©This story is property of The CyBurr, the online version of The Burr, Kent State’s student magazine. Spring 2004.

Community Through Art

One local gallery keeps the arts alive

Story by Erin Roof

Photos by Emily Rasinski

The North Water Street Art Gallery would not be here today if Jeff Ingram hadn’t broken his legs. In 1992, Ingram was driving to San Francisco to start a progressive theater company when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a logging truck.

“I woke up, and my car was spinning, and there was glass splattering everywhere,” he says.

His crushed legs had multiple fractures. Unable to find a place to recover in the West, Ingram returned to his parent’s home in Tallmadge to heal.

Traveling through Kent, Ingram passed a vacant building on North Water Street and pictured himself starting an art gallery there. After six months of contemplating, he arranged to split the rent with a friend, and the art gallery was born.

Now, the gallery showcases art exhibits, poetry readings and children’s theater.

“I was just wanting to find a place to show my friends’ art because I had seen them traveling around to all these different fairs, but there was no central location for them to show their jewelry and paintings,” Ingram says.

Since then, the gallery has shown more than 10,000 pieces of art by local artists. It is also a venue for area poets and musicians to share their work with other community members.

In 2000, Ingram started the non-profit organization Standing Rock Cultural Arts with longtime friend and Kent resident Gary Lockwood. The organization is supported by arts grants and community donations. The group oversees the gallery’s events, such as mask making, jewelry workshops and Kent’s New World Children’s Theater group. Ingram, the executive director of Standing Rock Cultural Arts, says he chose the name because of the rock’s history in the city.

Standing Rock, east of Standing Rock Cemetery on North Mantua Street in Kent, was a meeting place for area Native American tribes long before white settlers inhabited Kent. At the rock, tribes settled disputes and made promises for the future.

“Standing Rock has such an important history in this area,” he says. “That rock has been here for thousands of years. It’s a good foundation to have the strength of so many years standing on it.”

Today the North Water Street Art Gallery is a gathering place, too. It’s a place for Kent’s community to come together through paintings, drawings, photographs and poems.

Mannequin Leap and Siamese Twins

“I never thought I would be playing with dolls,” Vince Packard says, making his new marionettes dance.

There is not one blank space in his small apartment above the gallery. Every corner is filled with his art: a pair of painted mannequin legs with lights inside, paintings of Siamese twins, glazed toilet seats with pictures of Jesus on them and intricate masks fashioned with a third eye.

The innovative artist has had work displayed all across the country, most notably at CB’s 313 Gallery in New York City, where he exhibited a mounted doll’s head with bright red hair and antlers. Packard has displayed some of his artwork at the North Water Street Art Gallery, created fliers for the gallery’s events and helped with costuming for the New World Children’s Theater.

Packard’s friendship with Ingram goes back nearly 20 years when he played drums in Ingram’s punk band, PPG. The two met again in October 2002 when Ingram invited Packard to be a part of the gallery’s Eyepitaphs art show for Kent’s Day of the Dead celebration.

“It’s really one of the best galleries I know of just because Jeff is very open-minded, and you don’t have to be professional,” Packard says. “He likes quality, but being professional doesn’t necessarily make you great. It’s more about pulling the community together. We need to break away from the TV and connect with our community, and the gallery is a good place to do that. An art show is a perfect little get together.”

The gallery displays a new exhibit every month. In addition to established local talent, Ingram is now working with art students from Kent State to bring younger artists to the gallery.

The Art Club at Kent State is collaborating with the gallery for the first of what it hopes will become an annual exhibit of student art at the gallery. Many members have displayed their work at university art shows and see this as an opportunity to get their work into the community.

“We wanted to do a show independent of the university,” says senior art major Jen Graven, the club’s president. “It will be good to show art in a different atmosphere.”

Senior art major Natalie Capannelli says she enjoys the opportunity to show her large abstract paintings and drawings in a new venue.

“It’s nice when fellow artists in the community can show their support for emerging artists trying to make a name for themselves right out of a university,” she says.

The gallery also has a yearly children’s art show where young artists proudly hang clay masks, string puppets and collages from the white walls.

