lauren Heaton

For those who reminisce about the days when the Yellow Springs Opera House was a bustling center of activity for the arts, the days of pining may be numbered.

Last week the Morgan Family Foundation purchased the historic home of the Corbet family, known as the “Barr House,” at Xenia Avenue and Limestone Street, in hopes that it might one day become a community performing arts center.

Vicki Morgan, the foundation’s treasurer, said it has been a fantasy of hers and her husband, Lee Morgan, that the community have a space where performing and visual artists could exhibit their work and the community could experience it.

Knowing community members have scrambled to find suitable locations, including the local school buildings, Center Stage and the Antioch Theater as performance spaces, the Morgans decided to buy a property with a central location that they thought might serve well as an arts center.

Vicki Morgan said beyond purchasing the property, the foundation has no intention of deciding what’s to become of it.

“What the foundation did was buy a piece of property and hold it to provide an opportunity for the community to identify its needs and to evolve a response to those needs,” she said.

Lori Kuhn, the foundation’s executive director, said that though the foundation is “not in the business of sitting on property, we’re willing to sit on it” for the next couple of years while the community decides how to use it.

“This is not the Morgan Family Foundation purchasing the building to build a performing arts center,” she said. “We aren’t going to be the sole funders. There needs to be other donors willing to support this, but there’s an opportunity for us to play a role.”

An informal group of individuals and organizations calling itself the Arts Center Working Group has been meeting weekly since midsummer to discuss the possibilities of establishing an arts center in the village, according to Mary Campbell-Zopf, a spokesperson for the group.

Other members include Hardy Ballantine, Aurelia Blake, Jerome Borchers, Chris Hill, Michael Cannon, Tony Dallas, John Fleming, Beth Holyoke, Mary Rogero and Louise Smith, who together represent the theater and arts programs in the Yellow Springs schools and Antioch College, Yellow Springs Arts Council, YS Kids Playhouse, and individual artists, directors, playwrights, parents and interested community members.

Campbell-Zopf stressed that the purchase of the Barr House occurred independently of the working group, whose members have just begun to explore the possibilities for the look, feel, location and purpose of an arts center.

“It’s too early to link our work with this property. No one knows if it would be a good location, and we wouldn’t want to pin it down,” Campbell-Zopf said. “Let’s imagine, let’s not narrow.”

The working group has based its discussions on the guiding question, “What would it take to create a distinctive community arts center that reflects our community values and dreams and is economically viable?” Members have researched zoning and architectural issues in different areas of the village and have researched similar efforts other communities have made to build an arts center, Campbell-Zopf said. The group is also seeking funding for a proposal to involve as many residents as possible in a planning process to create a center that reflects the needs and values of a broad spectrum of the community, she said.

The Morgan Foundation purchased the Barr House, which sits on 1.6 acres, for $410,000 from Abigail Corbet, who lives in Portland, Ore. The home’s contents were sold at auction in September.

According to a press release from the foundation, the house was built in 1840 and was purchased seven years later by Corbet’s great-great-grandmother Rebecca Bell Thompson.

Kuhn and Vicki Morgan said the foundation is eager to see what the community comes up with as it defines what it wants in an arts center.

The Morgans, whose children, Asha and Matthew Morgan, participated in theater at Yellow Springs High School and at Center Stage Theatre, said they believe that experience on stage teaches people the necessary art of performing in their daily lives.

“One of the most beneficial things for our children in Yellow Springs was the performing arts activities, which have served them extremely well. A lot of life is theater,” Lee Morgan said. “Asha has to stand up in front of thousands of people and perform all the time in her job, and both she and Matt are equipped to deal with things that are variations on theater.”

The Morgan Foundation was established in 2003 when Lee Morgan, the CEO and chairman of The Antioch Company, sold his stock in the company to The Antioch Company’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

Vicki Morgan said the foundation’s board members, herself, Lee Morgan, Matthew Morgan, Asha Morgan Moran and her husband, Marty Moran, are new at running a foundation and are just beginning to define their mission of philanthropy.

This past year the foundation gave $2 million in grants to 23 different projects and organizations in southwest Ohio and central Minnesota, in the communities where the board members reside. The foundation’s grants in Ohio included the Antioch School, Community Children’s Center, YS Kids Playhouse, Home, Inc., Planned Parenthood and Mad River Theater Works.

The foundation will not restrict future giving to these areas. Kuhn advises groups seeking funding to talk to her at the foundation’s office on Glen Street.

Contact: lheaton@ysnews.com