A stone’s throw from Hamilton, some 25 miles from downtown Cincinnati, lies a public park with monumental sculpture and an underground house.Pyramid Hill sprawls over 265 acres of rolling hills, man-made lakes, thick woodlands and butterfly-filled meadows. Overlooking the Great Miami River, it is a contemporary art museum outdoors – a place where visitors can hike or drive through natural galleries filled with the splendor of art.

More at Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park, the Enquirer, and Cincinnati USA.

CET conducted this interview with Harry Wilks, the park and museum’s founder and director in 2007.

More at Wikimedia.

“We call her Big Girl,” explains Big Girl owner Andy Scheurer, who is always happy to talk about Big Girl. “She’s been a source of humor and a bit of mystery, but she’s also a timely piece of pop art. She’s lovely, and as the leaves fall off the trees in the winter, she literally slows traffic.”Big Girl is throwback to the ’60s, when Muffler Men, Uniroyal Gals (which is what Big Girl is) and other giant fiberglass statues stood as roadside attractions for businesses – usually holding tires – in the pre-highway days. (Except now, Clifton’s Big Girl is armless. How she got that way Scheurer is unsure, but he also calls her Jackie DeMilo, after Jackie O and Venus DeMilo).

Big Girl is 17.5 feet tall and is sort of creepy – she’s very pale and appears too large against the backdrop of her Clifton backyard home. Yet she’s beguiling in her femininity, with her classically ’60s flip hairdo, her white V-neck T-shirt and red, form-fitting knee-length skirt.
She holds the look of a woman who knows something you do not.

“That’s why she’s a piece of art rather than a kitschy piece of crap,” Scheurer says. “Her context is in a formal yard. It’s the oldest standing house in Clifton, and you expect stone walls and flowery crap and sculptures. To find her in this context is jolting. She is made to drive by on the highway. And indeed, she has her own dose of creepiness.”

Clifton has been Big Girl’s home since Scheurer’s brother found her abandoned in a park in the late ’70s or early ’80s. Before that, she stood at the old F & M Steakhouse in Northern Kentucky.

More on Uniroyal Gals from Roadside America.

via Tominabox

Some other ideas for Touchdown Jesus:

• Build his feet sticking out of the ground on the other side of the highway.
• Bengal’s Jesus!
• Reds’ Jesus!
• Clown Jesus!

More information on Roadside America.

It’s a statue of James Bradley, a slave turned educator and Underground Railroad conductor.

He fools me everytime I walk down there. In the wintertime, someone usually puts a scarf around his neck and a hat on his head to keep him warm. In the springtime, when everyone is still paying attention to the Reds, you may find him with a Reds cap on his head and a pennant in his hand. I have yet to see any Bengals gear on him, I guess because there usually isn’t any reason for him to cheer.