Cy*Burr // spring 2004

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 settles 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.