CW Constant change for gallery, art Arts
PASSIONS
From donated paint to climate-controlled comfort, Grimsby Public Art Gallery has come a long way, baby! By Mike Williscraft An empty space slated for use as a storage reached it 40th anniversary in 2015. Grimsby Public Art Gallery, which started out with cement floors and cinder block walls in the basement of the Carnegie Building in 1975, has seen great change in the span of its life. “It was very much a community place when it started out,” said Lyndsay Dobson, whose father Bill Poole was the driving force behind the development of the gallery. “There was always something going. The youth were very much involved. There were art classes, activities, pumpkin carving in the fall, you name it.” And that grassroots type of feel was West Lincoln Fire Department systemic of its origins. Capt. Gary Ricker, right, One could not let the Mr.helped Rogers aprecruit current Fire Chief Dennis pearance, sweater vest and all, fool you, Fisher, from Bill Pooleleft. wasRicker a manretired on a mission. the department after 41 years “He thought everyone should of have service. Williscraft Photo art and access to it. That is why he liked prints so much. They could be reproduced with access for all,” said Lyndsay of her dad, who was also involved in Wayzgoose and was an initial organizer of Grimsby’s Festival of Art in 1968. “In 1975, he saw his opportunity and he did everything to make it happen. It was not just him though, Gordon Hadler was another who helped a lot and there were others. They managed to get everything donated.” Gordon and Bill were both members
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Ted Fullerton (left), Bill Poole and Murray Bowman (right) at opening of Gallery 25, an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s 25th anniversary in Spring 2000
of the library board which oversaw the gallery’s affairs at the start. In 1999, the gallery became a separate entity under the Town of Grimsby administration and was part of the massive rebuild of the gallery and library in 2004. Lyndsay recalls the floors were painted “ox blood red” and walls a cream colour. Leon Betzner, who operated Home Hardware at the time, donated curtain tracking and chain link. “This was how the art was hung at the start, so they could be moved around easily,” noted Lyndsay. So while Bill, who died in 2001, helped get the infrastructure of the gallery itself underway, a major donation by his mother Ethel gave the facility’s permanent collection a boost. “My grandmother, when she passed away, had quite a large collection of art. She donated all of it to the gallery,” noted Lyndsay, adding her grandmother was among those who frequented Grimsby
Beach via ferry rides from Toronto, eventually settling in a home on the escarpment. “There were a lot of early 1900s landscapes.” From an empty basement to a state-ofthe-art facility, the gallery has changed a great deal in its first 40 years. “It was so grassroots at the start. Artists used to bring in goats and calves and the kids would draw them as part of the classes. The floors were cement so you could do that because you didn’t have to worry about carpeting,” Lyndsay laughed. “It was run more the way the old co-op galleries were run at that time: with a real community feel, much less institutional. But, to get the travelling exhibits and things like that, they had to improve the design and format. Dad was better at starting things, then handing them off to others to run.” Grimsby is a better place because he helped start Grimsby Public Art Gallery.