June 15 - September 30, 2022
Created by local artist and Truth and Reconciliation Artist Grantee 2022, Brent Billingsley, I’m Listening… is art community engagement project created in collaboration with officers of the Cincinnati Police Department (CPD). The concept is simple—pair Cincinnati Police Officers and local teens to create a collaborate mural to strengthen the police-community relationships.
Officers in each of CPD’s five districts participated in the project along with youth from the districts neighborhoods in a series of 16, three hour artistic workshops facilitated by lead artist and project manager, Brent Billingsley. Artwork produced in the workshops were then combined into a large-scale 17' x 20' mural.
About the Artist
Brent Billingsley is an artist and an empowering voice behind young disenfranchised youth. He is also a Behavioral Health Specialist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital medical Center/Psychiatry. Other endeavors include Independent Contracting Therapeutic Mentoring and the co-founder of 2 non-profits geared toward the utilization of therapeutic artistic engagement and the performance arts.
Brent says a nihilistic state of being inspires him the most because the canvas must be needs repurposed and then re-primed before the painting can begin. He graduated in 2013 from Miami University with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts with a concentration in Printmaking and from the University of Cincinnati in 2015 with a Masters in Social Work.
This artist’s intention is to help all whom he is blessed to come in contact with realize that they are part of something bigger than themselves and that their part matters. The goal is to utilize art as rhetorical vernacular and encourage people to do something they have never done before, acknowledge the exertion, forfeit maladaptive ideations and upon one’s own artistic epiphany; act on it. Brent believes that the world can be changed through art; 1 PIECE at a TIME!
Location
Third floor
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
50 East Freedom Way, Cincinnati, OH 45202
Admission
Included with general admission.
Sponsors
Magnified Giving, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati Recreation Commission, Reds Community Fund, Fringe Church, LaRosa's Pizzeria, ROMAC, Back2Back Cincy, ArtsWave, Cincinnati Police Department, Meizinger Construction, ARTE, Pixxel Designs, Eddie Hawkins, Charley Frank, Monica Mitchel Johnson and Patrick Davis.
