ARTS & CULTURE

ARTS &

CULTURE

10,000 Maniacs

PHOTO: PROVIDED BY 3CDC

Women to the Front

10,000 Maniacs kick-off Cincinnati’s new RiseUp concert and event series, which focuses on women musicians and female empowerment

BY KATIE GRIFFITH

Aconcert and event series created to empower women is slated to begin this month with a free, day-long event at Washington Park. The Cincinnati Bell RiseUp Women’s Series kicks off Sept. 17 with a mimosa happy hour at the park’s concession area, The Porch, and ends with headlining Alternative Rock band 10,000 Maniacs, fronted by violinist and vocalist Mary Ramsey.

Created by 3CDC, the series aims to honor women and their voices via various events and music performances. Mostly taking place at Memorial Hall, the concerts, poetry readings, networking events and support and education opportunities are scheduled through 2022.

“I feel like a lot of people don’t know that 3CDC operates Memorial Hall from a programming standpoint,” says RiseUp creator and 3CDC sponsorship and advertising manager Tasha Stapleton. “In the thick of COVID, Memorial Hall wasn’t able to do pretty much anything. The beauty in that is that it gave us the opportunity to pause and ask, ‘What makes this building a 3CDC space?’

“So we sat down and came up with things that we should be standing behind from a programming aspect inside of the hall, and the biggest piece we walked away with was that we wanted things to be more inclusive and attract a more diverse audience.”

The rolling event series is about empathy, support and inspiration for women, Stapleton says. The programming aims to empower women and provide safe spaces for open discussion and support, which starts with an individual and ultimately leads to a positive impact in one’s community, she adds.

The kick-off event will include a women’s market during the day, set to feature 15 vendors selling various goods from female-owned businesses, food trucks included. At 6 p.m. Cincinnati’s Shiny and the Spoon will play Folk-Pop tunes, followed by singer/ songwriter Lauren Eylise before 10,000 Maniacs takes the stage.

Fans will hear a variety of music from 10,000 Maniacs’ catalog, along with a number of new songs and a few surprises, frontwoman Ramsey says.

“We’ve worked on new material and are going to be putting out some kind of recording,” she says. “We have about 20 songs and we are just figuring out how we are going to do it, if we want to make a CD or if we want to do it in the modern way of releasing a few at a time.”

Ramsey says the band is looking forward to its Queen City stop, noting that it’s been a while since the group has played in town. She says members are excited to share new and old music, especially as an ally to RiseUp’s purpose.

“When you have a female in a rolemodel position — even to have a woman onstage or having a woman playing violin onstage, which is what I do — young girls or other women say, ‘Why can’t I do that, too?’” she says. “It’s a form of inspiration and breaking barriers. I think that’s important, kind of saying anything is possible.”

In March, Forbes published an article on gender inequality in the music industry based on statistics from a University of Southern California study. Forbes noted major issues that women in the industry face, including sexual harassment, visibility and ageism.

“I do feel like if you turn on any awards show you will always see that there are more men in the spotlight than women,” 3CDC’s Stapleton says. “So, first of all, intentionally putting women onstage is super important.”

Ramsey agrees and hopes everyone who identifies as female will walk away from the show feeling good about themselves, feeling safe, inspired and

The RiseUp series is programmed by Memorial Hall

PHOTO: PROVIDED BY 3CDC

FROM PAGE 35

confident in their right to be heard.

“I think that with 10,000 Maniacs there’s always been an identifying quality and content of lyrics in songs and political parts of songs, just kind of a respect of womanhood in our lyrics,” she says. “For bands historically, you go back in Rock & Roll, there have been women, but not as much as males. And even if you go way back into the Classical music realm, that was dominated by male composers. So we are kind of catching up in a way. The fact is that it’s important now to have equality for all people.”

In addition to the market and the concert, the RiseUp event will feature various nonprofits such as Ladies of Leadership, a local mentorship program, that will be on-site collecting donations and raising awareness for their initiatives.

“The concert is awesome,” says Stapleton. “We are going to have a blast. But it’s really about awareness, so when it comes to our nonprofit partners, we know by the end that we are going to actually make an impact. These nonprofits are in the weeds, they are the ones that get their hands dirty, they do the hardest work, so we are thrilled to partner with them.”

When Stapleton was organizing the event, she consulted the Women’s Fund of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation to uncover local organizations that empower young women and might also benefit from the series, she says. She was eager to reach out to Ladies of Leadership, an organization in Avondale that serves children in kindergarten through eighth grade. According to its website, the program builds a sisterhood through mentorship, creating self-worth and confidence in underserved youth.

