Past is Future: New Wayne Center for the Arts director set to expand and restore Center’s programming By Tami Mosser
J
ames Fox isn’t going anywhere.
That’s a promise, he says. Fox, the executive director of the Wayne Center for the Arts, knows people have gotten used to center directors being short-term over the last years. The Wooster resident was hired into the position in June, succeeding Josh Coy, who had led the organization for just two years before taking what he characterized as a “dream job” with the Ohio Arts Council. And Coy took the place of Dayna Sear, a western Pennsylvania resident who held the position from 201416. Fox, who said he appreciates what both Sear and Coy brought to the center, said his path to the position was a bit different. He’s been a Wooster resident for several years, having come here when his wife, Stephanie Strand, took a faculty position at The College of Wooster, where she now chairs the biology department. “I chose this job,” said Fox, who had been the administrator for the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas. “Logic would have said,” he added, “to stay ex-
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actly where I was.” In truth, Fox had applied for the job he now calls his back in 2008, but saw the position offered to and taken by Robb Hyde. Still, Fox said, “this was always something of interest.” And 2019 seemed to be the right time. Of all the directors who have come before him, Fox pointed to Roberta Looney as someone he believes truly understood “the center’s roll in the arts throughout the community,” and added that “in a strange way, I think – I hope – we’re back where we began.” And that means a return of some organizations that called the WCA home in the past, as well as some new groups and new ideas that Fox believes will take the center into the future. One of those is the Wayne Artists Group Effort, a cooperative assembly of local artists founded 30 years ago by Wooster resident Susan Shie. “I like them,” WCA operations director Lynn Davis said of the group. “They love the center; they do.” Along with WAGE comes the Wayne County Performing Arts Council, as well as the recently
hatched Wooster Youth Shakespeare, which had been rehearsing and performing in the lower level of Central Christian Church. WAGE got its start in 1986, when Shie – who had just completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Kent State University, found herself living in a place near the center, located on South Walnut Street in the former Walnut Street School, and “I needed a group of friends who were artists,” she said. The WCA was a convenient meeting place and though for a while it was just Shie and one other person, over time the numbers grew into the dozens. And that group, she said, “was physically, mentally and emotionally connected to the arts center.” WAGE had its shows in the center’s Looney and Gault galleries, but moved to Heartland Point in Orrville when a juried show for artists with Wayne and Holmes county connections began in late 2018. WAGE’s shows are not juried, Shie said, in part because the group itself exists to