GPAC Director calling it quits

Copyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Bill Donovan
Staff Writer

GALLUP — When Roy Howard opened GPAC two years ago, he wanted two things — to bring more culture to Gallup residents and not to lose his shirt.

He succeeded on his first goal with GPAC — the Gallup Performing Arts Center — providing a wide range of concerts, shows and art gallery offerings. As for the second, he admits that making GPAC a reality has forced him to dig into his personal savings and go deeply into debt.

At the end of the month, his lease on the building in the former Trade Mart Square on Second Street ends and his involvement with GPAC will end at the same time. He has moved with his wife to Wichita, Kan., where he will be in semi-retirement and working part-time as a piano tuner, something he has done for most of his adult life.

But he leaves not because of a loss of faith about the GPAC concept. To the end — the bitter end, some would say — he still believes that there is a need to provide a space for Gallup performers to show their talents and believes that if he had stayed, he could have turned the corner and made GPAC if not profitable, at least self-sustaining.

“I had a good first six months, a rough summer but things were picking up recently,” he said. “If I had stayed, I think I would have been all right.”

But the concept is not totally dead.

He said he thinks there is a possibility that the space leased by GPAC will remain available for people to use to put on cultural events, and he’s in the process of talking to someone else in the community — Chris Kenny — to take over the name and provide the same kind of services but probably at a different location.

Whatever happens, however, Howard leaves knowing that he tried his best.

Until recently, his intention was to continue the effort to make GPAC self-sustaining, but a few months ago he realized that his wife, who is on oxygen, needed to live some place with a lower altitude. At that point he made plans to leave Gallup.

He’s in Gallup for the next few weeks selling off the inventory of GPAC, which includes seven pianos — mostly uprights — a wide range of cultural books and materials that are part of the Gallup-McKinley County School District curriculum and pieces of art, including sculptures and paintings at discounts.

Some of the pianos are there on consignment but others are available for the cost he put in tuning them and bringing them up to standards.

He also has a professional mixing board he purchased two years ago for use at GPAC but never did.

“I have a lot of cultural materials in Navajo and Spanish as well as religious literature and things for the family,” he said. These are available for a 20 percent discount.

Although music has been the center of his life from an early age — he has a long list of his own compositions — his vocation has been teaching. And although he has four degrees in music, he retired in 2008 from Western New Mexico University after 26 years as a professor of bilingual education.

“I was a teacher of teachers,” he said.

For more details, about what GPAC offered to the community, go to the Web site — www.gpac.info — where one can listen to some of his musical compositions. To talk to Howard or one of his staff about purchasing any of the items up for sale, call (505) 722-2258 to make arrangements to see the items.

GPAC is currently open for business and will be hosting a showing for most of the last portion of the month of the painting collection of local historian Martin Link. The paintings are also on view by appointment.