Arts

Supporter of the Arts

Frank Bette’s Dream Lives On

Katherine Kam
Photo by Robbin Kilgore

If Frank Bette were young today, he’d probably be breezing through art school, casting sculptures by day and passing the evening hours touching up his latest painting. But Bette came of age in Germany during the 1920s. An art career was verboten; his strict, furniture-making family wouldn’t have tolerated such nonsense. Fleeing pressure to join their business, Bette came to America in 1927. Early on, he went to work painting signs for his uncle’s dry goods store in Chicago. But the family trade caught up with him. By 1950, Bette had settled in Alameda, where he set up shop restoring antique furniture.
    But inside his modest Victorian on Paru Street, the solitary German immigrant spun out a secret life. He wrote poems. He sculpted tango dancers. He painted whimsical plants that sprouted from barren moonscapes. And when he died in 1999 at age 96, he left behind an astonishing cache: hundreds of paintings, up to 1,000 sketches and enough sculptures and carvings to fill a room. “He was an exquisite furniture finisher,” says one admirer. “He was also an artist, but nobody knew. He never promoted himself as an artist.”
    Given Bette’s consuming urge to create, one wonders: Did he ever regret the road not taken? Gretchen Fleischer, a friend who says she met the “very quiet and introspective” Bette in a writing class, doesn’t think so. “He took classes and he painted all that he wanted. I think he was very happy.”
    And Bette wanted others to enjoy the same. As he lay dying in the hospital, Fleischer spent 10 days by his side—and not once did he mention a stunning surprise. A lifelong bachelor, Bette named no beneficiary in his handwritten will. Instead, he charged Fleischer and four other friends with transforming his home into “a place where creative people could have meetings, readings, showings and other doings.”
    Doings, indeed. The Frank Bette Center for the Arts, which Fleischer opened in 2003, prides itself on carrying out its namesake’s vision: providing creative spirits with a place to publicly display their artwork, take drawing and photography classes, hold poetry readings and pursue other artistic yearnings.
    Why did Bette keep his plan secret? “That’s what I’d like to ask him,” Fleischer says. As founding president, she ran the center during its inception, but later turned leadership over to Debra Owen, the current executive director. Owen, an artist with a long career in the garment industry, now spends her days bringing Bette’s dream to fruition.
    “Alameda is lucky to have so many good artists,” Owen says. When artists submit work,  she selects pieces to hang in art exhibitions in the house’s front room, now converted into gallery space. Shows change monthly to reflect various themes. This year, she has selected subject matter that ranges from “The Blues”—an April show about blue colors and blues music—to “Our Men,” a June celebration of all things male: “gentlemen, husbands, tycoons, heroes, sugar daddies, boys, dudes, cowboys and chaps,” not to mention “GQ” types.
    On occasion, the center has hung the works of Bette, who so shunned the limelight. According to Fleischer, he hated the thought of showing his work publicly. “He was very, very modest. He didn’t want the publicity. He didn’t want people coming by his shop to bother him.”
    In the front gallery, group shows feature 35 to 60 artists at a time, and Owen reserves a back room for “signature” shows by solo artists. The back room functions, too, as an incubator for creativity—a site for classes in life drawing, watercolor, textile painting, photography, and other subjects. This year, the center even appealed to the teen crowd with a new Japanese anime (or “manga”) drawing class with illustrator Ken McGhee.
    As much as Bette embraced obscurity, his legacy has helped other artists to emerge from the shadows. San Lorenzo’s Mimi Dean, 44, has worked as a baker, environmentalist and middle-school teacher. But in her spare time, she creates sculptures from metal and from odds and ends scrounged from thrift stores and trash piles. Her motto: “Turnin’ junk into funk.”
    “Metal is my passion,” she says. But Dean had never gone public. Not until Owen saw her work on a Web site and found her swirling, playful designs captivating. To Dean’s amazement and delight, Owen invited her to show at the gallery. In the year since then, Dean has made it a point to display her latest work at every new monthly exhibition, and today she is one of the Frank Bette Center’s most lauded talents.

THE DETAILS  

For information on classes and events, call the Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru Street, (510) 523-6957, www.frankbettecenter.org.

Open 10:30 a.m.-6:30 p.m. Wednesday-Friday-Saturday; 10:30 a.m.-9:30 p.m. Thursday; 10:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Monday and Tuesday.