When Iowa artist Julia Franklin was a child growing up in north Texas, she would melt crayons on the hot lightbulb of a bedroom lamp.

She recalls this distinctly because she uses wax in her artwork today.

“I remember I loved the smell. I loved the translucent quality of melted wax,” said Franklin, who in December took over as executive director of Mainframe Studios, the artists’ workspace nonprofit in downtown Des Moines that opened in 2017. “I would dig in the backyard with my pink Baskin-Robbins spoon and create moats and create little cities just by digging in the dirt and playing in the mud every day and having to be hosed off before I could come into the house. Art is messy; there’s this idea of play that should be a part of what you do.

“I’ve always been making.”

Franklin previously worked on grants handed out by Bravo Greater Des Moines to arts and cultural organizations. She started her new job at Mainframe on a “First Friday” – an event from 5 to 8 p.m. the first Friday of every month that includes music, food, drinks, themed exhibitions and five floors of artists and shopping.

At Mainframe, she took over from Siobhan Spain, who had overseen the project since its opening. The Business Record caught up with Franklin recently. She explained how she approaches the job and what is ahead for Mainframe.

Responses have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Could you describe what exactly it means to be the executive director of Mainframe Studios?

First and foremost, I think the job is to take care of the artists and the building to ensure that we’re meeting our mission to provide affordable workspace for creatives. That’s my day to day: Is the building safe, are artists safe, do they have what they need to thrive? And then there’s things that support all of that, like fundraising. Working with the board, to make sure governance is happening and that oversight. It’s managing budgets to keep things sustainable. That’s the whole point. In some ways, I see it as relationship-building with tenants themselves, the artists and with community members. I see myself as that connector of artists to the community. I’ve witnessed every day, and I’m in awe of it, just the collaborative spirit that is here, and the willingness of people to pitch in and help solve problems with each other collectively. It’s incredible what the proximity of all these studios allows for.

About how many artists do you have? 

We have 181 studios, which I also liken to small businesses. They are all small businesses. And we have artists who share spaces and we do have some nonprofits, so we’re over 220 people who work in the building on a regular basis.

What does a typical day look like for you? Or is there even a typical day?

I have yet to find a typical day, and I love that. The job is never boring. There will never be the same day. A lot of it is meetings with individual tenants, with community members. It’s also solving a building emergency and helping support the team in that way. It’s also helping plan for the future, especially for First Friday events, for any professional development that we do for artists. 

When did you know that you wanted to be an artist? 

I did not have an art class until I was a sophomore in college. I hadn’t been to a museum until I was a sophomore in college. It wasn’t something that my family did. It wasn’t discouraged, but it wasn’t encouraged either. But I think I’ve always been crafty, creative. All of my English reports would have illustrations with them.

I think about my life – my dad took his own life and died by suicide when I was 16. I have a feeling that was the moment: How do you tell that story? How do you move on from something like that? That really just changes the course of your life. When I was in college, still not even quite sure how to articulate what happened … words weren’t doing it, but art could. Art was so interesting because a shape or a color could represent a mood or a moment. There were ways to use those symbols to help start to address some of that trauma, some of that impact. It still took decades for me to really tell the story of that experience and look at my father in a different way and start to understand the pressures of the world.

Thank you so much for sharing that. And I’m so sorry that you went through that.

Thank you. I appreciate that. … People do things because you have to. You are doing it with fear, you’re not doing it because you’re fearless, you’re doing it always with fear. But you have to accept that uncertainty and that unknown. There’s an interesting part of that choice, of getting through the day, making change happen, and finding ways to share that with others. And I think that’s the power part, is that it may not resonate with everyone, but it will resonate with someone who maybe desperately needs to hear that they’re not alone.

It sounds like the job you had at Bravo was really cool. What made you apply for this job? What was it that really called to you?

I’ve been in love with the arts for easily 25, probably closer to 30, years now. Another passion of mine is helping people. I see my role as to uplift others. I really enjoyed my time at Bravo as a community investment specialist. I was working with over 90 arts and culture nonprofits, and they all had very different needs. Most were volunteer-led organizations; some are much larger institutions. 

For most of us, there’s a small group of things that we go to and support on a regular basis. For me, it just opened my eyes to the wealth of opportunities in this town to learn about different cultures, different ways of creating. Performing arts, visual arts, in between, thinking about history, heritage, the stories that we tell, and I loved being able to help create systems that funded those organizations so they can continue that critical work in our community. 

When I think about why I wanted to apply here … it was being back in this building every day, and being surrounded by artists who were doing the work and knowing that I could help tell their stories and help amplify and elevate the work that’s happening at Mainframe to new audiences in the city, in the state, in the region and nationally. There’s a lot of opportunity there, because this is a gem, and it should not be a hidden gem.

Do most artists prefer and/or need studio space like Mainframe offers to separate work from home? 

