Framers’ Guild Owners Pass the Torch on a Mariemont Institution

By Carol Sanger

As the saying goes, it’s often not what you know, it’s who you know. Sometimes though, it’s more like what who you know knows about what you want to know. And when all of that comes together, there’s just one word to capture the moment...

Serendipity.

Few could argue that it wasn’t serendipity that first brought Judy Runnels and Pat Moores together more than four decades ago, turning Anderson Township neighbors into friends who then became business partners, successfully running the Framers’ Guild together in Mariemont for 44 years.

Nor could one say that serendipity didn’t play a role in David Smith’s decision to buy the Eisele Gallery in 2018, and to move it from Fairfax to Mariemont two years later – locating it across Madisonville Road from the Framers’ Guild.

days a week just trying to stay on top of everything. “I loved our time there and the people I met, and I knew I would miss that part of it,” she says, “but I also knew I couldn’t keep on that way.”

So what had begun as friends and neighbors deciding to go into the picture framing business together in 1980, came to a conclusion earlier this year when both Judy and Pat agreed the time had come to sell the business that had become a Mariemont institution.

Meanwhile, across the street, business at the Eisele Gallery was thriving and David had reached out to his friend, Jim Crooks, for some extra help. It came with a side of on-the-job training and exposure to the unique world of running an art gallery that specialized in traditional and contemporary fine art of exceptional quality.

These legacies of long-standing friendships and partnerships culminated in a changing of the guard earlier this year, after David Smith walked across the street and casually mentioned to Judy Runnels that he might be interested in acquiring the Framers’ Guild someday were she and Pat ever wanting to sell.

“I didn’t think he was serious,” Judy says of that brief encounter in the early fall of 2023.

And David admits that “Yeah, I did say it kind of off-handedly. I wanted her to know that I was interested, but I was trying to be sensitive, too.”

So time moved on as it is wont to do, and by December a lot had changed. Pat was experiencing her own health problems while needing to care for her husband ‘s illness at the same time. Being unable to be in two places at once, it meant that she was coming into work less and less often. That left Judy working without help and spending seven

For Jim, it was the closing of a circle that began with graduation from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., in 1997. A year later, following David’s graduation from Miami University, the circle connected Jim and David through a mutual friend, with whom they opened a working art studio in Over-theRhine’s old Red Top Brewing Co. building.

Looking back on those days now, both men wonder how they managed to live and work in a building that was sweltering in cont'd on page 4