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A building in Brighton. Photo by Jennifer Feld.
Brighton Place is an industrial, urban, artistic, and historic neighborhood located slightly north of the West End. Its origin as a home to a large German immigrant population has morphed into what it is today: factories, retail spaces, galleries, a moped club, and even a slaughterhouse; lofts, apartments and studio spaces for local artists and musicians; a home to bands, artists, poets, pianists, fashion designers, art educators; and much more. Though some of its structures suffer visibly from neglect—it may be difficult for an outsider to determine which buildings in the area are vacant and which inhabited—those who call it home know a good portion of their neighbors by name, and are supportive of the area's galleries and businesses.
Brighton is quiet most of the time, punctuated by the occasional motorcyclist or lone resident walking a dog. However, on the first Saturday of each month, galleries all along the strip of Central Avenue and Hamilton inaugurate new shows. Encouraged by the quality of the art, the experimental bent, and the marked atmosphere of welcome, artsy folk of all kind—art lovers, students, hipsters, and familiar faces of the Greater Cincinnati art scene—fill the (formerly silent) streets. In short, Brighton is the location to be on First Saturdays.
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Anthony Becker.
Murmer (detail), 2010. Paper, wood. Site-specific installation. Photo courtesy of the AEC.
Birds, wheeling and settling and rising again, fascinate sculptor Anthony Becker. He sees countless individuals acting as a single unit and hears the beating of hundreds of wings as a joint and murmuring chorus. For several years, using the most modest materials, Becker has constructed tributes to this vibrant presence in our world.
In Eclipse: Shadowing of the Sun, a two-person show now on view at Covington's Artisans' Enterprise Center, the most recent of Becker's series can be seen. It fills a third of the large front gallery, floor to ceiling, and was conceived especially for the space.
On the floor, Becker laid out a frame of 2x4s, encasing parallel cross ties to which his lengths of brown butchers' paper are tethered in ten rows. The strips, eight to a row, each about two feet wide and embellished with brown paper birds, slant upward all the way to the ceiling, every piece reversing the direction of its immediate neighbor so that a series of Xs is in place when the piece is viewed from the side. That's not the way to see it, though. Look at it head on, from either end, or at an angle that keeps the surface of the paper in view.
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Tarrance Corbin.
In the past year, several of the Cincinnati art world's most important and creative people have died: Terry Corbin, teacher extraordinaire and superb abstract painter; Pam Kirchener, Director of Contemporary and Modern Art at Cincinnati Art Galleries; and Barbara Miller, founder, with her late husband Norman, of The Miller Gallery on Hyde Park Square. All were friends and colleagues of mine, and I'd like to at least remember the lives of these three fine people.
Tarrance Corbin came to teach painting at UC-DAAP in the 1980s, the first full-time African-American to do so. He brought an intense passion and rigorous standards to teaching, as well as a catalytic new leadership to, with, and amongst African-American artists who live and work here (Terry was around the same age as Jymi Bolden, Thom Shaw, Joyce Phillips Young). I frequently guest lectured in his graduate drawing classes, and guest critiqued in the graduate painting classes he taught. Students were spellbound by his abilities, his passion, his demand for excellence. We were two of the founding members of Umoja (the word means sharing in Swahili), a group of African-American artists determined to mentor incoming African-American students at, for example, The Art Academy of Cincinnati; my role was to try to get their own work exhibited in area museums and arts centers. Corbin's leadership was invaluable; his commitment of time extraordinary. He opened his studio to thousands of students, faculty, friends, artists, making it a gathering place for younger artists, including those from The Art Academy, where he guest taught, and NKU, fertilizing creativity in this most exciting of venues. His bold abstract paintings, generally very colorful, sometimes in shades of black-white-grey, undermined geometric abstraction with their emphases on curvilinear shapes as well, giving the eye a field (day) for movement. His last show, while dying, was at Cincinnati Art Galleries, a show which must have been booked by the late Pam Kirchener, who was Director of American Paintings, and of finding area talent to show there.
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Brighton Arts District, Then and Now
A building in Brighton. Photo by Jennifer Feld.
