About its Past, it Now Squeals With Porcine Delight Wildlife artist John Ruthven stands with the fiberglass pig he painted for the Cincinnati Museum Center outside the Union Terminal museum center in Cincinnati. Plush, squeezable toy pigs. Winged pig T-shirts.
Porcine pride is now fashionable in Cincinnati.
More than 360 fiberglass pigs individually designed by artists will be deployed around the Cincinnati area in a public art display called the Big Pig Gig through October. It officially starts June 10, but about 100 will be out on street corners, sidewalks, parks and building lobbies in time for the second running of the Flying Pig Marathon on May 14. Corporations have fallen all over themselves to sponsor the sidewalk porkers after the marathon's T-shirts and other promotional items produced fat sales last year. It wasn't always this way. Cincinnati used to shun its former nickname of Porkopolis, derived from its 19th century days as a hog-butchering town.