Years of Michael Dinning’s dreams conspire to bring new art gallery featuring local artists to downtown Spokane

When the decadeslong dream of opening an art gallery became a reality for Spokane artist Michael Dinning last month, one thing he didn’t want to do was hang his own work in it.

Named after Dinning and his wife Stephanie, who co-own the facility, D2 Gallery and Studio opened on May 2 and is located on the corner of West First Avenue and South Bernard Street in downtown Spokane.

D2 hosted its second First Friday event this month, with local artist Jim Dhillon as the star – for a second month in a row.

“So many artists struggle, just trying to get shown,” Dinning said. “I didn’t want (D2) to be a vanity project … I just want to find people who are doing really quality work that I love, and I want to show it. It’s a really hard way to make a living, and I know that from trying to do it.”

Highlighting individual artists for one month at a time – with Dhillon’s two-month-long exhibit Dinning refers to as D2’s “guinea pig” being the exception – is a part of both Stephanie and Michael Dinnings’ goals to give back to the Spokane artist community.

June’s exhibition will include 11 new Dhillon pieces that weren’t shown in May.

Most visual artists, Dinning said, get to show their work in a gallery every year and half, and need to make all their profits during that time. Galleries, on the other hand, tend to make a profit every month.

“To support the artists that we believe in, we want to try to also sell their work outside of that time,” Dinning said.

In addition to solo exhibits, D2 supports artists by taking a smaller commission from work sold at 30%, compared to 40% or 50% at most commercial galleries, Dinning said.

The idea of opening a gallery has been brewing in Dinning’s head “for a long time,” but the dream became serious just last fall. Five years ago, Dinning was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, which he said changed his mindset about “a lot of things.”

“One of those things was we just need to jump in,” Dinning said. “What’s the benefit of not?”

Originally from Bellevue, Washington, Dinning said art has been an important part of his life since childhood. After studying museum curation at Washington State University in Pullman, Dinning had plans to continue his studies at grad school at the University of Denver.

“I took a gap year, never went back (and) suddenly I just became an artist,” Dinning said.

Dinning spent several years post-grad working in art management in the Seattle area, but moved to Spokane 20 years ago after meeting Stephanie. There, he worked running graphics and mail rooms at Avista, and quit doing anything art-related for around 10 years. It wasn’t until the family’s nanny quit and he became a stay-at-home dad that Dinning took up his passion again.

“There was a way for me to get back into the sculptural part of it,” Dinning said. “I find it’s a lot more expressive to bring in all these different parts and elements, because then you can tell a whole story in one piece.”

Dinning said his love for sculpture – more specifically, morphing sculpture and paintings into one – dates back to his college years.

“I hated painting,” Dinning said. “Part of it was I was rebellious and everybody just wanted to be a painter … but also part of it was the tactile part of sculpture and print making – it’s more of a craft.”

This mixed media style is what Dinning has become known for in Spokane. It’s not unusual to find objects such as stone arrows, violin bows and vintage shaving razors in his work – in fact, he says it’s what makes his works less precious.

“It kind of breaks the mold of what a painting is,” Dinning said. “I don’t think art needs to be precious, it just needs to be enjoyable. I can’t imagine doing sculptural pieces without the painted piece also involved.”

The idea for an artwork, Dinning said, almost always starts verbally. From there, an image usually suggests itself. One of those images came to Dinning eight years ago, and inspired a work he titled “Lost.”

“One day, someone was supposed to pick up my son and she didn’t see him there. For 15 minutes or something, he was lost, and it was terrifying. So I created a piece of artwork about that,” he said.

Recently, Dinning decided to revisit the work and turn it into something more “bittersweet.” The revamped piece, titled “Lost Childhoods,” is Dinning’s only piece living on D2’s walls – outside of a few works-in-progress in Dinning’s small studio space at the back of the gallery – and is one example of his ability to morph elements of sculpture and painting together.

The original 12 canvases containing images of his children are present and have been arranged into two groups of six, with wooden window frames hung with string in front of each grouping. On the canvases themselves, an image of an empty chair has been painted in the center, Dinning said, symbolizing a loss of childhood as his children have since grown up. From each window frame hangs an Edison lightbulb, which casts an intentional warm “nostalgic” glow. Miniature jars containing rolled-up paper illustrations straight out of a “Winnie the Pooh” book hang from the piece and are held in place with crushed-up crayons.

“(I spent) probably two years straight reading my son ‘Winnie the Pooh’ every night,” Dinning said. “I actually used the book that we would read from, and cut out the illustrations from it.”

Local photographer and owner of Marmot Art Space in Kendall Yards, Marshall Peterson, has shown Dinning’s work at his gallery three times over the years.

“He’s a super sweet guy,” Peterson said. “He cares about the world, and if you look at his art, many of the pieces you’ll notice that they’re not just pretty colors and shapes, but there’s a message that they’re talking about.”

Peterson also said that D2 is Dinning’s way of giving local artists a designated space to be recognized, which can be a challenge in the gallery industry due to it often not making enough of a profit to keep the gallery open.

“The truth is, almost nobody does it,” Peterson said, referring to opening a gallery dedicated to local artists. “I’m glad that he’s stepping up to the plate and putting his resources on the table. And that’s a cool thing to do.”

It was through one of Peterson’s shows at Marmot that Dinning met Dhillon. D2’s current exhibit, titled “Past is Present,” is a curation of Dhillon’s pieces from the past 20 years.

Dhillon said the exhibit’s title is inspired by his tendency to create work based on human experience, and how our pasts as humans can create part of who we are in the present moment. He calls his works “nonverbal communications,” and said the emphasis on human experience transcends into the way Dhillon hopes viewers of his work interpret it.

“I don’t really try to explain (the art). I just kind of make them and let people connect with them, or not connect with them,” he said.

At a glance, most people might classify Dhillon’s paintings as abstract. While his style of art doesn’t necessarily fit within one specific category, Dhillon said the term neo-postmodernism is more accurate.

“They’re based on modernism and abstraction, but I kind of make them my own, kind of go a little in a different direction with them,” he said. “People need to come and see them up close and personal, because the pictures just don’t do them justice.”

Beyond supporting local artists, Dinning said preserving spaces dedicated to visual art in general is important because of the way it can communicate and resonate with people.

“When you see something and it just appeals to you, you just, you know – you feel it more than you understand it. We’re both speaking to the world,” Dinning said, referring to himself and Dhillon. “If we can just get someone to see something and like something and just feel good about something, then I think that’s important.”