Category — Exhibits

By guest blogger: Jocelyn Coulter

There is a new piece of art in the Zoo… and it’s made entirely out of trash.  It’s fitting that we would place it in the Go Green Garden, but there is more to this story than just trash and “going green.”

A little history…

As a part of my Masters through Miami University’s Global Field Program in partnership with the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, I have focused the past 2.5 years on how art can play a significant role in environmental conservation.  This past summer, I was fortunate enough to work with a handful of high school students, from four different high schools, who were willing to come together in the name of art and the environment. We worked through a pilot course that offered a new way to learn about the environment through art.  Aside from some cool art activities and discussions, the most amazing result of this course was the heightened interest of two young ladies from Roger Bacon High School, who both aspired to take some of what they learned back to their peers.

Amanda and Michelle create graffiti, using stencils and mud.

Amanda and Michelle show off their journals crafted out of an old dinosaur book.

So where in the Zoo was this picture taken?

In the P & G Discovery Forest!

The 4,500-square-foot P&G Discovery Forest is a tropical rainforest housed in a unique, three-story circular atrium as part of the Harold C. Schott Education Center that opened in 1996. I was so fortunate to be able to work on the interpretive graphics and interactives for this exhibit. [Read more →]

Twigs snap. Leaves rustle. You get a prickly feeling on the back of your neck as you wonder whether someone, or something, is watching you, stalking you, hunting you. It’s an eat-or-be-eaten world and, in the Cincinnati Zoo’s new Cat Canyon exhibit opening next summer, you are the prey.

A fishing cat crouches in its Night Hunters exhibit. (Photo: Brian Jorg)

Cat Canyon will encompass and link up the new Night Hunters experience (opened in May 2011) with the former Tiger Canyon area and include new exhibits for cougars, tigers, and snow leopards. (The cougar exhibit actually opened already.) Cat Canyon provides an exciting, sensory adventure into the world of our great predators, the wild cats, while strengthening the Zoo’s commitment to the conservation of threatened species through education and scientific research in the wild and at the Zoo. [Read more →]