Dean Gillispie worked in the maintenance department at Warren Correction Institution, and that gave him access to the entire prison, which he often scoured for the bits of trash he could use.
Locked in his cell at night, he’d take out his cache, and with his hefty frame hunched over a small writing table, he’d use a few homemade tools — the blade of a disposable razor inserted in a pen to make an X-acto knife; a tiny serrated saw fashioned from a paper clip with ridges cut in it by a toenail clipper — and he’d begin to build small dioramas that echoed nostalgic images of life beyond the bars.
He crafted a gas station of yesteryear, a bait shop, an old movie house, an Airstream trailer.
“I’d get into it so much that I wasn’t in prison no more,” he said. “I was… gone! Sometimes I was out on Route 66 driving by all those places I’d imagined.
" I did it to keep my sanity. I was in the deepest part of hell, and I wanted to escape the madness around me.”
In Gillispie’s case, that’s not an exaggeration.
One day he’d been a 24-year-old Fairborn guy working at a factory in downtown Dayton, and the next he was wrongly imprisoned for crimes he did not commit.
Thanks to a security guard’s personal beef with him at work and his recruitment of a Miami Twp. police detective who, as a court would rule decades later, manipulated witnesses and suppressed evidence, Gillispie was convicted of kidnapping, rape and armed robbery.
And suddenly there was madness all around him.
“Ain’t nobody gonna call me a rapist cause I ain’t a rapist,” he said. “When people would say it to me, I was determined they weren’t gonna say it for free.
“My first five years in prison it was constantly fight, fight, fight. But just because I could handle myself before I went in didn’t mean I could handle prison. Those dudes are for real.
“Nothing prepares you for seeing your first person killed, much less a half dozen others.”
Gillispie recalled those times the other afternoon as he sat in the Edward A. Dixon Gallery at 222 N. St. Clair St. in downtown Dayton. He had just carried in five boxes containing five of those models he’d made in prison.
They’ll be featured in the Dean Gillispie Art Show that opens there on Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. The event benefits the Ohio Innocence Project, which is responsible for helping Gillispie get his freedom in 2011 after being wrongly imprisoned for 20 years.
Every year Dixon curates a “We’re Doing It ALL Wrong” show with the intent to “create dialogue and spark ideas for change related to the many ways humanity fails itself.”
Gillispie’s personal story and artwork fit that concept and in the process they bring to light the work of the Ohio Innocence Project, which to date has freed 42 wrongly convicted people who served over 800 years behind bars.
Thursday’s show also serves as a precursor to the second annual “An Evening for Justice” program at the Victoria Theatre on Wednesday, Feb. 19, at 7 p.m.
It will be headlined by Leo Schofield, who spent 35 years in Florida prisons for the murder of his wife — which he did not commit — and Gilbert King, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and the creator of the popular crime podcast “Bone Valley.”
Their talk will be followed by a panel discussion featuring legal luminaries involved in the case and area stalwarts of the Innocence Project, including Montgomery County Common Pleas Judge Stephen Dankof, who launched the “Evening for Justice” programs last year.
As for those boxes containing Gillispie’s art, they recently arrived back in town after three years on the road in what’s been an almost inconceivable tour for discarded items found in Ohio prisons.
Gillispie’s dioramas were featured, among other places, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City; the Freedom Center in Cincinnati; Brown University in Rhode Island; a show in Birmingham, Alabama; and at the Schomburg Center back in New York.
Publications like The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times have run articles about him and his creations.
Now, Gillispie said, a movie is being filmed about his story and his celebrated art.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think any of this would happen,” he said. “It’s just trash that I made into something and, when I came out of prison, somebody got interested and took it to the top of the world.
“To go from wrongly convicted to a MoMA artist is just a crazy (expletive) story.”
Credit: JIM NOELKER
Credit: JIM NOELKER
‘Now it’s on!’
Just as fascinating is Gillispie’s primary pursuit since being released from prison.
He’s fully immersed in the Ohio Innocence Project, a legal clinic at the University of Cincinnati law school, and now serves on its Board of Directors.
“I owe them everything,” he said. “If it wasn’t for them I’d still be in prison.”