Layered into the decorated concert schedule are “Empower Hours,” intimate, two-hour events that range in purpose from networking to storytelling. Small businesses and outstanding female leaders will be highlighted in categories such as family law, financial planning, healthy living, relationships, career advice, spiritual well-being, parenting and self-help. The first Empower Hour is scheduled for November and will honor The Future You Project, a community created to spread hope and a web of support for women. That hour will also feature Amy Scalia of Sinclair Broadcast Group as a speaker.

“I feel like you’d almost have to be hiding under a rock right now to not feel like there isn’t incredible momentum for women,” says Stapleton. “I think that we are being heard. I think what our hope is, is that we want to amplify that voice whether it’s through an incredible powerhouse female singing onstage or a quiet voice reading poetry or listening to an inspirational speaker. The goal is to create a space where people feel supported, where we can show true empathy and inspire them to be proud of who they are as individuals.”

Tickets for upcoming events range $20-$50 and can be purchased on Memorial Hall’s website. Concerts scheduled throughout the year so far are slated to feature Wild Child, Nella and The Wailin’ Jennys.

Stapleton hopes RiseUp installments can morph into a permanent fixture of Memorial Hall’s entertainment offerings.

“I think that the one thing I would hope people walk away with is the feeling that someone cares about them,” Stapleton says. “We want to make women feel empowered for themselves first but to know that there’s this whole community here in Cincinnati that is there to support them and all you have to do is raise your hand. We live in such a giving city, somebody is listening, somebody is trying to make their voices heard.”

The Cincinnati Bell RiseUp Women’s Series kicks off Sept. 17 with a free concert at Washington Park (1230 Elm St., Over-the-Rhine) featuring headliners 10,000 Maniacs. More info: memorialhallotr.com.

CULTURE The Art Academy Hopes to Expand Its Social Impact with New Space, SITE 1212

BY NATALIE C. KOKING

The Art Academy of Cincinnati (AAC) has expanded into a neighboring space while simultaneously hoping to expand the school’s mission.

The recently opened SITE 1212 is the AAC’s “new center for community impact.”

Located at 1212 Jackson St. in the former BarrelHouse — a popular music venue and one of the city’s first wave of modern microbreweries — the spot remained vacant from the brewpub’s closure in 2010 until AAC began renovations to expand their campus in 2019. Alongside Elevar Design Group, AAC transformed the space into a community gathering place for artistic work and urban problem-solving.

SITE 1212 was unveiled with a “1212 House Party” on Aug. 27 and 28 on the block of Jackson Street in front of the AAC. Festivities included live music from local indie bands the Young Heirlooms and Wussy Duo; a fashion show by Lindsey Whittle; and OTR mural tours through ArtWorks. Artisans sold handmade work, apparel and crafts. Taste of Belgium, Banging Brothers and Hoff’s Pretzel Company sold signature culinary items.

According to AAC President and CEO Joe Girandola, SITE 1212 is the conclusion of yearslong conversations between the school’s faculty, staff, alumni and trustees.

“Congealing all those ideas into one is a very difficult task,” Girandola said in a presentation about the space. “I say, ‘Why can’t it just be a blank canvas for the most amazing work to be highlighted from our faculty, from our students, from our alumni? To bring people in through the doors to see what is possible when you enable this amazing college of art and design to expose itself to the community?”

In the same presentation, Greg Otis of Elevar Design Group and an AAC Trustee Board member, recalled mapping out the school’s future five years ago. He engaged the community to learn what they knew of the college.

“Many of them said, ‘Who? The art museum? What?’ That was disheartening — and a lot of pressure on us to figure that out,” he said. These conversations, Otis explained, revealed how relevance was key. They defined the vision for AAC’s future as bolstering students’ experience, engaging the community and transforming the former BarrelHouse space into whatever the school needed.

Fast-forward to 2021, on a hot summer day at the start of a new school year, the 1212 House Party offered a glimpse of that vision. More than that, perhaps, it reintroduced AAC to the Cincinnati creative class and the public at large. Attendees shopped original work made by AAC students and alumni, toured a gallery of works by Cincinnati painter and AAC alumnus Jim Effler and sipped micro-crafted vanilla stout created by the original BarrelHouse brewmasters Rick Debar and Brian Sprance.

Gathering Cincinnati creatives is just the start. To sum up the mission at its most basic, Girandola tells CityBeat that SITE 1212 is about making a difference in the region. He sees artists as uniquely positioned to use their talents to collaborate with organizations and imagine solutions beyond the studio to make a social impact.

