This project was the culmination of many tossed ideas, a couple of late nights, and a lot of teamwork. A special thanks goes out to Monica and Chris Human of The 86 for allowing us to put this up in their business and talking to us about the goals and background of their work. Also, thank you to Nicole Ihlenfield for your watercolor contributions with the coffee flowers and to Hank Fitzgerald for gluing on a ton of coffee beans and then scraping them all off when we decided to go a different direction - you both are great friends.

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We tried to make this something that embodied The 86 as a place for people of different backgrounds to come together and find a place that feels like home. A lot of meaning can be found in the different elements we chose to incorporate. For example, the backgrounds are made up of pages from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and sheet music from Bach. This is a dual representation of the books and concerts the 86 provides as well as the students the 86 serves.

 

Starting with the leftmost canvas, you can see the coffee and community aspects of The 86. The coffee represents the quality drinks that The 86 creates with the help of its volunteer baristas and the many people they source their coffee from. The background of this logo is made up of pages from the UC student run paper The News Record. Below this is the community logo. Surrounding it is pieces from a street map of Cincinnati. All of the dark pink areas are local universities whose students frequent The 86. 

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The middle canvas contains the official 86 logo which can be found outside the cafe. In the top corner you can see some of the countries their coffee is sourced from including Sumatra, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, and Columbia. In the bottom corner you can see the cover of an old Pike St. Review along with a sketch of the iconic bridge downtown that we found in a used bookstore by campus on W. McMillan. Overlaid on this is watercolor of coffee flowers in bloom as well as the cherries that coffee beans come from. 

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The rightmost canvas contains the concerts and creativity aspects of The 86. I guess you could say that this one represents the fact that humans aren't perfect! We accidentally glued the logos on the wrong backgrounds, but an argument could be made for synesthesia or the fact that pursuit of music is inherently a creative endeavor. However, in reality, we made a mistake and by the time we realized the glue was already cured. Who knew a glue labeled E-6000 Permanent would be so, uh, permanent. But part of life is making mistakes and this is no exception. We mentioned it to Monica and she didn't mind, so we left it. It's not noticeable unless you pay close attention and maybe it will make you draw your own conclusions about the art in this way. After all, the artist can work to convey whatever message they want, but art is a two-way relationship and the interpretation by the viewer is just as important.