The countdown for this year's Blink festival has started. Eighty artists will create murals, light installations, and projection mapping displays October 17 through 20, in Downtown Cincinnati, Over-the-Rhine, Covington, and for the first time, Newport. Director Justin Brookhart says several teams of artists will paint Music Hall with light.
“That’s definitely one of our more featured installations,” he says. “What we wanted to do when bringing back projection mapping, because Music Hall hasn’t been projection mapped since the days of Lumenocity, is we wanted to invite some local collaborators and some national (and) international collaborators to work on that with us.”
Brookhart says there's a good mix of local, national and international artists, along with a balance between new and familiar creators.
Brookhart says during the last Blink in 2022, about 250 artists submitted proposals. “We had over 900 submissions this year,” he says. “It’s hard getting that 900 list down to the folks we’re going to be working with this year, but we feel we did a really good job of curating some incredibly amazing installations from artists from the Cincinnati region and all over the world.”
Related: Blink expanding to Newport in 2024
This is the fourth Blink event. Brookhart says it is getting to be known around the world.
“We’ve only done three of these before, and we’re doing our fourth one and people around the world know about us and they want to come and exhibit artwork here,” he says. “That’s really because while there are other light and art events in the U.S., there’s nothing on this scale. So people want to come to the U.S. and want to come to one of the best experiences possible and we think we do that.”
Brookhart says an organization that supports public art, CODAworx, has selected Cincinnati for their next convention, during the October festival.
Blink starts October 17 with a parade and runs through the following Sunday.