“Artists not only have a vision aesthetically but could collaborate with community partners — like the Homeless Coalition of Cincinnati, Freestore Foodbank, many different programs in the city that are trying to make a difference,” says Girandola, who considers SITE 1212 a laboratory for such ideas. “Why not enable artists to be at the table when problems are being discussed?”

To illustrate the potential power of including artists in such conversations, Girandola describes the work of his mentor, artist Mel Chin. Chin’s experimental art project Revival Field aimed “to cleanse industrial contamination from affected soil with plants,” according to his website. The project involved re-employing plants at a specific site to act as “toxic sponges” to pull out heavy metals from the soil. Chin’s website explains the project “calls for collaboration between the artist, the academic and the environmentally-concerned community.”

“What creatives do at the table is say, ‘Throw out those solutions. Here’s something no one’s thought of,’” says Girandola.

Though AAC has a 152-year history, Girandola says the curriculum has evolved to enable students to engage in their environment through their artistic skills. How can they translate still-life painting into community activism? How does animation apply to social engagement? The creative processes at play inside the classroom are not only skill-based but solution-based.

One such example is a program called HATS (“Higher Art Time Saved”), a collaboration between AAC and the Ohio Justice & Policy Center. HATS was slated to begin before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic but was postponed until spring 2022. The program gives women who have been incarcerated the opportunity to learn digital literacy skills that ease their transition from prison to release to the workforce. Girandola says HATS provides tools that enable them to be storytellers of their own lives and communicate effectively their experiences when seeking employment.

“Enabling a core curriculum for individuals while they’re in prison to be able to exist as human beings when they’re released is the least we can do,” says Girandola. “There’s no better program than what we are enabled to do as storytellers ourselves, as creatives, than to collaborate with this kind of program.”

Last summer, AAC launched The Leaders Academy — a STEAM program that invites select area high school students to spend a week on campus and engage in workshops facilitated by local leaders. The overarching goal is to provide knowledge and inspiration for students — specifically from Black and Brown communities — to harness the powers of entrepreneurialism and creativity so that they can solve real-world problems with artistic thinking.

One of the speakers at AAC’s recent Leaders Academy was Kick Lee, executive director at Cincinnati Music Accelerator (CMA). The nonprofit organization educates and develops musicians toward an artistically-based, business-focused career. Their goal is to establish Cincinnati as a music city where artists thrive. AAC and CMA have partnered on numerous initiatives, and SITE 1212 promises to continue that relationship.

“Both entities are really focused on being more inclusive in the arts as a whole, not just music and fine arts,” Lee tells CityBeat. “Through this partnership, we’re working deeper and harder at being more inclusive in the arts.”

While AAC offers undergraduate degrees like design, illustration, painting and drawing, the school currently doesn’t offer musical education. Lee says they’re working together to introduce the CMA music business program into the curriculum, having received a $25,000 grant from Black Empowerment Works. He also envisions holding performance workshops, fundraisers and other community events at SITE 1212.

Alazandrea Townsend, a senior at AAC and president of the Black Student Union, sees opportunities for both artistic and social engagement.

“I envision seeing my work in the 1212 suite space, being admired along with my peers, family, friends, faculty and staff,” Townsend tells CityBeat.

She says the space can also “encourage our fellow people of color and allies to come together, display their art and discuss any injustice or discriminatory topics that have occurred while attending school or throughout their life.”

AAC sophomore Keith Wallick, who is vice president of the Black Student Union, echoes Townsend.

“I create art to heal, spread joy and create conversation on how to love yourself, others and the world around you,” he says. “With SITE 1212 as a space where the community and the Art Academy can weave a radiant relationship, I hope to at least touch one person. Healing is contagious, and like a Pothos plant, it can propagate and be shared with others.” Learn more about SITE 1212 at artacademy.edu.

SITE 1212

PHOTO: PROVIDED BY THE ART ACADEMY OF CINCINNATI

Inside SITE 1212 PHOTO: PROVIDED BY THE ART ACADEMY OF CINCINNATI

CULTURE Meet the Hometown Artists Appearing at the Cincinnati Comic Expo This Month

BY SEAN M. PETERS

The Cincinnati Comic Expo bills itself as the city’s largest gathering dedicated to comic books and pop culture. In other words, it’s the perfect place to dress up like Darth Vader and meet fellow nerdy connoisseurs to talk about the newest indie comics or Marvel blockbuster.

Running Sept. 17-19 at the Duke Energy Convention Center downtown, the expo is an exciting weekend-long destination for anyone who collects and celebrates comics, film, TV, toys or memorabilia

But those colorful characters that grace your favorite pages and films don’t appear from thin air, even if that is supposed to be one of their superpowers. Alongside writers, creative artists produce the “POW” and “BANG” for every hero and villain.

