CINCINNATI — While communities across Ohio still debate the use of masks and social distancing when it comes to COVID, an artist is creating a new exhibit in the Cincinnati area that features several hundred masks of all shapes and sizes.

What You Need To Know

  • Artist Carol Grape is presenting “Reverent Boundaries,” a new exhibit at the Eva G. Farris Gallery on the campus of Thomas More University

  • Her exhibit looks at the boundary of the mask while using each one to make a comment on what she sees as a growing lack of civility across America

  • Grape had been collecting antique handkerchiefs for years and had always planned to use them to make an exhibit 

  • “Reverent Boundaries” runs through Sept. 8th 

Artist Carol Grape is presenting “Reverent Boundaries,” a new exhibit at the Eva G. Farris Gallery on the campus of Thomas More University.

“Since COVID, we have been setting up boundaries like social distancing, masks, and hugging people less,” Grape said.

Her exhibit looks at the boundary of the mask while using each one to make a comment on what she sees as a growing lack of civility across America.

“Over the past five or six years, people have been getting ruder,” Grape said.

She had been collecting antique handkerchiefs for years and had always planned to use them to make an exhibit about the lack of civility in today’s culture. Her idea was to embroider words onto the handkerchiefs that have fallen out of favor, just like the hankie.

“We really have stopped saying, please, thank you. It became obvious to me that people were being very rude, and I was very frustrated by that,” Grape said. 

During the pandemic, she started making masks, and she combined the two ideas, turning the handkerchiefs into large masks and then hanging them on clotheslines that criss-cross the gallery.

“As a sculptor, I really wanted to create a dimensional space in an installation,” Grape said. “They are flat, but because of the stabilizer that’s in them, I can make them dimensional.” 

Grape said visitors to the gallery don’t have to read each one. 

“If you repeat things over and over again, people hear them,” Grape said. “Hopefully, it makes a fuller statement.”

Her work already has the campus talking, said Dr. Rebecca Bilbo, the chair of Thomas More University’s Department of Creative Media. She invited Grape to premiere the art installation at the gallery.

“Carol always gives us a lot to think about,” Bilbo said.

“The fact that you could tie that into something that has pervaded our lives for the last two years made everything about it very relevant for today,” Bilbo said. “And mask wearing was even controversial on this small campus.”

Bilbo believes the exhibit is about more than masks.

“I also like students to see the kind of craftsmanship that Carol Grape is known for,” Bilbo said. “Because they’re always exquisitely done.”

Grape hopes visitors will be taken with the masks, but that they’ll also walk away with something to ponder.

“Hopefully, people will think more about how they treat others,” Grape said.

“Reverent Boundaries” runs through Sept. 8th at the Eva G. Farris Gallery.