Spend a little time on the website for the Lisan Gallery of Art and Design and it won’t take you long to find the driving force behind it. “LIFE IS SHORT,” says owner Elissa A. Jones, and no matter “how corny that sounds,” she’s here to do something with hers.With gleaming hardwood floors and vibrant walls, the gallery interior exudes warmth. Feeling that the draw of art is essentially emotional and intuitive, Jones designed the space to be “warm and fuzzy” – in other words, personal. Her business depends upon the personal network of customers and artists who contribute to the store’s bottom line.
Since its opening in January 2006, Lisan Gallery (883 Smith Ave. S., West St. Paul) has become an artery of human creativity and support. “I started with about twenty-one artists, who I mostly found on Craigslist - Craigslist is my answer to everything,” Jones laughs, “Gradually people saw that I was serious about this and started telling their friends and cousins.” Now, with around fifty artists contributing pieces to the gallery, she finds that there is some truth to the “six degrees of separation scenario.”
Connecting the Dots
Taking a sip of her strawberry colored soda at the coffee shop next door, Jones tells me that the path to here and now hasn’t been a matter of going from A to B. After graduating from high school, she went to a small bible college, which she admits, she chose for the wrong reason. “I was not ready for school at that point,” she says, “but I was expected to go to college.” Coming from an extremely liberal background, she settled on a conservative school not likely to curry favor with her parents. To her dismay, Jones soon discovered that the majority of the women were not there to get a good education, but to get a nice husband.
Jones eventually switched to Bemidji State University, where she majored in English Literature and minored in Theatre Construction. She interned at the Paul Bunyan Playhouse for a year and a half, helping with everything from set painting to costumes, and served as master carpenter with them one summer. Though she enjoyed the vitality of the theatre community, her satisfaction in school began to sputter and eventually, she left BSU.
Unsure of her direction, Jones transferred into Alexandria Technical College in 2001 primarily (she winces), because her boyfriend was going to school only forty-five minutes away in Moorhead. At the time, she didn’t have a driver’s license and that winter there were nine and ten-foot snow banks outside of her apartment. She felt cut-off from the world around her. Not long afterwards, she and her boyfriend broke up.
Jones had all but decided to quit again and move out to Texas with some friends, when she got her grades for the term. “They were the best grades I’ve ever had, so I decided to go back.” She studied interior design and became increasingly invested in the program as her studies continued. She connected with a group of friends with whom she still remains close and became something of a “Mother Hen” for her circle in the post 9-11 climate of fear. In 2003, she walked away with a degree, not to mention invaluable experience working with the National Kitchen and Bath Association and a local art gallery in Alexandria.
Things Fall Apart
Though Jones now finds herself at the center of a robust social and professional network, she is acutely conscious of how quickly things can fall apart. Just two years ago, her mother began complaining of a terrible stomachache. Her mother’s physician told her there was nothing to worry about - “it’s just gas.” The stomachache worsened, however, and she was eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
Jones’ mother was admitted to the hospital for a full hysterectomy. Jones, then twenty-six and working as a visual display person for Marshall Fields, remembers those days as a blur of shuttling between work and hospital, with little hope that her mother would recover. Before she died (three weeks after diagnosis), her mother said to her, “I have no regrets. I’m proud of you. But I’m going to miss seeing what you do with your life.”
Two months later, Jones’ stepfather of fifteen years had a brain aneurysm while attending a basketball game. He insisted on driving himself to the hospital, but died in surgery. Shortly thereafter, Jones’ biological father, George (whom she describes as her best friend) broke his foot and spent six weeks recovering from surgery. By this time, Jones was living with George and, going through what she called “separation anxiety.” She stuck close to make sure that he was going to be ok.
It was a devastating period for Jones and her mother’s words kept popping into her head – “I’m going to miss seeing what you do with your life.” Jones decided to quit her job at Marshall Fields and took some time off to re-evaluate. Having never contemplated what life would be like without her mother, she used her time to work through priorities, travel, and reinvest in friendships. After eight months, she was back in the Twin Cities with a plan in hand.
On her way to a friend’s house in West St. Paul one day, Jones happened to notice a vacancy notice in a business node nestled into Smith Ave. The space and area appealed to her, so she wrote down the telephone number and gave the building owners a call. Using funds from her inheritance, Jones signed the lease in October 2005 and started moving in the following month.
Making Connections
“I think of my gallery as more of a service than a shop,” says Jones. “As a general rule, artists don’t speak up for themselves, don’t know how to market themselves. I want to build something where artists are coming to me to represent them and where people from the community come to get information on art and events, etc.. I want to help make that connection between the artist and the community happen.”
The challenge, for Jones, is to nourish that connective tissue between artist and client, at the individual, community, and corporate levels. Situated at the intersection of West St. Paul, Lilydale, Mendota Heights, Inver Grove Heights, and St. Paul proper, her customers defy conforming to a single profile. Her response to this has been to create a two pronged plan that gives her the flexibility to work with corporate clients (furnishing signature pieces to retail/office spaces) while simultaneously being a “neighborhood store” where people can come to look for a gift for grandma or get help with planning their wedding décor.Though she has worked in retail and had the word “upsell” impressed upon her since the age of fifteen, Jones is not interested in pressuring customers into a purchase; she wants them to come to that decision on their own terms and to feel good about the artwork that they’re taking home with them. “There’s a lady who come in here about once a week,” she tells me, “just to look at this one piece. I don’t want to push her into buying - I don’t want her to buy something for six hundred dollars and then later on have buyer’s remorse.”
Jones tells me a story about a teacher who was once coaxed into buying a three thousand dollar Oriental Rug while on a trip to Chicago. The teacher ended up feeling so guilty about blowing the money (without first consulting her husband) that she simply folded the silk rug up, stuck it in a bag, and left it in the back of her closet for the next four years. “Art should be a part of your life,” she says, “not in the back of your closet.”
Driving home the idea that Art is a part of Life, on July 13th, the Lisan Gallery of Art and Design will be holding a silent auction to raise money for the Three Day Walk for Breast Cancer (supporting the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and the Philanthropic National Trust). Jones will be taking part in the walk, which coincides with the two-year anniversary of her mother’s death, and hopes to raise $5,000 in pledges. Talking to artists about her own mother’s experience “has opened me up to artists in a way I couldn’t have predicted. I’ve been flooded with stories and situations about their daughter-in-laws and mothers…”
Lisan Gallery of Art and Design
Photos by Valerie Borey
No comments:
Post a Comment