Photography courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum
Plan a visit to the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Rosenthal Education Center (REC) to witness firsthand John Lanzador’s vast wall of rainbow-bright pigs, titled A Pig-Ment of Your Imagination. The current REC Artist in Residence, he teaches art at Maddux Elementary School in Anderson Township and has done a variety of murals around town as well as small art carvings.
Lanzador’s installation has hung in the gallery since May, and every month he meets with children and their grownups to create unique art projects that accompany the pig exhibit as part of the museum’s new RECreate Program. I attended the August 11 event with my 4-year-old daughter, who had a chance to gaze into Lanzador’s kind face and watch as he drew her a pig that she could then color.
His pigs, both the ones on display in the exhibition and the ones he drew on the spot, have expressive ears and wide-set eyes, and their little bodies seem to sway in a sideways movement of curiosity or bemusement. They’re very cute pigs. Still, when a little girl who wasn’t into pigs came to the artist’s table, Lanzador drew her a unicorn. He’s chill like that.
The exhibition is an echo of and homage to Hunt Slonem’s “Bunny Wall,” which has hung in the museum’s Terrace Café for years. The bunnies are painted in oil, their silhouettes outlined in black or white against a solid background. While the design is simple, each bunny seems to merit a long look—and the entire collection is very satisfying to see at once.
As a longtime fan of the bunnies, I gasped when I saw Lanzador’s pigs. The bunnies are backgrounded by sedate colors: maroons and silvers and golds and whites. The pigs, in contrast, shine against neon yellows, oranges, purples, pinks, and blues.
“There’s really no limit to the colors you can do,” Lanzador told me as we gazed up at the wall of pigs. Against the midnight blue gallery wall, the pigs seemed to glow—and some were noticeably sparkling. “It’s diamond dust,” he explained, gesturing toward a pig with a radiant purple backdrop.
He got the idea from looking up what Slonem has been doing with his bunnies in recent years. Initially, when Lanzador heard that some bunnies were finished with “diamond dust,” he was a little concerned about the potential cost. But it turns out that diamond dust is—wait for it—ground up plastic. The tiny shards are sprinkled over a wet mat, where they dry in place and create a stunning visual effect. “But they’re sharp,” he said, “and that’s why the diamond dust pictures are pretty high up on the wall. We don’t want kids to touch them.”
Lanzador applied for the REC exhibition in last fall. When he was notified that he’d won, he spent the next four months making pigs, working about two hours a night to create one to three pigs, depending on their size. And the sizes truly vary—each pig (or grouping of pigs) is made to fit precisely into its frame, which Lanzador and his wife sourced at thrift stores. Some are the size of a postcard, while the largest feature six piggies in poster-sized frames.
There’s something about seeing them altogether that’s especially impressive. “I like to work with a theme,” Lanzador told me. “One of the easiest things for artists is to come up with an idea and to repeat that idea as many times as you can.” Of course, Slonem’s bunnies are just such a theme; he famously makes one a bunny a day as a kind of a warm-up for whatever else he’s going to do.
There are 27 frames of bunnies in the Terrace Café and 53 frames of pigs in the REC. Like the bunny wall, the pig wall is presented behind a bevy of seating tables and a kitchen. “I wanted kids to be able to pretend they were in the café,” said Lanzador. “They could be the waiter or the chef or the customer.”
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Art Museum
I experienced this pretend world firsthand a few minutes later, as I was instructed by my child to first sit at a tiny table and order coffee and then told that it was my turn to ask her what she wanted. After nearly 20 minutes of these exchanges, I bribed her to go to the real Terrace Café to get a chocolate-chip cookie—which are served warm, by the way, and cost just $2.
In all, the Cincinnati Art Museum has done a lot to welcome families into the REC space. The pig wall itself is gorgeous, silly, and fun to see, but museum educators have also created a variety of crafts inspired by the exhibit. There’s an activity book drawn by Lanzador that features a pig and a bunny eating together at a café, with a bunch of blank-framed pictures behind them. Kids can color the characters and add their own artwork.
The gallery also offers 4-by-4-inch mini canvases, which you can color with paint sticks and then cover in black velvet stickers. The stickers can be custom-cut to look like the pigs on the wall. I quickly made two; it can be fun for adults as well.
On the remaining Sundays when Lanzador visits (September 8 and October 13), unique art activities will accompany him. Past activities have involved print-making and T-shirt decoration.
It’s also simply exciting to meet someone who lives and makes art in Cincinnati. There’s something about the exhibition’s homegrown quality that makes you feel excited about art itself, and the REC folks seem to know it—in-person visits are part of the Artist in Residence gig moving forward.
Any artist can apply to showcase his or her work at the REC, which rotates exhibitions twice a year. Since opening 10 years ago, the gallery has featured seven different artists, who will be celebrated in an upcoming anniversary exhibit.
When I asked Lanzador what will happen to his pigs after the exhibit closes in October, he said they’ll probably be sold. He hopes that some families will be able to get a small set of pigs, and he’s priced them accordingly—just $100 for a post-card painting, more for the larger pieces.
Wisely, the Cincinnati Art Museum has opted to keep a few pigs for future installations and for fundraisers. As pigments of the imagination go, these pigs are pretty inspiring, even if none of them have wings.
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