Suzanne Bort Gray

Adding Art to the Boardman YMCA

Suzanne Bort Gray, ’04 BFA

Suzanne Bort Gray was in her early 50s and a non-traditional student at YSU when she first walked into Boardman’s shiny new Davis Family YMCA in 2002, hoping for a part-time job teaching art classes.

“I didn’t realize that art wasn’t even on their radar at the time,” she said. Her proposal inspired Y directors to introduce art when the facility opened its doors a few months later, with Gray teaching the first classes.

Today, the 2004 YSU grad is Arts and Humanities coordinator for the Boardman Y, overseeing a robust, wide-ranging art education program that she helped create.

There are classes seven days a week for every age, along with three major art shows a year that attract entries from around the world.

“All I asked for was a sink for my classroom,” she said with a smile, remembering the early years when she taught painting in a carpeted meeting room. Art had become a priority at the Y by 2010, and a major expansion project included new art facilities and a new title for Gray.

“They gave me a beautiful art studio, two sinks, a kiln and a gallery wall in the lobby that’s perfect for our art shows and student art,” she said. “Aren’t I so lucky? I got to be the catalyst for a lot of things.”

Gray and her husband, Ed, had lived more than 40 years in Boardman but recently moved to her childhood home in Columbiana, Ohio. He started out in construction; she stayed home to raise their three children, now grown.

The first steppingstone to her new career came when Ed, unable to work because of a job injury, enrolled in YSU’s Electrical Engineering program. She took an office position at the Southern Park Mall to support the family and was asked to help with visual merchandising displays in the mall. It was an awakening for Gray – she loved the work and realized that she had artistic talent. With a new self-assurance, she quit the mall job to start her own merchandising company and stayed busy for nearly a decade, creating seasonal displays for shopping malls across the region.

But the retail industry saw widespread changes in the early 2000s, money was tight, and her merchandising business collapsed. Looking back, Gray sees it as another opportunity. Her husband had completed his Engineering degree by then. “It was my turn,” she said. Inspired with a new passion for art, she enrolled as a Studio Art major at YSU, completing her BFA in 2004.

Gray credits several YSU Art faculty for their support, especially Al Bright, a former professor who is now an internationally acclaimed artist, and Susan Russo, then Art department chair. “I was not a confident person. I can’t say enough about how my professors encouraged and mentored me.”

Gray has continued to make her artistic mark across the region. The Y’s FIVE Squared art show attracts entries from afar – this year’s 500 entries came from 10 states and 11 countries. She does art therapy at several area assisted-living and specialty care facilities and coordinates an annual art show and reception at the Y to display the residents’ work. On staff at the Canfield Fair’s Fine Arts building, she initiated Faces of the Fair and designed the Big Lock Steel Rooster.

“I always feel that everything is a steppingstone,” she said of her nontraditional career path. “If I hadn’t taken that lonely job at the mall, I might not be where I am today.”