Artist Run Spaces

A convening of independent arts organizations, nonprofits, and collectives throughout Ohio and northern Kentucky. Discover more than ten boundary-pushing communities of art makers.

Co-organized by the CAC and Wave Pool, Artist-Run Spaces explores a moment of self-reflection and reopening amid the pandemic. The needs and interests of these artist-run and independent spaces, which are often able to pivot and react to current events much quicker than larger organizations, are timely and important. This exhibition features ten artist-run spaces and collectives that developed an installation highlighting their work and ethos, with a focus on showcasing the work of artists and makers within their networks.

Welcome Home

Welcome Home is an invitation to uncanny hospitality; it’s a compendium of work that relates to the domestic space, and an artistic archive of 7 years at The Blue House. The installation invites viewers to step inside a blue house, feel welcome and turn viewership into an act of curious belonging.

The works in Welcome Home deal with the domestic either directly, metaphorically and oftentimes both. Some of our artists turn domestic objects fancifull, implausible, grotesque. Like a kitty litter box in which the litter has taken the shape of the Taj Mahal or a miniature swimming pool that is embedded in a collared shirt (white collar? blue collar?) Other artists challenge ideas of the domestic by critiquing and/or celebrating capitalism and consumer culture, such as Ella Weber’s Lazy Boy Poetry or artist Dave Scott’s clothing line T.E.D. (the Epitome of Dope). 

Welcome Home is installed in order to simulate the rooms of a house. Works that are about food reference a kitchen, works that deal with garments or textiles reference a bedroom or closet. Like the uncanny, the works and installation are strangely familiar, welcoming the viewer to live in abstruse comfort for as long as they choose.

Artists Featured:

Juan-Sí González, Bridgette Bogle, Frank Travers, Sydney Joslin-Knapp, Crescent Collective, John Dickinson, Ella Weber, Darcy Van Buskirk, Jeff Einhorn, John O'Donnell, Issa Randall, Andy Sloan Jackson, Dave Scott