Oktoberfest, Opening Day, the WEBN fireworks on Labor Day—certain annual events are established traditions in Cincinnati, and BLINK quickly earned its place on that list. The nation’s largest public art and light festival is poised for even more success in its fourth iteration October 17-20 at 7-11 p.m. each evening.
Executive Director Justin Brookhart is now in his second turn at the helm. The festival had a local economic impact of $126 million and brought in more than two million visitors in 2022. The leadership team has built on those successes and learned from public feedback, continuing to refine an event that’s increasingly coming to define the Cincinnati experience.
“The 2022 festival was a good learning year for me personally and I think a nice evolution for BLINK,” says Brookhart. “Our biggest goal this year has been thinking about how we can collaborate better and how we commission artwork a little bit differently.”
BLINK put out its first call for artists in 2022, attracting about 250 applicants. This year, more than 950 people applied. Part of that expansion resulted from the application process being left open for a longer period of time. Another part came from the concerted eff ort Brookhart and team made in reaching out to artists through intentional engagement sessions in Cincinnati as well as in the international artist community.
Brookhart and BLINK partners also organized an outside set of judges to review the submissions. Eight artists and curators from various Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky institutions were tasked with the first pass at every submission.
“I think the one thing we all agreed on was that we needed more local artists involved, either in an assistant capacity or as a lead artist,” says Michael Coppage, whose “Care Bear” work was projected on the side of the Aronoff Center for the Arts at BLINK 2022. “I was looking for diversity and story as well as different ethnic backgrounds, women, and Black people, because I think I was one of two Black artists in 2022. And we wanted to make sure that, if we were having this thing in Cincinnati, Cincinnati was a big part of the art.”
Photograph courtesy Agar
This year, four muralists (out of 13), 17 lighted installation/sculptural artists (out of 35), and 11 projection artists (out of 30) hail from the Cincinnati region. Among them is muralist Javarri Lewis, who’s enjoyed one of the more meteoric rises to BLINK fame. He started painting in earnest just a few years ago, and this year he’ll take on his first solo BLINK mural.
Just before the pandemic set in, Andrew Salzbrun with AGAR, one of BLINK’s executive partners, connected him with mural artist Matthew Dayler, a past BLINK participant. Dayler brought Lewis on board to help his collective, Chroma Projects, with two murals at the then-new MegaCorp Pavilion in Newport.
“That was my initial experience doing a large-scale mural and learning project management,” says Lewis. “That was what sparked my journey of learning more about public art and working with other designers and continuing to meet people in community.” He was brought on as a mural assistant to hand-paint a BLINK 2022 piece designed by London-based Kingsley Nebechi, entitled “Justine,” located in the Findlay Market footprint.
Lewis’s own artwork is full of vibrant portraiture that often pays homage to historical figures, including his collaboration on the “Cincinnati Against the World” mural in Goose Alley in Over-the-Rhine. For BLINK 2024, he’s embarking on one of his most unique and meaningful collaborations yet, with Cincinnati muralist William Rankins Jr. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Rankins’s colorful, approachable work was sought by many local businesses for use on buildings across the city. But the creep of gentrification, particularly in OTR, has erased nearly all of his work. And, in a sad twist, he’s lost almost all of his sight in the past few years.
With this collaboration, Lewis is looking to restore some of Rankins’ vision and visual legacy. “I thought it would be cool if we could somehow commemorate his story as one of the main people who really kicked off this explosion of Cincinnati becoming a mural city,” he says. “My idea is to do a large-scale mural of him actually painting.”
Photograph by Zak Kauth
The Lewis and Rankins mural will be at the Film Center apartment building near Findlay Market. Most of this year’s BLINK murals are concentrated in that zone. The festival is expanding to Newport, providing yet another concentration of art in addition to Over-the-Rhine, downtown, The Banks, and Covington. “There’s going to be an activation primarily around Newport on the Levee,” says Brookhart. “We wanted an area that families and people are used to going to, and that’s already a family-friendly entertainment area.”
