Visual arts bloom in downtown Clayton

CLAYTON -- Dorothy Demboski earned artistic fame decades ago for adapting Appalachian quilt designs into high fashion. Now that she's moved to Clayton, she's helping foster another transformation -- that of the town's sleepy downtown into a haven for the visual arts.

A mural Demboski finished this month at town hall is part of a boom in the Clayton arts scene that includes plans for the town's first large-scale public art project.

Once dismissed by the rest of Johnston County as a bump in the road on the way to Raleigh, fast-growing Clayton is constantly beefing up its claims to sophistication -- from bike trails and boccie courts to Johnston's first Starbucks to the Clayton Center, which has hosted the likes of Doc Watson and David Sedaris.

Such cultural attractions help the once-rural town compete for urban transplants with larger towns and cities in the Triangle.

For its latest cultural coup, Clayton is negotiating for a public art project by Lydia Rubio, a Miami-based artist who has finished one sculpture at Raleigh-Durham International Airport and is working on a second. In other hopeful signs for a town that has long aspired to be an artistic center, Clayton's second downtown gallery opened in October and a local artist was chosen to paint an ornament for the White House Christmas tree.

"The visual arts are really rising and gaining steam," said Heidi Stump, director of the Clayton Center and a member of the town's Public Art Advisory Board, which is negotiating with Rubio.

The board was formed this year and quickly seized upon a chance to add an artistic element to the town's plans to landscape a vacant downtown lot that will also have parking and public space. Initial estimates put the cost of the art project at $40,000.

Clayton isn't the only Johnston County town with artistic aspirations. Smithfield has also adopted a public art plan and recently unveiled a sculpture created by a Greensboro artist along the Neuse River that depicts the town's African-American heritage.

But the arts are particularly important for Clayton's quaint, quiet downtown center, which has suffered as retail stores built up along U.S. 70. Making downtown an arts center would help the town and its artists, said Mayor Jody McLeod.

"We have wonderful local artists," McLeod said. "They need a place to gather."

Changes good and bad

Newcomers to the town in recent years have helped fuel an interest in the arts, said Gail O'Neil, a Clayton native who has run a downtown gallery for 10 years.

"The new people moving in are hungry for that type of thing," O'Neil said. "We're trying to grow in that direction." She is an artist known for her acrylic and watercolor paintings of flowers.

For O'Neil, a widespread interest in the arts is a bright spot among changes in the Clayton of her youth that aren't all so rosy.

"You have traffic, problems with school overcrowding, and all that comes with growth," she said. "But we certainly wouldn't be able to have galleries and an art center if it weren't for the growth."

Demboski's role in the artistic boom highlights another gift of Clayton's growth: It brought not only an interest in the arts, but also more artists.

Hardly 5 feet tall with long gray hair, Demboski, 71, became a familiar sight on a cherry-picker in a town hall lobby during the four months she worked on the 10-foot wide circular mural there.

Few suspected that the creator of the brightly colored patchwork of Clayton landmarks had a storied past as an artist and designer. In the 1970s, Demboski helped form a West Virginia cooperative that adapted Appalachian crafts to contemporary uses, work that led to a line of clothing she designed for J.C. Penney and a book on the movement.

She moved to Clayton five years ago to be near her daughter and grandchildren. She chose Clayton over Charleston, S.C., where her other children live, because the cost of living is lower. She served on several public art boards in West Virginia over the years and is now a member of the Clayton public art board and other local arts groups. She's glad to bring her experience to a town with a budding interest in the arts.

"It's fresh, and it's vibrant and it's new here," she said. "I can help get it started, and we will see where it takes itself."