Artists are usually making work, and it’s very solitary, so they are making work alone in a studio or alone at home. What Mainframe affords is actually a clean space for you to come in and make work, and you can leave it in process. You don’t have to clean up. So if you are doing this at home, on your kitchen table, you don’t get to have it out all the time. And so Mainframe allows you to come in and work daily. And so your practice is much more disciplined in that regard. But also, if you’re at home, most spaces are at a kitchen table or in a basement where you’re looking at your laundry or the dishes I need to do, and so Mainframe doesn’t have those distractions. Mainframe also is a community of other artists where if you’re working at home, your family may not understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Here you have hallways of people who totally get it and can connect on a completely different level, about materials, about ideas, about where to show work. This is the place to level up.

How does Mainframe’s budget work? How large is the staff?

We have three full-time staff members: me, our property manager and a program manager. Our budget is around $1.2 million, and we are a nonprofit. We really do want to be that sustainable workplace for creatives. The majority of our expenses all go to the building. This building is immaculate, and making sure things are running safely is a big priority for sure. And then there’s money for programming. We have monthly First Friday events, public events, where we do have thousands of people coming into the building to tour artist studios, make art, eat food, meet other people. So, we have a very public presence, and then we also have just the daily operations.

Do you have much time to make art?

I have not since I started this job. I set a deadline, so I have a small collaboration with another artist on the 29th of February. We’ll be doing a small work together. And so, yes, it’s still part of my life. It’s just not as much of a part of it as it was a couple of months ago.

What were your interactions with Siobhan Spain like when you were first a tenant? Has that informed your first months in the role?

Siobhan was definitely a friend and mentor. I remember approaching her in 2018 when I got an Iowa Artist Fellowship and had a sizable chunk of money, $10,000, to put forth to art projects and approached her about getting a studio here. I was able to get a small space on the fourth floor. That was instrumental, to be part of that early group that was part of Mainframe’s beginnings. Really proud to have started there and to see what was possible. Then I moved on up to a larger studio. I’ve since given that up so that other artists have that opportunity to share their work with the public.

What are your short-term priorities for Mainframe, and then what are your long-term priorities?

Short-term priorities are really looking at systems and processes and professionalizing those things. In a lot of ways, Mainframe has been in startup mode, and so we’re now evolving our business and thinking about new ways to be sustainable and help artists thrive, and thinking about potential expansion for programming, and other ways to connect the artist with the public. I think there’s a lot of cool education we could do to help the public understand what goes into designing something, making something, because not all art is made to be for sale. It is about an experience. How do we help the public know how to approach those things that might be unfamiliar or uncomfortable? I think there’s a lot of interesting education programs we can do out of that.

What do you think is the most effective way to tell the story of Iowa’s art scene?

That’s an interesting one. Social media videos seem to be what people want to consume, and it has to be digestible in 30 seconds or less. A lot of times, that just yields itself to the final art product, showing that, rather than maybe the process of how ideas happen and are formed and how those manifest in a physical artwork creation. That’s it: It’s how do you tell the story and how do you get people to connect with things in such short chunks of time? That’s the challenge for any business. But I also am reminded that Mainframe is in the details. I went to an event; the videos that were shown were all shot and edited here at Mainframe. The setting was at Mainframe for some of the interviews; the jewelry someone wore was from a Mainframe jeweler. How do you point out all of those things? The food that was served, some of that was made by Tangerine, who’s here at Mainframe. Some of the dresses that people wore to that event were made by Mainframe fashion designers. Mainframe is all-encompassing. It surrounds us, and how do you point that out and remind people that the flair and richness of life is coming from the creatives in this building?

What do you like to do in your free time, or outside of the art world?

I love traveling, like most people. My background is in art and in art history, and to go and see and experience where things were originally made, different cultures, different civilizations, that’s life-changing and transformational. And that’s what I love. There is a certain interest in the unknown, to that uncertainty, to that moment of discovery and understanding when you travel, and when you learn about different people doing different things, and how that connects the past to our current times. I think that’s what art has the ability to do: connect us. Things are still relevant even if they were made thousands of years ago. The context might have changed, but there’s still some commonalities.

What’s your favorite place you’ve visited?

I took a trip last year – it was a bucket list trip – to an island in Greece on the Aegean Sea to see the architectural ruins that were there, with a sunset in the background, and to understand that even the basic architecture is still what we use today, and that other cultures had that same basis for architecture. There was a simplicity to some of the work that was created thousands of years ago. I look at it as being almost moving toward abstraction, and yet we think about abstract art as being a 20th-century thing. And, it’s not. It’s happened before, and we just maybe weren’t paying attention. But you have to travel to see that and make those connections. Get out of your comfort zone.

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At a glance

Age: 50

Hometown: Wichita Falls, Texas

Education: BFA in sculpture and printmaking from Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls; MFA in sculpture and ceramics at TCU in Fort Worth

Family: Spouse, Davin (“he helps when I create large room installations, he helps build walls and figure out physics for me”), and daughter, Skye, 21 (“who’s taught me a lot about learning to look and appreciate all the details”)

Resides: West Des Moines

Activities/hobbies: Art is the center of everything, but also travel, reading and sunshine

Contact: julia@mainframestudios.org