The Oxford Community Arts Center (OCAC) will participate again in the Cincinnati BLINK Festival opening parade this weekend.
The festival itself will run from Oct. 17 to Oct. 20 and is free to the public.
Heidi Schiller, the executive director of OCAC, said she is excited to participate in the festival for another year.
“BLINK is an amazing four, five days of celebration of light,” said Schiller. “It’s all over downtown Cincinnati. Every neighborhood is going to have light festivals, drones [and] things are lit up on buildings. There’s performances, I mean, this is huge … they’re expecting millions of people to come into Cincinnati just for this.”
OCAC’s entry this year, titled “Drawn to Light,” features butterflies and moths drawn to a glowing moon inside of a cage.
This is no ordinary work of art, though. The cage itself is a 21 foot by 14 foot steel cage that will hold an 8 foot glowing moon. Volunteers dressed as butterflies and moths will accompany the piece while others maneuver it through the parade.
“That light will be going towards Oxford because it will be led by OCAC’s logo,” Schiller said. “We are drawn to the light in Oxford. It’s really hokey, but we love it.”
The cage was originally built by Bill Greene, who has been on OCAC’s programming committee for nearly six years, as a prop for the Talawanda High School Marching Band.
“It took a couple of months [to build],” Greene said. “[It was] a lot of cutting and welding steel and measuring, figuring out how to fold it up so we could move it.”
Greene purchased the structure back from the school once it was no longer needed. He then proposed using the cage for the BLINK festival to his colleagues at OCAC.
“There were straps [on it] that looked like chains,” Greene said. “We stripped all of that off and ran lights vertically … The whole committee came out and strung the lights. I’m figuring out the last details of how to hang this big globe in the middle, hoist it and put lights on it.”
While Greene built the cage, both he and Schiller emphasized that the creation of this entry was not a one person job, rather, it was a collaborative effort amongst the programming committee and volunteers.
“This is a group project,” said Schiller. “We have a ton of volunteers who are giving up their time just to go down and promote Oxford as well as the OCAC. This was a brain child of the entire program committee. Bill is the guy who takes all of our crazy notions and makes them reality.”
As stated on its website, BLINK is the largest immersive arts event in the U.S. Spanning over 30 city blocks, the festival features interactive installations by over 80 artists using various forms of light. It will open with a parade at 7 p.m. on Oct. 17.
OCAC has participated in the event since its inception in 2017. This is the third festival, as it takes place every other year.