Instead, he’s given talks in Ireland and Italy and across the United States at colleges, high schools and even to a group of Ohio judges, whom he took to task for allowing bogus evidence to distort cases.
Dankof recently appeared on stage with him at Tiffin University, which has an OIP chapter, as does the University of Dayton.
Gillispie can mesmerize a crowd with details of his wrongful conviction and imprisonment, as well as the story of his unlikely art career.
When he made his first creation in prison, he said it was confiscated by the guards. Then one day he had to do some work in the warden’s office and noticed his seized art on display there.
“I thought, ‘Oh, I see how this works. Now it’s on!’” he said with a grin. “I knew if I kept building stuff it might get taken, but it wouldn’t be destroyed.”
He said after a few years the prison agreed to stat an art program for inmates.
After state and federal courts and the Ohio Supreme Court released and exonerated him and admitted he had been “wrongly imprisoned,” Gillispie was back in Fairborn and his artwork was stored in his parents’ garage.
“A buddy of mine who was six to eight cells down from me got ahold of his cousin who was a professor at Rutgers University and had been working on stories of prison and prison art,” Gillispie said. “He told her she needed to see my stuff.”
He said Dr. Nicole Fleetwood, a 1990 graduate of Hamilton High School, eventually came to see his work and her response, as Gillispie recounted in his Kentucky accent, was: “Ho-leee crap!”
She curated a show at Rutgers that featured his work, and she highlighted it in her book, “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” She eventually moved to New York University, and he was invited to show his work at MoMA, which he said he’d never heard of.
The show was a hit and, just as had happened at Rutgers, he was approached by an art collector who wanted to buy his collection and made a high, six figures offer. Both times he turned them down
“At the time he didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” Dankof said. “But those pieces were all he had from 20 years of his life. That meant something to him, and it just shows you the humanity of Dean Gillispie.”
Art saving a life
Although he insists he’s not an artist, Gillispie showed otherwise when he was convinced to do a sculpture for the Garden of Hope at Chagrin Arts in the historic downtown of Chagrin Falls.
His work is on four blocks of limestone — the primary building material of Ohio’s old prisons — and has a chain with links the size of a fist that is wrapped around it.
The chain is being pulled up by stainless steel butterflies, each engraved with a different name of a wrongly convicted person freed thanks to the OIP. Along with the number of years that person served, each butterfly has a separate QR code that enables you to learn everything about that individual case.
“We just added eight more butterflies at our last ceremony there,” Gillispie said proudly.
In November of 2022, Gillispie won a $45 million civil lawsuit — the largest civil rights payout in Ohio history — after a jury found former Miami Twp. police detective Scott Moore suppressed evidence and tainted eyewitness identifications to get Gillispie’s convictions.
A year later Miami Twp. was ordered to pay the judgment on Moore’s behalf, but that decision has been appealed in federal court.
“People say, ‘Man, you got it made. You were compensated,’” Gillispie said. “And I say, ‘Kiss my (rear end), Compensation would be making me 25 again.’
“My life stopped for 20 years. I go to my buddies’ houses, and they have careers and kids and all those great memories of life. I missed all those formative years.
“And it didn’t just affect me, it nearly killed my parents.
“Nothing erases what I went through, what I saw. The PTSD is intense.”
Back in Fairborn, he now finds tonic in tackling life-size projects. He built an Airstream trailer that mimics his model and he’s rebuilding a 1953 Chevrolet station wagon that he said will be “done in a patina, not paint” and have a powerful 550 horsepower engine, big fancy wheels and a sweet interior.
So, while life has now imitated art for him, art, in turn, saved his life.
“If I hadn’t started doing this artwork when I did in prison, I might not be here at all anymore,” he said quietly.
At the least, he said, “My head would have been busted open plenty times, and all my teeth would be missing.”
He shook his head at the thought and finally started to laugh, just hard enough that you could see a mouth full of teeth, all intact.
HOW TO GO
What: Dean Gillispie Art Show
When: 6-8 p.m. Thursday
Where: Edward A. Dixon Gallery, 222 N. St. Clair St., Dayton
Register and tickets: To register go to https://foundation.uc.edu/DeanGillispieArtShow. Tickets are $20.
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