Durben to step down from OAC after 50 years

What is the Owatonna Arts Center without Silvan Durben in it?

The community will find out in September, 50 years after he was hired as the first paid employee of the then relatively new nonprofit.

Durben, the creative director at OAC, will retire in August, it was announced last week.

“We are all replaceable,” he said, “and we want the best for the organization – and I want the arts center to take advantage of all the new possibilities that happen” with new leadership.

The move may not necessarily have come when it did had Durben made the decision himself, but he is willing to do what the board is asking, he said.

“Sept. 1 is the beginning of our fiscal year, so that’s the reason for the unusual timing,” Durben said.

Jan Mittelstadt Tippett remembers when Durben arrived at the OAC through a government grant.

“He was hired as the curator to hang and take down the shows and to chair the program committee,” Tippett said. “How do I know this? I wrote a feature story about him and the new position” for the newspaper, meeting Durben within days of his arrival.

“He surely did far more – from the start – than just hang and take down the shows,” she said. “Early on, he painted the door so that it would be more welcoming and so that people knew what door to take to get in to climb the steps.”

Durben remembers that “the (OAC) board didn’t know what to do with me, and I didn’t know what to do with the position. They were very thankful to just have somebody who could open and close the doors,” because the volunteers who were running it were exhausted.

The first Christmas decorating was later that same year, Tippett remembered, a tradition that has continued and had many different themes, “thanks to Silvan.”

Durben “started calling the arts center’s performance hall ‘Owatonna’s living room’ in 1997,” she said. “It is that.”

Over the next nine months, there are “some wonderful exhibitions that I really want to be a part of,” Durben said. “I’ve scheduled a few other exhibitions that I might not be here for, but I want to see that they happen.”

There are also some behind-the-scenes things on his to-do list, including finding another endowment fund to help provide sustainable financial support for the OAC.

“There are new opportunities for the arts center,” Durben said, “and we need to take advantage of them. We don’t want to live in the past; the world keeps moving forward in a very positive way.”

Still, Tippett said, “there is no replacement for the man who has lived and breathed his work for 50 years. With good fortune, the board will be able to hire a successor to carry on with one of Owatonna’s greatest institutions.”

Durben hopes they give “the new person the opportunity to be themselves and do things – and not feel that they’re in the shadow of the previous person. None of us are necessarily the perfect fit for a position, if you’re using the textbook kind of analysis, but everybody does the best with the resources and their skills,” he said.

“Each of us have various talents, and the new person or persons will bring their own touch, their own expertise,” he said.

“Over the years, the one thing that is always very critical and wonderful is, we have really good people in the community… and they’re willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work that needs to be done,” Durben said.

“The people have been very good and very generous to me and to the arts center, and the real legacy is the community support that they give to the arts.”