This is a compelling story of fashion entrepreneur Bryan Downey’s great-great-uncle, artist Waylande Gregory — whose treasure trove of work, through fate and circumstance, fell largely into Downey’s fortunate hands. A savvy businessman who partnered with Mickey Rosmarin (owner of Tootsies) to launch Rayure shirts several years ago, Downey and Rosmarin have partnered again to replicate beautifully Gregory’s fine ceramics, which were once hailed by The New York Times and Time magazine, and were featured in museum exhibitions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to The Smithsonian.
Waylande Gregory, it seems, was a famous sculptor who fell into obscurity after his death, and when Downey was growing up in the Midwest, his mother and grandmother would tell him tales about this prolific artist, who was born in 1905 in Baxter Springs, Kansas. He left that small town to become, at one point in his career, the best-paid sculptor in America, with 172 major national museum exhibitions in 11 countries to his credit.
This brilliant artist eventually landed at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he met the man who would be his mentor: historian-sculptor Lorado Taft. They shared a studio, where Gregory learned to work in marble, bronze and ceramics. Through the years, his refined sensibility brought him great fame, as well as the admiration of such collectors as Henry Fonda, Dolores del Rio, Joan Bennett, Albert Einstein, Elsie de Wolfe and Charles Lindbergh. Gregory’s sculpture and ceramics are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
Downey’s mother safeguarded the family’s few Gregory pieces and planned to pass them to her children one day. After several decades, Downey told her that he was finally ready to take possession of the pieces she’d been saving for him. He became obsessed with Gregory’s work and was astonished to discover that each piece, hand-decorated by the artist himself, fetched anywhere from $100 to $100,000 on eBay. When he googled the name, he located a couple of dealers selling Gregory’s work, including Bianca Brown, who had a cache of thousands of his ceramic and metal works, from small bowls and dishes to life-size figurative sculptures.
Meet octogenarian Brown, keeper of the flame and co-executor of the Gregory estate, inclusive of the work of Waylande Gregory. She befriended Gregory and his wife when she moved to Warren, New Jersey, and recalls: “I first met Waylande as a neighbor. Then he gave an exhibition of his work and would give talks about it. I went with my painting class to his studio, where he would show us slides and movies of his work, describing how he worked.”
Gregory died in 1971, and his possessions fell into the hands of Brown — including a collection of Gregory’s work, believed to number more than 7,000 pieces. To try to raise the value of the pieces, as well as the profile of the late artist, Brown reached out to several venerable art auction houses. “I called several prominent auction houses to get an estimate on the work, and I was met with the same response: ‘Gregory who?’“ says Brown. It was a sobering epitaph for a man who, during his career, received acclaim not only for his formative-movement pieces (including sensual, figurative sculptures) but also for his technical advances. Among his credits: rediscovering the ancient method of firing enormous sculptures (weighing up to a ton) in a huge kiln of his own creation, with each life-size (or larger) piece concealing a honeycomb-support structure inside to keep it from collapsing in on itself. His sophisticated advances with ceramic and glazes yielded unexpected benefits years later, as NASA commissioned him to develop ceramic heat shields for its space vehicles.
All of which brings us back to Bryan Downey. During his googling, he happened upon Brown’s Web site and her links to online auctions. Downey bought one of the original pieces she had for sale. Almost immediately afterwards, he made a pilgrimage to her home, then to the New Jersey warehouse (a repository for thousands of pieces that hadn’t been touched for years) to cull through the archives in search of treasure and inspiration.
Back in his home office in Houston, Downey and Rosmarin began a two-year mission to create a Waylande Gregory collection of reproductions and contemporary adaptations, with a percentage of the profits earmarked for Brown’s charity Door of Hope, and an aim to re-establish Gregory’s rightful legacy as one of the century’s most important and prolific sculptors. Finally, the wait is over. This month debuts exquisite reproductions of Gregory’s handmade and hand-detailed objects from an abstracted zebra bowl and lava vase to geometrically focused grid vide-poche, and fanciful boxes, shallow bowls and plates with hand-rendered circles, dots, trees and animals, now carried by some of the chicest shops stateside. Brian Bolke and Shelly Musselman have purchased every piece for their store Forty Five Ten. Information 214.559.4510.
“I called [several prominent auction houses] to get an estimate on the work, and I was met with the same response: ‘Gregory who?’” — Bianca Brown