By Leyla Shokoohe
Photography by JP Leong
“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
—James Baldwin
Sometimes in city development, artists are an afterthought — invited in the final stage to paint a mural or perform at the ribbon-cutting. But artists are more than beautifiers — they can help us remember forgotten histories, or imagine possibilities that yet to exist.
On a Monday evening in early March — just days before the world shifted to social distancing to protect each other from the Coronavirus — Gee Horton of Urban Consulate Cincinnati brought together three artists — Damian Hoskins, Toilynn O’Neal, and Cal Cullen — at The Mercantile Library to ask why artists belong at the table, discuss why diversity is so important, and explore the essential role artists play to engage and enliven our communities.
Horton opened with a favorite first question —
When did you fall in love with Cincinnati?
“I fell in love with Cincinnati probably every day, but twice that are poignant,” said Cal Cullen, executive director of Wave Pool, a community-based art center in the neighborhood of Camp Washington. “Once when I left Cincinnati in 2009, because I realized how much I was leaving behind and what I was missing. But then even moreso when I moved back in 2014. It was only upon leaving and coming back that I really realized everything is here, it’s just how you look at it. It just had so many possibilities.”
O’Neal and Hoskins echoed that sentiment. The “boomerang effect” is a strong one in Cincinnati, with many leaving to pursue their paths elsewhere before returning home to contribute to their city.
Folks come back fired up. Where does that come from?
“If I did not go away from Cincinnati, I wouldn’t have been as powerful,” said O’Neal. “I had to see some comparison and contrast. But I also had to recognize my purpose here. Many people stay in silos. When you go away, you see the world is expansive — and the possibilities. You have a purpose. I had a purpose to come back here and implement some of those thoughts.”
With the love you have for community, how does it feel to watch the community transition?
“Looking back, I felt that the inner city was, for a whole host of reasons, manufactured to house poor people,” said Hoskins. “But there was a creative side of how people lived — that they took what they had and made the most of it, turned something that was intended to be utilitarian or ugly into something incredibly beautiful. That’s art. That’s creativity. That’s creation.”
“When I go back now, it’s the commodity of land. It’s the commercialization of space versus that creativity inherent in making the most of what you had. That hurts, to be quite frank.”
Both Hoskins and O’Neal attended the Arts Consortium, formerly Cincinnati’s leading African American arts center located in the West End of the city, the same neighborhood where the football team FC Cincinnati is now constructing a multi-million dollar stadium. “It was the place you went for resources,” said O’Neal.
One community-driven arts response to this need to share community knowledge & resources is Wave Pool, the contemporary art fulfillment center started by Cullen and her artist husband Skip. Their mission: “By pairing communities knowledge of their needs with artists’ sense of possibility, we aim to create a society where contemporary art and artists are integrated fully into the fabric and success of our neighborhood, our city, and beyond.”
“It’s all about listening,” said Cullen. “A lot of our art projects are about listening to our neighbors, being neighbors, getting to know our neighbors, really centering them and responding to the needs and desires with contemporary art projects that support artists and connect us all to be a stronger community.”
How important is it for the younger generation to be aware of the historical contributions of the artists who laid it down for us?
“There’s this gap between the generation of artists that did legacy movement change in Cincinnati, and this vibrant group of artists doing exciting things [today],” said O’Neal. “Not a lot of people know about them because there’s no place for them to express themselves and get the accolades people in the past would get because they were a community.”
Lost in the gap is the passing down of earned wisdom, including pitfalls to avoid. Knowing some of the steps artists took then could prevent artists from taking those wrong steps today, said O’Neal.
“They laid a path that if you knew about it, you could be a bomb-diggity artist. The reality of it is, you don’t know that history, that story.”
By recognizing the past, and documenting that story, a sense of consciousness develops that can elevate where you are.
Why is it important for artists to have a seat at the table?
“Perspective from diverse voices makes any table richer, and makes any dialogue more meaningful,” said Hoskins.
“It’s important to be at tables, and not beholden to an agenda that doesn’t match your purpose. If we don’t have a seat where a lot of these decisions are made, then life will happen to us, and we don’t have the voice to inform the decisions that are ultimately going to affect us.”
When you’re at the table, how should you use that opportunity?
“As a creative person, when you join tables, if you don’t know what you bring to that, and how you can contribute to that, it almost becomes a waste,” said O’Neal. “No matter what the table is and how grand it seems, if you come with nothing and you’re just observing the table, it’s a waste of your time. You start to lose part of your creativity. I search for tables where I can be useful.”
“It takes a level of self-awareness,” added Cullen, “to be able to sit in your power and show them what you have to bring.”
“We have to know what we’re bringing, and what its value is, and make sure we’re being compensated,” said Cullen. “Not even just personally, but through social well-being, or knowing that the social justice you're advocating for is going to happen.”
The learning goes both ways.
“I think there’s a lot of education to do — both for artists to realize what power you have as artists, but also to show the rest of the world what power artists have and why they belong at these tables.”
As Baldwin wrote, the role of the artist in society is to not lose sight of our shared purpose “to make the world a more human dwelling place.” How can you make sure artists are at any tables where you sit?
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Urban Consulate is a network for exchange. Since 2016, the Consulate has hosted hundreds of conversations in Detroit, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Austin, Cincinnati and Chicagoland to bring people together and share ideas for better cities. In Cincinnati, monthly parlor talks gather at The Mercantile Library, hosted by Garry “Gee” Horton, Naimah Bilal & Megan Trischler, recorded by Afrochine. Free & open to the public thanks to support from the Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr./U.S. Bank Foundation.