GAMBIER — Sometimes it is worth a little extra effort to find a special place off the beaten path. One such place is the Olin Gallery at Kenyon College, tucked away deep in the Olin Library on the south side of campus, next to Rosse Hall.
Although the gallery regularly schedules student and faculty shows, the majority of its programming aims to reach beyond Kenyon walls and connect with the community at large. But for the first-time community visitor, part of the fun is just finding it.
First, the visitor enters the main entrance of the Olin Library and follows the hallway angling to the right. At the atrium, stairs lead up into the main library. Inside the library, the visitor will cross to the nearby glass doors which say “Art Gallery.” Inside those doors, the visitor takes a spiral staircase downward into the small but dynamically shaped gallery. In short, one must go up, across, and back down to find the Olin Gallery. Perhaps it can be best described as a well-kept secret.
“It would be my hope that we not be such a well-kept secret,” said gallery director Dan Younger, who is working hard to reach out beyond campus and remind people the gallery is there, and features prominent local artists and important national figures.
The gallery’s peculiar location comes from it being added at the last moment to the plans for the Olin Library when it was being built in the 1980s, Younger said. He has been curator of the facility for 11 of its 20 years.
Born in Columbus, Younger grew up in New Jersey, returning to Ohio to go to The College of Wooster. He then worked for a number of years in Boston, at an arts nonprofit organization and as editor of a photography journal. He returned to Ohio in 1994 when he met and married his wife, Melissa Dabakis, a Kenyon faculty member in the art department. Younger himself serves as part-time faculty in addition to curating the gallery. As lecturer, he holds the title of Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History. He teaches the history of photography and a seminar in museum studies.
In addition to representing student art, the gallery’s mission is to present contemporary and historical visual arts reflecting local, regional, state and national levels.
“We try to tap into and represent the work of artists in the region,” Younger said, pointing out recent shows which have featured local artists. These shows include the art quilting in Ohio exhibition last fall, which featured works of Ellen Harbourt, Elaine Hartley, Jo Rice and Linda Shaffer. An exhibition in 2003 featured the work of the African-American father and son folk artists Walter O. and Walter L. Mayo, who lived in Mount Vernon in the first half of the 20th century. That exhibition also had tie-ins with the college’s sociology department, having students do oral research projects about the impact of the lives of the Mayos on the community.
Younger said it is his intention to connect more with the community, and was delighted with the full house which greeted the opening reception of the art quilting show last fall.
“It’s important for us if we can reach out not just to the students, who are often so work-obsessed and busy, but to have this facility as a destination for the community,” he said.
He pointed out that he finds it encouraging to see the energy and enthusiasm of some of the art galleries which have opened lately in Mount Vernon, and he hopes to work on cooperative ventures with them in the future as one way to connect more with the Knox County community at large.
Finding artworks and artists to feature at the Olin is a major part of Younger’s job. To keep abreast of developments in the art world, Younger reads magazines, keeps up on Web sites, and travels around the state and sometimes beyond in order to visit artists’ studios and establish relationships. Younger said it is typically a two- or three-year process to plan a show; making connections with artists can take even longer. First, he meets artists, then follows their work for a time. After establishing a dialogue about holding an exhibition, planning and scheduling must follow before the works come before the public eye.
When not working on gallery projects, Younger loves fine art photography and the history of photography. He did a photographic series on county fairs which has been exhibited at the Dayton Visual Arts Center. Another project was a series of photos chronicling community and individual responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“It’s important to me to document things going on here,” Younger said.
His next project is one inspired by Knox County’s agricultural traditions — focusing on farms and farm imagery.
