Frank Lawson brings it all back home with his debut solo exhibition

Update: Initially scheduled to open on Friday, Oct. 18, the exhibition has been pushed back a week and will now open on Friday, Oct. 25.

Growing up on the South Side of Columbus, Frank Lawson said the idea of becoming an artist felt distant. At the time, museums were largely inaccessible, and there were no neighborhood galleries or even comic shops that he can recall visiting. 

“Someone told me there was a comic book store at one point on Lockbourne [Road], but I can’t remember it. … This is an industrial side of town with a bunch of workers just trying to make it to the next day, the next week,” Lawson said inside of the Citadel, a new community space and art gallery owned and operated by Khamall Jahi, a fellow South Side native. “And then museums and shit like that? Nah. I might have taken a class trip once as a kid, but it wasn’t anything I was going to regularly.”

The Citadel, which sits a couple blocks north of All People Arts and less than two miles from where Lawson grew up, is the site of the artist’s debut solo exhibition, “South Side Art Show,” which kicks off with an opening celebration on Friday, Oct. 25. And on a gray afternoon in mid-October, Lawson was still processing what it meant to step out solo as an artist in the neighborhood that served as his childhood stomping grounds, and one he continues to call home. 

“It means a lot, man, because there was nothing like this at all [when I was growing up],” said Lawson, who has previously taken part in group exhibitions and a duo show with artist Kent Grosswiler, in addition to helping run the POCtober Instagram account each spooky season. “As Columbus is embracing more of the arts, so is this side of town. And me and Khamall, we’re making it happen. I don’t want to be dramatic, but to me it’s like putting a stamp on history.”

There was a time not long ago, Lawson said, when he couldn’t envision working as an artist, describing the time afforded him by the early Covid years as the key to unlocking current pursuits. “The blessing and the curse of the pandemic is that I got waved out on a tide in this direction,” he said.

Lawson completed most of the art on display in the Citadel over the last six months, and the paintings reflect myriad long-held interests, especially horror films and fantasy – a draw the artist credited at least in part to the sense of escapism provided by the forms coming up in a working-class neighborhood. For similar reasons, many of the pieces are painted in bright colors, with Lawson sharing his desire to create work that stands in contrast to the overcast skies he commonly associates with his hometown.

One painting, for instance, depicts a submarine surfacing on the water, which flickers with pink hues, kissed by the light from the rising sun. “It’s supposed to be hopeful,” Lawson said. “I was coming out of depression. There’s seasonal depression, and then there’s regular depression, and it was a mix. But it was like, ‘Oh, I’m feeling like I’m coming back up again.’ I don’t want to just wallow in misery. You gotta stay productive.”

Generally, though, Lawson’s paintings are less purposefully direct, the artist obscuring some of the more personal connections with humor and horror. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can talk about my feelings. Trying to find somebody who gives a fuck, that’s harder,” he said, and laughed. “But I think to disguise it in some of the work I do is the best thing for me, because I don’t like people all in my business, either, you know what I’m saying? So, yeah, I try to mask some of what I do. And people might read it as dark or ridiculous, but it still means something to me, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I remember what I was thinking and feeling when I painted that.’”

In the four years since Lawson first displayed alongside Grosswiler at Streetlight Guild, he has progressed in his technique, sharing that he allowed more time in developing the works for this current show, which enabled him to incorporate greater detail than in the past. The artist has also grown in the awareness that he has a platform and the opportunity to impact kids who might feel the same disconnect from the art world that he did coming up, recalling a recent exchange he shared with a young Black child who happened by his table at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus.

“This kid, he walks by. And I catch him out the corner of my eye, and his sister whispers in his ear, and he comes back, like, ‘Hey, can I ask you something? How do you get this stuff printed?’” Lawson said. “And that made my entire weekend, because that’s what I want to do. Nobody ever told me I could be an artist. … In a blue-collar neighborhood, ain’t nobody thinking about art. They don’t even know what you can do with art. And I want to show kids they can do this.”