Yay Pigs Do Fly
by Kathy Barney
Title
Yay Pigs Do Fly
Artist
Kathy Barney
Medium
Photograph - Photography-digital Art
Description
There are 4 flying pigs on crowns at a downtown cincy park. Pigs were adopted as a mascot because of Cincinnati's past reputation as "porkopolis;" providing the world with meat in the slaughterhouse heydays. Writes john Johnson for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1999: "To celebrate the city's 200th birthday that year, plans were made to build a riverfront park � Bicentennial Commons at Sawyer Point � that would include an entrance sculpture. From more than 50 proposals, a team of renowned artists and architects selected a sculpture design by Andrew Leicester, an internationally known artist based in Minneapolis.
Mr. Leicester incorporated various aspects of Cincinnati history into his design. Pigs, he knew, played a significant role in the city's industrial development.
Indeed, Donna M. DeBlasio, senior historian for Cincinnati Museum Center, notes that by 1835 Cincinnati was the nation's leading pork-packing center. And by the 1840s, it was the world leader, with a quarter of a million hogs a year being slaughtered and processed here.
To pay homage to Cincinnati's reign as Porkopolis, Mr. Leicester included in his sculpture four 3-foot-high bronze pigs, with wings. They appeared to be blasting out of 30-foot-tall riverboat smokestacks.
Uploaded
February 19th, 2014
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