“Doubles?” Sparked A Craft-Art Career

Before his choice to leave the New York gallery scene for timid one in New Haven, before he purchased the Frame Shop in 2002 to turn it into The Frame Shop & Westville Gallery, and certainly before he was informally crowned the unofficial ​“mayor of Westville,” Gabriel Da Silva was a 17 year-old Uruguayan immigrant working odd jobs in New Haven to ​“make ends meet” as he, his parents and three siblings sought to put a life under rotating military dictatorships in Montevideo behind them.

He was homesick, and working hard, and not entirely sure what the future would hold.

That all changed when the now outgoing gallery owner met an unlikely friend in 1991: an Argentine immigrant from Buenos Aires who, by chance, was standing in line with him at Lighthouse Point, waiting to get in on a volleyball game.

“This person next to me says: ​‘Would you want to play doubles?’” Da Silva recalled during an interview on WNHH’s ​“Open for Business,” breaking into a smile as he spoke.

“We go in. I say: ​‘Sure.’ I detected an accent, I asked him where he was from. He was from Argentina … Montevideo [and] Buenos Aires, Argentina, we are almost like one place. We are different countries, but between the two … we are very much related. So when we went away [from our countries] … we kind of gravitate towards each other.”

That ​“leap”changed everything, Da Silva said, and not just because they won the doubles match that day.

The friend had a sister who was a sculptor exhibiting art across the state and the East Coast. When they attended one of her shows in Pennsylvania, Da Silva was amazed by what he saw: Artists weren’t peddling hobby-level crafts or the beginning etchings and ceramics in which he had been dabbling as a student at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW). They were making real money while embracing the spirit of local craft and artistry.

“I said: ​‘You can actually do work? I mean, you can do some sculpture, you can go to an art show or craft show and be able to sell?’

“That was a discovery for me … I’d never seen anything like it. I didn’t know what a craft show or an art show was, at the time, and it took me long to realize, well, if you create it, you make something, bring it and exhibit it, people may like it. That was the beginning of my craft-art career.”

DaSilva was struck by a totally new sense of creative possibility. He started making small sculptures. He toured with them around parts of the U.S. he had never seen before: Florida, Atlanta, Chicago, Vermont. Although he exhibited once in New Haven, at a 1994 jazz festival, he felt that his artistic home was elsewhere. So much so that he opened up a gallery in Tribeca.

He maintained New Haven — where his family settled from Uruguay, when Da Silva, the oldest of their four children, was 17 — as his primary residence. But not his business base.

“In 1995, because New Haven maybe did not have an infrastructure [to support artists], I partnered with a friend of mine, and we opened up a gallery in New York City,” he said. ​“We were on Reade Street in New York, in Tribeca, from 1994 and a half until ​‘97.”

Buxbaum’s Pitch

That changed when Da Silva wife, Inger, became pregnant with the couple’s second son Alex in 1997. They debated moving to New York, but ultimately decided to sell the gallery space and keep their family life rooted firmly in New Haven. Da Silva looked for work and for properties where he could open something like the space he’d had in New York. That’s when he met Westvillian Thea Buxbaum, who suggested that he look into a property for sale in Westville just three blocks away from where he and Inger were living. Six months later, he bought the Frame Shop from Judy Mison and was well on his way to becoming someone everyone knows and interacts with in ​“the Village.”

“It [the transition from New York] was not difficult at all,” he said. ​“I look at New Haven as really my place, my home. It is very different from galleries in New York. I mean, I loved New York and I really liked it when I was there. But it’s not what New Haven is, or what Westville is. We try to do mostly local artists, so it has that cozy feeling, and I like to discover some new artists in New Haven.”

Part of what has made the Westville area feel like home, he added, is the diversity of artists, clientele, and Elm citizens with whom he and his family interact every day. As an immigrant whose children revel in their multiculturalism — Uruguayan, Swedish, and Portuguese — DaSilva said it is incumbent upon him to recognize and nurture the constellation of cultures that come together in his city, his neighborhood, and his shop.

“You need to make it happen, he said, noting his involvement with the Westville Renaissance Alliance and advocacy for ArLoW, a new development for work-live artists’ housing. ​“You need to create it. Just because you are in Westville doesn’t mean Westville is Westville because it’s just physically where it is. You really have to … [look at] who is there and how connected you are.”

“New Haven is in a very particular space,” he added. ​“I think New Haven is very tolerant … New Haven is a great place to be, and to be heard. I think you just have to follow your path.”

This interview is part of WNHH-LP’s ​“Open For Business” series on immigrant business owners and leaders in the nonprofit community. ​“Open for Business is sponsored by Frontier Communications. Frontier is proud to be Connecticut’s hometown provider of TV and internet for your home and business. Their phone number is 1.888.Frontier and their website is Frontier.com.