Ten Welcome Editions

Welcome Editions is a collaborative art initiative by Wave Pool that brings internationally recognized artists together with refugee and immigrant artisans in Cincinnati. Each limited-edition work combines contemporary art with skilled craft traditions, creating opportunities for cultural exchange, creative collaboration, and paid artisan employment. Spanning textiles, ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking, the editions explore themes of identity, migration, community, and shared making.

Socially engaged artists refuse to stay in their lane. They decide it's their business to care about affordable housing and we get Project Row Houses by Rick Lowe; or legal aid for immigrants and we get Immigrant Movement International by Tania Bruguera; or mess with the way AI gets trained, and we get the Feminist Dataset by Caroline Sinders. When they build things that don't look like art, they don’t do it as a conceptual gesture, but because the thing needed doing and they were there to do it.

Wave Pool started that way. Artists came to Camp Washington to figure out what they could do here that would be useful to the neighborhood. So whatever is useful is the art, whatever shape it takes. A project needs a nail salon: that's art. The pandemic hits and people need groceries: the food fridge is art. The block could use more color: we build flower planters with the neighbors.

The longest-running strand of Wave Pool’s work is the idea that it's artists' business to welcome people to the neighborhood, the city, the country. That's The Welcome Project, perhaps the most recognized Wave Pool initiative: a kitchen, a market, a place to eat, to learn English, to be hired. Things grow out of it because artists work alongside the people they're welcoming, not on their behalf.

Welcome Editions are where this work comes full circle to the art object. We invite a contemporary artist to design an edition, and the immigrant and refugee artisans of The Welcome Project fabricate it, bringing the embroidery, ceramic, and textile traditions they came here with. Contemporary art and traditional crafts merge to create something that would not be possible otherwise. Part of feeling welcome is feeling that your culture is taken seriously, and craft is how a culture is carried.

The artists who have said yes so far include Chris Johanson and Johanna Jackson, Caroline Woolard, Pedro Reyes, Terence Hammonds, Jeffrey Gibson, Vanessa German, Baseera Khan, Lorena Molina, Sheida Soleimani, and Shahzia Sikander. That is a very distinguished list:between them, their work is at MoMA and the Met; they hold MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and the U.S. State Department Medal of Art; they've shown at the VeniceBiennale, Guggenheim and Brooklyn Museum. Ten editions in, welcoming has taken the form of an object you can hold, and a reminder that the traditions people bring with them keep our culture alive and growing.

Boris Oicherman