Along with this week’s announcement of the 2018 winners of the coveted $15,000 People’s Liberty Globe Grants comes news that there will now be two storefront spaces for them to transform with installations.
One is the existing location at 1805 Elm St., across from Findlay Market in Over-the-Rhine. The new space will be at 2849 Colerain Ave. in Camp Washington. It is more than three times the size of the 800-square-foot Elm Street space, with 3,000 square feet available for Globe Grant recipients.
“With People’s Liberty being a five-year experiment, we’re always trying to innovate and find new ways to break down the fields of traditional philanthropy,” says Aurore Fournier, program director with the organization. People’s Liberty, begun in 2015, is a philanthropic laboratory that’s part of the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation.
“We’ve been intrigued thinking of our future — does it live on?” she continues. “If so, do we have tiny branches in different neighborhoods or does it spread out? Does it only live online? With the Globe Grants, we could start to experiment about being present in a different neighborhood.”
The 2018 Globe Grant winners for the new Camp Washington space are:
• LOOK by Sidney Cherie Hilley and Anh Tran; February-April: It will be a shop and reading lounge with artist-made publications from local and regional contributors. The back area will have space for performances and an open studio.
• Fashion Bootcamp by Kaley Madden; May-July: The storefront becomes an education sanctuary and upcycling center, targeting high school students to participate in a six-week fashion-design boot camp. • SkateAble vs. Non by Jill Cleary, Ali Calis, Zach Kincaid and Scott Licardi; August-October: It’s an artist-led skate park that will teach local residents about skateboarding.
The 2018 Globe Grant winners for the Elm Street/Findlay Market space are:
• The Good King by Arian Armstrong; March-May: It will turn the gallery into an abandoned clock tower/art studio, with old wooden floors, stone walls overgrown with ivy, rustic beams and more.
• Make Someone’s Day by Bethany Pelle; June-August: It will promote collaborative gestures of kindness. Visitors will nominate locals to receive handmade ceramic flower arrangements and then help create them.• Rewriting Our Narrative by Melissa Aydogan; September-October: It will turn the space into a Turkish teahouse with ground seating, Turkish lanterns and rugs, music and conversation over sweets.
Before settling on Camp Washington as the site for their expansion, Fournier and the People’s Liberty team compiled a short list of potential neighborhoods. Camp Washington has seen new galleries and a museum in recent years. People’s Liberty engaged neighborhood residents and influencers to gauge their reaction to the idea and it was positive.
People’s Liberty’s Fournier envisions Camp Washington as a destination location, while the Elm Street location has the benefit of fairly steady foot traffic from Findlay Market patrons. Lessons learned from past Over-the-Rhine programming will help guide community-engagement activities at both locations.
“The space made it so attractive to us,” says Cleary of SkateAble Vs. Non, the skate park/art gallery installation taking over the Camp Washington storefront for a period next year. “The opportunity to do it in a bigger space with funding is so exciting. We remember Camp Washington before; it was industrial. People don’t realize how cool it is now. It’s inspiring in itself.”
The SkateAble vs. Non installation will feature a skateable side and an art/illustration side. It will offer board building, in-shop skating, interactive screen-printing opportunities and more. Cleary said her team hopes to screen films about skateboarding.
“Our main goal is to create an inviting and inclusive space for community members to come in and own it,” she says. “I got together with all my old skateboarding friends and we started talking about how can we bridge that gap between art and skateboarding.”
Learn more about People’s Liberty GLOBE GRANTS at peoplesliberty.org.