“Young views are important,” Ingram says. “Children’s art shows are always amazing. We get more variety of art than we get in any other exhibition.”

The Highest Communication

Copies of Poet’s Market and well-worn paperback novels are nestled between chemistry textbooks three times their size in Kent State chemistry professor Edwin Gould’s office. Gould is a University Professor, a special title bestowed by the university on outstanding professors. Two of the books, Inorganic Reactions and Structure and Mechanism and Structure in Organic Chemistry, Gould wrote himself.

“Nobody bothers reading those. This is more me,” Gould says, pulling open a gray filing cabinet drawer that houses his seven self-published volumes of poetry. Gould started writing poetry seven years ago, at age 71, after he enrolled in a poetry course with “15 girls one-third my age.”

Gould has attended Kent’s open poetry readings since they began in 1982 at Brady’s Café. When the readings moved to the gallery in October 2002, after Brady’s closed, Gould moved with them.

“Gallery readings have become a very important part of my life,” he says. “They know me there. They are, in effect, my family.”

Maj Ragain, a Kent State English instructor, was instrumental in organizing the readings 22 years ago, which he says are one of the longest running open poetry readings in the country. Ragain says moving the readings to the gallery shows the endurance of the poets.

“It shows how art replicates itself,” he says. “Art doesn’t need much. It’s self-sustaining. All you ever really need is a storefront and, in the winter, a little heat.”

Once a month poets gather at the gallery, sitting on the sparse chairs—and the floor when there’s no room—for the readings Ragain co-hosts with Ingram. Poets go back and forth reading their poems from ragged old notebooks and neatly typed pages. Their shoeless, holey socks thump out rhythms to the beat of words hanging in the air.

Senior English major Nikki Robinson is there with some friends from Ragain’s poetry class. When the poets take a break, they pound on hand drums. Robinson says poetry readings are a way for students to interact with the community.

“It pulls the students into this town and makes them a part of it,” she says. “It allows the students to step outside the university.”

Gould leans back against the wall and listens intently to everyone who speaks. Not every poem may touch him, but he waits patiently for the one that does. Poetry, to Gould, is the highest form of communication.

“It’s saying something I want to say in a way that may not be expressed in sentences and paragraphs,” he says.

Finally, it is his turn. Holding a sheet of paper with both hands and his blue All-Star high tops rooted firmly to the ground, he recites his love poem. His muse remains a mystery. “The world can never have enough love poems,” Ragain says after Gould finishes.

High Drama

“No talking unless it relates to the dialogue,” Ingram shouts, trying to hush the kids.

“Dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue,” one boy quips, rocking back and forth in his chair.

It is the end of an hour-and-a-half long writing session for the next New World Children’s Theater production, and the playwrights are ready to leave. The authors are crawling beneath the table, and no one is concentrating on the work, but it will only take a few more lines to finish the scene.

The children are working on a play about a group of animals who escape from a zoo in search of their natural habitat. The eight members of the group are in charge of everything from the writing to the staging and performing of the play. Only now the penguin has collapsed on the floor in a fit of giggles, and Ingram has to interject to try to quiet the laughing hyenas.

Six-year old Emma Peshek, who is double cast as a jaguar and a dog, says the play will be a riot.

“We like lots of laughter in our play and fun things,” she says. “It’s a cool play.”

The New World Children’s Theater group is composed of children ages 6 to 13. It began in 1993 as a theater group for home-schooled children, but now the theater has grown to include public-schooled children, too. Since then it has produced 18 plays, and the performances have moved from the cramped quarters of the North Water Street Art Gallery to Kent State’s Oscar Ritchie Hall.

But right now the zookeeper has run head first into a tree, and the kids have to think of something funny for him to say. Ingram raises his voice again, trying to get the attention of the writers.

“Keeping them focused is the toughest part,” Ingram says, “but it gets done somehow, some way.”

Twelve years after the gallery’s opening, Ingram is fully recovered from his accident. Though he wasn’t planning on spending his life in Kent, he says he’s glad he ended up here.

“I feel enriched and blessed to have come in contact with so many good artists and become involved in the creative forces of Kent,” he says. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”