Newport on the Levee will have projection mapping on its floodwall, as will the historic Thompson House across the street. A first-time laser bridge installation will light up the Ohio River. “We’ll have a 100-foot array of laser lights shooting across the Roebling Suspension Bridge, running parallel to the bridge and connecting Covington and Smale Riverfront Park,” says Brookhart. “I think it will be sort of a showstopper.”
Walnut Street and Vine Street will continue to be major thoroughfares and high activation areas, as will Court Street, where the successful Asianati Night Market returns. There will be more programming along Court Street, which Brookhart describes as the “hub” between the downtown and Over-the-Rhine zones.
Several other artists return to BLINK this year, including Chicago-based projection mapping artist George Berlin. It’s his third BLINK appearance. His 2022 work, “ECO-NNECTIONS: TOGETHER,” was projected on the facade of Hotel Covington and focused on climate change; his team spent time speaking with hotel owner Donna Salyers, researching the history of Covington, and even interviewing Mayor Joseph Meyer to get a handle on the region.
“They call this kind of art site-specific design, but it’s not just the building,” says Berlin. “The building is in a place, and the place has meaning for people. A lot of what we do is digital placemaking to give people really great memories about a space they care about—and to do that we need to understand where it is.”
This time around, Berlin and his team will be mapping onto the YWCA building at Walnut and Eighth streets downtown. The title, “Roundabouts,” was inspired by the idea that not every goal has a straight path to its achievement and by the fact that the YWCA is historically a place that helps people on their respective paths. Berlin also commissioned friend DJ Skoli to create a mash-up of music from various cultures to complement his unity theme.
“Every city is in this city, and we’re all in one city around the world at the same time,” says Berlin. “It’s one big city. The subhead of the title for this installation is ‘One planet, one people.’ ”
Photograph by Zak Kauth
Another return to get excited about in October is new projection mapping of Music Hall. BLINK’s progenitor event, Lumenocity, projected exclusively on Music Hall between 2013 to 2016. “We’re really excited to be highlighting that obviously historical and architecturally significant building that has a great history of projection mapping,” Brookhart says. “We’ll be working with four different artists to projection map Music Hall, two local artists and two national/international. We just wanted to give multiple looks to that building since it’s such a large canvas.”
Chaske Haverkos is one of the local artists. A 3D animator and motion graphics artist, he projection-mapped the Ralph Steadman mural on 13th Street at BLINK 2019 and a mural by Max Sansig behind Deeper Roots Coffee at Findlay Market in 2022. He also uses music to help cue the mood and direction of his projections, and this year he’s working with Play Audio Agency to create an original soundscape for a fully immersive experience.
“I’ve always felt the need to inject energy, to fly forward, and to go into the mural by moving the camera to transport people or to take them on a journey of sorts,” he says. “It feels way too static to me to sit there in the same spot and let the visuals be the transitional element. I feel like it needs a bigger push.”
Another artist excited about Music Hall’s architectural playground is Susan Kosti. “I applied for BLINK because I saw this is the biggest light festival in the U.S. and I was like, OK, I want to come here,” says the Australia-based artist. “I got the response that I would do a projection on Music Hall and I was like, What? Oh my God!”
Kosti works across the globe, creating immersive experiences through large-scale projection mapping. Recent installations include a piece called “Flora” projected on the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas and a data visualization project for Vivid Sydney, the world’s largest light festival. Her piece for Music Hall will also incorporate data visualization, using all new subject matter.
“My goal here is to represent the dynamic design of the city and do a brief history,” she says. “So it’s going to be like skyscrapers, trees, and roots all over the human body, which represents the soul of Cincinnati. The whole animation will show how the city’s changed over time.”
BLINK continues to change and adapt as well. This year’s projections, for instance, will be treated more like actual shows rather than being on a constant loop, with a defined start, end, and intermission between each one. Music programming will also take into deeper consideration the artistic atmosphere and mood surrounding stage locations.
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