January 5, 2006

By Diane Chiddister

Gregory Frank has returned to Yellow Springs from New Orleans and set up a new studio in the old Center Stage Theater on Dayton Street.

When artist Gregory Frank moves somewhere new, he has a way of making a splash.

For instance, when he moved to New Orleans about five years ago, he transformed a nondescript former government building in the Mid-City neighborhood into an eclectic art gallery with a vibrant and exotic garden out front. Called Gregory’s Studio of Wonders, the gallery caught the attention of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, which featured it in a long article in 2004. The article described the many rooms in Frank’s 5,000-square-foot building, including a room for Christmas decorations and one for vacuum cleaners, as well as the “dizzying variety of forms” of Frank’s work, such as oil paintings, shadow boxes and slab-built ceramics.

With his new Yellow Springs gallery open only a few weeks, Frank has already caught the attention of most who walk by this Dayton Street site, where Center Stage Theater once operated. Frank’s handcrafted aluminum Christmas trees and wall decorations glisten during the day and, at night, transform the space into a wonderland of light.

Like his New Orleans site, Frank’s Yellow Springs gallery features his eclectic artwork. Frank said he gets bored if he doesn’t work in at least three media at a time, and his gallery features his oil paintings on plates, shadow boxes, aluminum Christmas decorations, ceramic fruit and lots and lots of things covered with glitter.

Glitter is his new favorite art form, he said.

“The way it glistens, what it does with light,” Frank said. “It’s so simple and so amazing.”

Frank has sprinkled glitter on small plastic cougars, deer, apples, pears and butterflies, and he said he’s excited about the superhero figure in his studio that he plans to cover as well.

“It will be so cool,” he said.

Frank creates his work in his studio next to the old entryway into Center Stage, in the space that was once used as a small gallery. He’s in there each day, working with glitter or cutting out the aluminum fronds for his trees or painting the faces of imaginary people on plates.

If he doesn’t create something every day, Frank said, he’s not a happy man.

That need to begin creating again is what brought Frank to Yellow Springs. In September, his Studio of Wonder, along with much of New Orleans, was flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He lost 30 years of his artwork, along with all of his portfolios, he said, and it’s not clear yet if the building he transformed can ever be used again.

Since evacuating before the storm — he didn’t want to evacuate, Frank said, but his daughter insisted — he has returned to New Orleans about 10 times to work on his building, which suffered extensive water damage and contained a toxic oily liquid that covered almost everything.

He worked hard to clean up the space but became more and more discouraged with the pace of recovery, Frank said, a feeling he believes many other New Orleanians also share. While he said people felt hopeful about recovery soon after Katrina, they seem more and more disheartened as federal monies and insurance payments fail to materialize.

The last time he went to New Orleans, Frank said, “people were overwhelmed, tired and angry.”

Frank doesn’t know yet if he will eventually restore his New Orleans gallery or if he will give up on the city completely. But what he knows for sure is that he needed to begin making art again, and that he believed Yellow Springs was the place to do so.

Born and raised in Dayton and a former student at the Dayton Art Institute, Frank lived in Yellow Springs in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a recently out-of-the closet gay man and single father of two young children. He was part owner of Com’s, which later became DG’s, and participated in the thriving arts scene at the time, he said. Musicians and artists rented rooms from him in his Walnut Street home, and the atmosphere was lively and creative, he said.

He still has friends in town, and when his grandson came north to attend Antioch College this fall, Frank decided to make Yellow Springs his temporary, and possibly permanent home, he said. He found the Center Stage space, and rented it.

He said he is planning another trip to New Orleans soon to bring back some of his artwork that survived the flood. Though he lost almost everything in the hurricane he said he considers himself a happy man, because he is once again making art.

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com