N
ina M. Wells, a 32-year-old photographer from Madisonville, had a creative idea she wanted to act on but lacked the money to do so: fill a gallery with her portraits of African-American males sitting on a throne and wearing a bejeweled gold crown.
Julia Fischer, a 35-year-old toy designer/video-design studio employee from Covington, noticed that well-made toys were too expensive for many families, and the cheaper ones were soon broken and destined for landfills. She wished she could start a Play Library — a place that featured a wide variety of toys and games for free use.
Michael DeMaria, 37, a freelance Northside artist who works on storyboards and commercial illustrations, wanted to build a big, noisy, room-filling Rube Goldberg-like contraption in which every action causes a reaction, whether it should or not.
All three will get their chance next year: They are the 2016 winners of People’s Liberty’s $15,000 Globe Grants, and they will be able to take turns offering their projects in the first-floor gallery space of the People’s Liberty building at 1805 Elm St. in Over-the-Rhine. The space used to be the Globe Furniture Building.
Each is to “transform the People’s Liberty Elm Street storefront into pop-up experiences and bold installations,” in People’s Liberty’s words.
People’s Liberty is a collaboration between the Haile/U.S. Bank Foundation and the Johnson Foundation. For 2016, the program’s second year, 34 people applied for a Globe Grant. A three-person jury ranked the top seven proposals, and People’s Liberty staff interviewed the finalists to make sure they met qualifications. For instance, they have to be at least 18 and live within the I-275 beltway around metropolitan Cincinnati.
For Wells, it’s a huge break — she quit work as a bank teller in early 2014 in order to pursue portrait photography, her first love.
She has already experimented with her idea, buying a crown on eBay, and loved the results. “I was working already, and I said I wanted to photograph men of color and crowns,” she says, meeting with the others at the People’s Liberty office last week. “The concept is to restore value back into community and for them to know who they are as a people.
“We already have the issue of black men in the community with police,” she continues, “and with them killing themselves, so I thought this was a strong message in the center of community.”
Because the Globe Gallery is located in Over-the-Rhine, she expects to find many of the subjects for her King Me in the neighborhood.
She hopes this will not only be a message of positive empowerment to African-American men, but also a message to others to avoid stereotypical thinking. “Just in general, it’s for everyone to see them as they’ve never seen them before,” Wells says. “That’s the prime purpose of it.”
There is another feature — one that will be new to Wells. She intends to display 3-D poster-size prints of her work. “I was speaking to someone from People’s Liberty, and she said portraits were not enough — her exact words were, ‘Go crazy.’ So 3-D just popped into my head.”
Wells’ exhibit will open on Feb. 26, 2016 from 6-9 p.m.
Fischer, whose gallery takeover begins June 24, 2016 from 6-9 p.m., knows how the toy business works from the nine years she spent employed in it in Los Angeles. During that time, she visited manufacturers in China and found a sad truth hiding behind much of their work.
“When you’re creating something, you have a great idea,” she says, “but when you are openly selling it, you have to cost-reduce the whole thing. So we were making things we knew were going to break in three months. We were just creating landfill and I found it really upsetting.
“There are toys made with amazing materials, but they are unaffordable to so many people,” she continues.
In L.A., she thought about creating a Play Library — not specifically just for high-quality toys, but a place where they would also be available along with everything else. She even collected donations. Then she moved here (she’s a native New Yorker) and brought along her inventory. So she applied for a Globe Grant.
Her plan is to create a hip, colorful place stocked with toys and physical games (rather than video) that adults can play, too. “I definitely intend to have evenings for adults to come in and have game nights,” Fischer says.
“I want all children — all the people — to be able to play with that stuff,” she says. “Where I grew up, we used the public library all the time. I thought if I could do that with toys and playing, that’d be the most fun place ever.”
DeMaria, who grew up in Northern Kentucky and has a master’s degree in Sequential Art from Savannah College of Art and Design, traces his desire to make grand moving objects back to when he built a 40-foot diving shark for a Maker Faire.
“I learned I could make anything,” he says. “With friends, I worked on Halloween projects that incorporated LEDs, sound effects and things that move.”
And he did a Rube Goldberg-like project involving balls at Cincinnati Museum Center. (Goldberg, a cartoonist/inventor who died in 1970, became popular for imagining machines and systems whose complexity in performing simple, direct tasks can be hypnotic and hilarious.)
His Globe Grant-winning presentation will open Sept. 30, 2016 and he’s going to soon start designing and figuring out the materials he’ll use.
He hopes people view the final result, once it takes over the space, as art. “I’ve been to a lot of galleries where people stare at a beautiful painting and then go on to the next and it’s a quiet Zen thing,” DeMaria says. “Or they do it in a shallow way and don’t really see anything.”
“This will be something that encourages people to spend time and get submerged into it,” he says. “And even if they don’t, they’ll still get to see kinetic movement. So the artwork will be a constantly, ever-changing thing that is entertaining.”
For more information on PEOPLE’S LIBERTY, visit peoplesliberty.org.
This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2015.