SOS Art Cincinnati sponsors a yearly SOS ART Show and Event of creative expressions for peace and justice. This year, OHHS Art and Design students from: Groh’s Drawing and Printmaking class; Schorsch’s Drawing and Printmaking, Painting and Mixed Media, and Studio Art AP classes; and Ambs’ Art Foundations classes, will be participating in the event. Students will be exhibiting alongside many established artists, including OHHS Art and Design teacher Jamie Schorsch, all addressing issues related to peace and justice.

The  primary objectives of SOS Art Cincinnati are:
To promote the use of art as a vehicle for peace and justice and for a better world.
To provide art-related educational programs towards peace and justice for all ages.
To help facilitate the creation and development by local artists of literary and artistic works focused on peace and justice.
To help create a community of local artists who use their artistic voice for peace and justice, who connect and collaborate.
To use art, to inform, educate and create a dialogue on issues pertaining to peace and justice.

Information about the student’s selected to exhibit is provided below:

Icons of Influence
For “Icons of Influence” students selected an individual, an icon of society, to research who has impacted and influenced society in a positive way.  Using a stylus, with a variety of Scratchboard tools, students carefully observed details, textures, highlights, and shadows. A term was selected as a descriptor of the selected icon that was included in the work to summarize the individual’s life or characteristics.

Communicating Social Narratives: “Girl Rising”
Drawing and Printmaking students created a narrative image based upon one of the story vignettes from “Girl Rising” that they selected for inspiration. The compositions demonstrate the unification of notes and sketches taken during the viewing of “Girl Rising”, research related to the stories, and project planning completed previously. The artwork of Kara Walker served as inspiration for the silhouetting of the resulting images that convey the struggles that girls face around the globe in receiving and education.

Symbols of Global Issues
Having learned about the graffiti style artwork of Keith Haring, students created a drawing in the style inspired by Keith Haring as a means of using symbolic imagery to communicate a message based on a global or social issue.

Social Perspectives
For this assignment, students researched some of today’s greatest socially conscious artists, such as Banksy, to discover what makes art powerful and life-changing.  The collage-style work of art communicates to the audience the students’ position on a social issue, a moral stance on a particular incident, or viewpoint on a topic that affects their life.

Art & Civil Rights
Students researched some of history’s most (in)famous events of civil unrest and justice and visually communicated the essence of those events through the relief printmaking format. The goal of the work was to communicate the importance of documenting the power of people who challenge the violation of Civil Rights through a media that can be mass produced. Kathe Kollwitz served as the inspiration for this project for her role in educating the people about the horrors of WWI and WWII through mass produced prints.

The SOS Art Exhibition, now in its 15th consecutive year, will take place at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from June 2nd-11th, 2017. The opening reception will take place on June 2nd, starting at 6 pm.

Visit www.sosartcincinnati.wordpress.com for more information about programming.