Cincinnati is home to plenty of these talented storytellers. Keep an eye out for the local creators below when you visit. (A quick note regarding our coverage: Of the two dozen or so artists slated to appear at the expo, only two are women and neither is local.)

David Michael Beck

With 51 years of experience on the page, David Michael Beck’s illustrations show a mastery in his craft. He’s produced several issues of sequential illustrations for DC’s gunslinging antihero title, Jonah Hex, and much of his work can be found as cover art in the comics, gaming and role-playing industries.

Beck also is a fine artist who produces paintings for gallery sales and is an adjunct professor at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

“The Comic Expo gives artists as well as writers a platform to present their creations to an eager audience,” Beck tells CityBeat. “The comic convention industry is a breeding ground for creative writing leading to creative artwork. It is a showcase for new work being released and the sale of associated merchandise. The con is very useful for artists networking to present their craft for consideration for a publisher’s working talent pool, as well as an open door to meet and talk with already established accomplished artists producing work for the industry in its array of forms.” davidmichaelbeck.com

Jay B. Kalagayan

Jay B. Kalagayan is writer and publisher of MeSseD, a tale of Cincinnati Metropolitan Sewer District worker Lilliput and her battle against strange creatures and more that threaten to stop the sewage’s constant flow.

Illustrated by local artist Dylan Speeg, this comic series was well-received by critics and readers within the city and beyond.

Also known for founding Know Theatre, Kalagayan is the Contemporary Arts Center’s director of advanced and corporate giving.

“I was inspired by my daughters to create a strong character that happens to be Asian and identifies as female. So when I bring my daughters to a local comic shop or bookstore, they get to see someone that looks like them on the shelves,” Kalagayan says of his comic series.

“As a parent, you get the privilege to introduce the stories you love to your children. But then they re-introduce those stories back to you. Maybe your favorite stories weren’t as gender equitable or the characters were racial homogenized. I sought out more diverse media for my children, and I also wanted to contribute to it, as well.” messedcomics.com

Aaron Lambert

Aaron Lambert’s first time exhibiting at Cincinnati Comic Expo in 2010 was an eye-opening experience on his road to becoming a professional artist.

Lambert reports that three years after what he calls his “failed debut,” he quit his day job to work on art full-time, a career he maintains to this day in his hometown of Cincinnati.

“My love of creating art compels me,” Lambert says. “I love painting things from my mind no one has seen before.”

These days Lambert creates portraits of pop-culture icons ranging from Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to Grogu (known by fans as “Baby Yoda”) from The Mandalorian. aaronlambertart.com

Jason Montgomery

Jason Montgomery’s work pays homage to costumed superheroes and their iconic villains. The independent artist is currently working on a few storylines that will become multi-issue comics, so the illustrator is on his way to becoming a writer as well.

He has appeared at the Cincinnati Comic Expo for six years and credits it as a great way to meet fellow creatives and to promote his artwork to a wide audience.

“My approach to making a comic is to combine the things I’ve always been interested in,” Montgomery says. “Whether superheroes, monsters, folklore and sci-fi, I’d like to tell stories that aren’t quite the typical superhero genre.” facebook.com/jasonmontgomeryart

Lee and Nate Xopher

Bold, colorful artwork runs in the family for brothers Lee and Nate Xopher. The two work independently, with Lee living in Colerain and Nate in Dayton, but their shared passion for comics shines through in their unique yet similarly inspired illustrations.

Lee’s comic work includes The Wyld, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi romp featuring talking animals; webcomic Pixel Overdrive; and an illustrated time-travel concept album titled Rock of Pages.

“Cincinnati is a great city for comic artists,” Lee says. “Most work is done remotely, so the most important thing is living somewhere affordable with quick access to cheese coneys.”

Nate, whose work can also be found on The Wyld, agrees.

“I don’t really think it matters where you live these days,” he says. “Sure, you might find some connections in a big city, but social media and remote work have really opened things up for everyone. The Cincinnati Comic Expo is one of my favorite shows every year. It’s a great way to meet like-minded people and get your work out there.” leexopher.com, natexopher.com

David Michael Beck

PHOTO: PROVIDED

Nate Xopher

PHOTO: PROVIDED

Artwork by Aaron Lambert

PHOTO: PROVIDED

Jay B. Kalagayan

PHOTO: JASMINE THOMPSON

Lee Xopher

PHOTO: PROVIDED

Artwork by Jason Montgomery

PHOTO: PROVIDED

The Cincinnati Comic Expo takes place Sept. 17-19 at the Duke Energy Convention Center. For more information and a full list of comic creators and celebrities slated to attend, visit cincinnaticomicexpo.com.