Over-the-Rhine is alive with creative ideas to broaden and deepen the revived neighborhood’s — and the city’s — cultural offerings.
Although temporary, the Mini Microcinema in People’s Liberty’s Globe Building seems to have awakened locals to the need for a nonprofit institution devoted to film. And a new group connected to the Over-the-Rhine Foundation is trying to create a Tenement Museum like the one in New York’s Lower East Side.
On a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I visited an arts institution that would be perfect for Over-the-Rhine, since it repurposes unused older buildings. And there are still plenty of those available here.
It’s called the Mattress Factory, and it’s a nonprofit institution dedicated to offering local and international artists chances to do new large-scale work — or adapt existing ideas — for its unconventional spaces. Some of the resultant work is permanent, others temporary.
Located in Pittsburgh’s North Side, the main building was a Stearns & Foster mattress warehouse when Barbara Luderowski, an activist arts visionary, bought it in 1975 for an art space. The museum was officially founded in 1977 and has since thrived. Today, its installations encompass not just four floors of the original brick building, but also two other nearby buildings.
The pedestrian-oriented area around the Mattress Factory reminds me of Over-the-Rhine with its history of close-together townhouses intermingled with factories, warehouses and corner businesses. It, too, had fallen on hard times but now is undergoing full-blown revival. Indeed, the specific section of the North Side where the Mattress Factory is located has so much restoration going on it was hard to walk without stepping around construction equipment.
I toured the Mattress Factory on a hot weekday afternoon and was surprised by the constant flow of visitors — this place is a destination. More, as I moved through the separate rooms (and buildings) to view installations, I got to know people taking the same route.
I couldn’t always see them, however. In the room containing light-and-space master James Turrell’s 1983 “Pleiades,” a permanent installation in which you look at a dark space in an already blackened room until you begin to perceive its presence (maybe), I had to call out to avoid walking into people.
Other pieces were equally invigorating experiences, although in different ways. Sarah Oppenheimer’s “610-3356,” a 2008 work on long-term loan from the New York-based artist, is an intervention with the main building. She created a shaped hole in the floor of one gallery to insert a sleek, airplane-grade plywood chute. Like an aqueduct, it runs through the middle of the gallery below and out a window.
While it’s not quite the same as “negative space,” it does call attention to the way absence of a firm surface can be as vividly seen as the presence. My impulse was to try to slide on down (you’re not allowed to, of course).
In a three-story house on a small alley-like street behind the main building is a dwelling that stood vacant for decades before the museum acquired it. There, in “Trace of Memory,” the Japanese-born and Berlin-based Chiharu Shiota has brought in the kind of objects that would once have been there — shoes, chairs, a hospital-like bed, a sewing machine — and covered everything in spider-web-like crisscrosses of black yarn. She has suspended it from floor to ceiling, leaving just a walking path for visitors. It’s overwhelmingly beautiful — ephemeral yet impenetrable.
Something like this in Over-the-Rhine, already home to the Art Academy of Cincinnati, could help raise public awareness to the possibilities of site-related, mixed-media installation art. Further, using some older buildings as “art environments” would connect the work to the surroundings, the present to the past, in a way that’s hard for our existing museums.
Actually, two of the high points of recent art in Cincinnati were phenomenal installations in an older, unused (and decrepit, at that) building: Mount Adams’ deconsecrated Holy Cross Church. They were Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s Hanging Garden and Gravity of Light by Doug and Mike Starn, and were done with assistance from the Contemporary Arts Center and Cincinnati Art Museum, respectively.
But Towne Properties is planning a $2.1-million redevelopment of the space, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer, so that’s out. But Over-the-Rhine still has sites to spare — maybe something near a new cinematheque or tenement museum.
CONTACT STEVEN ROSEN: srosen@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2015.