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| Photo By Laura Leffler |
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Ober-Rae Starr Livingstone manages a new art gallery at a busy intersection in downtown Cincinnati.
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The Fifth Street Gallery, aka "A Coalition of Cincinnati Artists," opened in June and is doing surprisingly well. The gallery (55 W. Fifth St., Downtown) sits beneath the Netherland Hilton Hotel, across the street from Tiffany's and Macy's and within blocks of Saks, several hotels, Fountain Square and the convention center. On second thought, maybe success isn't all that surprising.
The coalition organizer, painter Ober-Rae Starr Livingstone, is represented by the Miller Gallery. He conspicuously refers to the new space on Fifth Street as "the shop." He found the space through a friend of a friend at Belvedere Realty, who gave him the perfect lease opportunity for an artist: month-to-month and dirt-cheap. Livingstone then invited several artists to join him; 10 locals have come together in one space with one idea -- to spread the word about their art.
The selling strategy is brilliant. With three very different painters, a glass artist, a jewelry designer, a potter, a stone sculptor, an art-quilt maker, a photographer, a monthly visiting artist and an events florist, there is something for everyone.
People milling around inside are a predictable mix of conventioneers, shoppers with Saks bags, a man asking how about the cost of commissioning a portrait. The work is not extraordinary -- big, expensive paintings, small ceramic works and handmade jewelry. Other things do surprise, however, like inexpensive T-shirts and gift cards, buckets of organic flowers and a makeshift studio in the corner, set up as much for advertising as for working.
The Fifth Street Gallery is a regular superstore, but the difference between this and, say, Macy's across the street, is that the gallery is not a superstore driven by profit. Sure, nearly 80 percent of the gallery's clientele come from outside Cincinnati. But the fact remains that the artists are local: They have faith in this city and in the businesses that remain.
Livingstone emphasizes this as he gestures to his own paintings -- wildly colorful images of sunrises and sunsets which, he explains, are meant to connect people with each other and with themselves in the understanding of beauty.
He says this standing in front of Larry Womack's paintings, which display the clean realism of old-fashioned oil paintings. One of them actually shocks me: a painting of a scene from The Passion of Christ, for which Livingstone boasts, "Larry had to get permission from Mel Gibson to paint it." I think he's joking at first -- Gibson owns the rights to the Bible? But he's serious.
Two highlights of the gallery are also the two most sell-able artists in the collaboration: Joyce Clancy and Jean Heffernan. Clancy is an octogenarian ceramicist whose pots and trays are elaborately decorated with handmade, fired clay sculptures. They are precious and distinctive, and the gallery cannot keep enough of them in stock. Heffernan's works, "Polaroid Fine Art Photography," look like hand-tinted pictures, printed on cloth, metal and other materials. Livingstone celebrates the sense of nostalgia in Heffernan's pictures, and he's right. These are works casting a hint of melancholy on a constructed, if lovely, past.
The mixing of art and business hasn't ever been undercover -- from the patrons of the middle ages to Sotheby's auctions to run-of-the-mill galleries, it has always been present. Yet somehow Livingstone and his friends have managed to reduce the stigma that surrounds artists' sale of their work. Artists are capitalists, too. And why shouldn't they be? Their work is as important as yours.
FIFTH STREET GALLERY is open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday through Saturday (until 9 p.m. on Friday). Closed Sunday.
