Pyramid Hill puts out an open call for light and media artists to revamp its holiday show

Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Brave Berlin, the downtown creative agency behind Lumenocity and BLINK, are collaborating to reinvent the park’s annual holiday light show.

Brave Berlin’s partners have put out an open call for light and media artists to submit proposals to create dynamic, lighted art for the holiday show. The model for this evolved out of Brave Berlin’s work with dozens of artists for BLINK.

The reimagined and expanded show will take on a new name — Borealis.

In 2018, Pyramid Hill management invited Brave Berlin to brainstorm new ideas for the popular event. The result was a transformation of Pyramid Hill’s outdoor pavilion into a 13-projector, 180-degree, drive-by media experience.

“It was an experiment to see if people would respond to something other than just your traditional holiday light show,” says Brave Berlin partner Dan Reynolds. “It paid off with over 20,000 visitors to the park.”

Pyramid Hill has produced the Holiday Lights on the Hill drive-through display for 20 years, attracting hundreds of thousands of guests over that time to the 2.5-mile hilltop route.

The park features more than 60 pieces of outdoor sculpture in a natural setting of hills, meadows, and forests. Its Ancient Sculpture Museum features Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Syrian, and Egyptian sculptures.

Brave Berlin was the creative force behind Lumenocity, the event that featured the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and an outdoor light show projected onto Music Hall.

The agency is also one of the principal forces behind BLINK, a light, art, music, and sculpture event that was inaugurated in 2017 over a long weekend that attracted about a million visitors to Over-the-Rhine and downtown. BLINK 2019 will take place Oct. 10–13 and extend across the Suspension Bridge and into Covington.

Pyramid Hill says artists who want to submit concepts should demonstrate a viable plan to conceive, fabricate, install, and maintain their artwork for a period of six weeks outside during the winter months.

Up to 35 works will be selected in three award levels ranging from $5,000 to $20,000.