Tamara Harkavy is the founding CEO and artistic director of ArtWorks, the nonprofit youth-employment organization responsible for covering our region with glorious works of art, mostly in the form of murals. Now in its 21st year, there are 130 youths working on 18 projects, 11 of which are murals, mostly in the downtown and Over-the-Rhine area. Harkavy is the mother of musician Ben Sloan, who is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and founder of the East Price Hill Percussion Park. She is married to artist, sculptor and real estate guy Matthew Kotlarczyk.
Harkavy quickly agreed to an interview to update us on this year’s murals, but getting her to choose a place to dine was a bit more difficult. After strolling about OTR — ArtWorks is located on East Central Parkway — we stumbled upon Court Street Lobster Bar, conveniently located across from the “Cincinnati Toy Heritage” mural by local artist Jonathan Queen, and happily tucked into succulent lobster rolls served on buttered and toasted Sixteen Bricks challah buns.
CityBeat: Why so hard pin you down on a location for lunch? Normally when we tell people that we’re buying, they jump at the chance to eat for free at their favorite place. Are you always this ambiguous about food?
Tamara Harkavy: This is going to sound terrible: When I eat lunch, I want to take a nap. I am not ambiguous about food at all. If you ask me “Do you want to eat,” yeah, but it’s got to be good though or why bother.
CB: For the uninitiated, tell me a little about ArtWorks.
TH: We started with the idea that we needed to provide meaningful summer employment for teenagers and use the arts as a vehicle very differently than had ever been thought of before to teach the kids about our city, to teach kids about social engagement and diversity, to teach all of us about how we are better citizens. When you’re working on a project in art, art uses math and science and logic and creative thinking and the mind’s eye and problem solving. So all of those attributes not only make for a good artist, it makes for great work-force development tools for future jobs and career paths for our kids.
CB: That would be a great training program even if they didn’t get paid.
TH: This is like the serious stuff. At least 50 percent of the youth we employ are from low-income households. They need this money. The money they make this summer contributes to their family’s well-being or goes into a fund that they set aside for college — and I also hope they set aside some of it and have a good time. We’re an economic driver, we value art and artists, so the creative mind and the creative efforts have a value. It’s about enterprise, it’s about economic development; it’s important to value creativity and pay for it.
CB: How do the murals come to be?
TH: There’s not just one standard operating procedure that gets a mural done. Every mural has a different story; every mural has a different outcome. Every mural has a different path, and certainly every mural has a different process and cost. So sometimes people come to us. Scripps and the Flying Pig came to us this year and said, “Hey, it’s the 90th anniversary of the Scripps Spelling Bee and the Flying Pig Marathon is 20 years old.” We love to make murals that celebrate Cincinnati’s heritage and the people who made this place so fantastic and have given so much to the city, so those murals have a much different path — they’re very much client or partner driven. Then some of our murals, like we’re sitting across today from the toy mural, which tells Cincinnati’s toy heritage, was very much artist driven. The artist that we worked with grew up on Kenner toys.
We work with the community, we work with artists and designers, we work with our partners and funders, and we juggle all of it. Someday, someone is just going to give us a boat-load of money and say, “Make great art, go for it,” and we’ll just be able to engage artists 100 percent and say, “Go for it: Be an artist, bring something to the city that you think is relevant and fresh.” Someday that’s going to happen. I just know it.
CB: How are the buildings chosen?
TH: The buildings are chosen for lots of reasons. Kroger came to us all those years ago and said, “We have this ugly façade,” and we painted Jonathan Queen’s “Fresh Harvest” on that and that became like instant mural envy, and it was a natural canvas. Some of the buildings, the canvases are a little bit harder to identify because you don’t see them when they’re just buildings — when it’s just brick and there’s clutter and signage, when they clear it off and put a fresh coat of paint on it and it becomes like, “Wow, I never even knew that existed.”
CB: What are some of the murals being worked on this summer?
TH: In the immediate vicinity of our office we have an Edie Harper mural, which is this gorgeous image of this calico cat. It’s called “Crazy Cat, Crazy Quilt,” I believe. That is probably one of our largest murals this summer, and it’s a patchwork. It’s beautiful. And we’re honoring Edie Harper, who is a Cincinnati master. Her mural will live very close to Charley (Harper, her husband’s) mural, “Homecoming (Blue Birds),” because it will be in the same neighborhood.
There’s a mural on Vine Street that is “Faces of Homelessness” that is beautiful and poignant and I think really expresses that Cincinnati can do this: We can solve some problems through art, we can make the community aware of the challenges of being homeless and the stigmas attached to being homeless. That’s another huge mural and the artists are two artists who are Iranian refugees, ICY and SOT. They came and they led the team. It will be a really unique mural because of its messaging of bravery and tackling a social issue that impacts all of us.
We have another guest artist named Ralph Steadman, he’s about 80, he’s Welsh, he was the illustrator for all of the Hunter S. Thompson books. It’s his first mural.
Frank Wood — “ambassador of fun” for Cincinnati of WEBN fame — 100 percent sponsored this mural, but he said, “I want this artist.” Ralph Steadman’s work is difficult. It’s messy, it’s sometimes vulgar or brutal. I got to know a new side of him, which is playful and very colorful. One of his murals is about democracy, and it’s kind of right on, and the other is from his children’s illustration books, which is the part of Ralph Steadman that I didn’t know.
And then there’s a RefugeeConnect project in Camp Washington which is again another quilt which is called “The Fabric of Refugees” and it’s based on the work of refugees, and again it’s very poignant.
CB: We would be remiss if we didn’t ask if you have a favorite.
TH: So, I have a lot of responses to that, but my favorite mural is probably the one that hasn’t been done yet. There are murals that I look at and I know the technical hand and design skills and painting skills that went into them to make them come alive on the wall, like the Kroger mural or the toy mural, or the carousel. There are murals that I love because they spark dialogue and conversation — a little bit of controversy and challenge, like George Washington in a dress in Camp Washington, “Campy Washington,” and probably when we take the scaffolding off of the Steadman democracy mural it might spark something. There are murals that I love because they sparked and entire movement for us, the “Cincinnati Strong Man” mural — the Henry Holtgrewe mural — there’s now a whole series of Cincinnati legends. I just gotta keep going so maybe a mural will lead to some kind of conversation or spark an artist to bring us an innovative idea that further pushes our community.
To learn more about ARTWORKS, visit artworkscincinnati.org.
This article appears in Jul 19-26, 2017.