The arts have barely been mentioned during the primary election, nor in the general election sweeping President Barack Obama into The White House on January 20, 2009. A meager $50 million has been requested by the new Congress for The National Endowment for the Arts. Although some state arts councils, like Ohio's, remain well funded, The City of Cincinnati City Council eliminated all funding for the arts for its 2009 budget. I foresee Kennedy-like arts evenings at White House dinners, but the near void in discussion may leave new opportunities for artists themselves to step up into the economic priorities being established by the new President and Congress, with $850 billion dollars being sought for new infrastructure jobs.
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The inaugural exhibit of Prairie Gallery's Happy Valley or Hell Town anchors it to a sense of place, the Northside community. Voss Finn's sculptural installation Figment 7 and Samantha Johnson's photomontage Spring Grove Avenue act as an archive of the neighborhood. According to the Northside Business Association the area was originally called Cumminsville, but it was also known as 'Happy Valley' or 'Hell Town' depending on which side of the tracks you chose to stand. Hell Town was the western side of Cumminsville occupied by honkytonks and barrelhouses. 'Canawlers,' the boatsmen who worked on the Mill Creek, frequented the bars and 'raised hell.' As for 'Happy Valley,' Dave Rosenthal, founder of Prairie Gallery, says the name could be derived from the circuses that paraded down Knowlton's Corner. Cumminsville was a lively entertainment and business district and a place for Cincinnatians to escape the city.
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As a failed architect, the way I make architecture is by writing. I am trained as an architect and practiced the profession for a few years, but most of my life has been spent talking about, writing about, exhibiting or teaching architecture, design and art. So to justify a rather nebulous position in life and in theory, my writing is a way of creating architecture beyond or without buildings. I hope that my words can evoke the spaces, forms and images that can shape our environment. I have enough chutzpah to believe that I can do so more powerfully than most buildings can. Buildings, after all, are mute. For most laypeople it is difficult to find the careful articulation of structure, the composition of form and the choreography of space, let alone be able to understand what gives shelter, within these structures. I define architecture as the 'signification' of buildings - how they speak or how we can read them - and in that sense the field of architecture may be a façade or a story, a warped form or even a paean to a particular edifice.
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Artful Infrastructure
