Columbus artists celebrate incoming cicadas through creations for sale
While some Ohioans are dreading the upcoming arrival of the buzzing cicadas of Brood X, others are anxiously awaiting them — and they aren’t afraid to show it.
Numerous local artists and vendors have taken to creating cicada merchandise to demonstrate their excitement and love for the noisy, winged insects.
Emma Goslin, 26 of the West Side, sells cicada-related items on her Etsy shop. She makes shadow boxes with cicada bodies and shells, as well as the insects preserved in jars of resin like a scientific display.
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“I make jewelry and art out of dead things I find here in Ohio, and a lot of it is just me walking around in the woods or walking my dog … It’s kind of weird, but I have a huge jar — not a huge jar, but a jar full of dead cicadas — that I hoard, because I don’t know how many I’m going to find this year, you know?” Goslin said.
Goslin, known as BoneLabs on Etsy, began collecting dead things in 2014 and selling them as a side hustle in 2016. The cicadas in resin are popular, she said, but she also makes jewelry out of the wings that sell from $15 to $38 .
The new wave of bugs, which emerges once every 17 years, is expected to arrive in May once soil temperatures reach 64 degrees, experts say. Ohio is one of 16 states Brood X will inhabit, and the state expects billions of them in southwest and western Ohio.
Laura Hiner, 31 of Clintonville, has been making art and jewelry from things found in nature for as long as she can remember, but her supply of cicadas from the 2016 Brood V in the Athens area is running low.
“It was like art supplies raining from the sky. I took a few trips down there and collected a lot of the wings, the shells and the dead cicadas to work with,” Hiner said. “I’ve done some insect jewelry before that, but … suddenly I had enough materials to experiment with, and I knew they were all ethically sourced and cruelty free and whatnot.”
Hiner makes art and jewelry for her business Demon Kitty Designs, including glow-in-the-dark cicada wing earrings that sell for $38. She said she finds cicadas to be beautiful bugs, but people don’t usually notice their features.
“I’m always keeping an eye out for bugs, shells, fossils — anything cool in nature I could find a way to present to draw attention to the little things that always catch my attention,” Hiner said.
Old School Shirts and Cincy Shirts, sibling companies based in Cincinnati, also have added to the cicada buzz with the addition of t-shirts to their online shops.
P.F. Wilson, director of content and events at the companies, said the companies try to stay on the leading edge of pop culture, so when Cincinnati locals were talking about the cicadas, they made the shirts. And it didn’t stop there.
“I decided, ‘Hey, they’re going to be in other parts of the country, so we should also put them on our Old School Shirts website as well,'” Wilson said. “And I looked up where else Brood X is going to be turning up, and it turns out it was places like Baltimore and Indianapolis and Nashville, so for the pages for those cities, we also added in
the cicada shirts.”
Wilson said the lead designer’s goal with the design of the shirts was to keep them from looking tacky so they can be worn long after the historical event. Offerings include including bug shirts that say, “Here for a good time not a long time” and detailed cicada drawings labeled “Brood X.”
“I think his idea was to make something that looks cool that would also remind people of in years to come of the 17-year cicada brood that hit this year,” Wilson said.
In the spirit of wearing support for the cicadas, Joi Eichert, 36 of the East Side, created screen-printed cicada patches a few years ago. As a gardener, she said she pays close attention to bugs, but has liked cicadas for a long time.
“Cicadas are just kind of crazy, alien-looking bugs that don’t hurt us, so I like that they’re big and wild-looking but not harmful,” said Eichert, known as Raygun Industries on Etsy.
In a sign of the times, Bree Pitcock, 41 of Bexley, starting making masks at the beginning of the pandemic to donate to nursing homes, then began selling them in her neighborhood.
Pitcock added cicada-themed masks to her brood because she is a an avid backpacker and camper, as well as a self-proclaimed bug nerd, she said. Over one weekend, Pitcock said she sold 30 cicada masks at $11 each on Etsy, where she’s known as Bitch’n Stitch Art. She said she’s been donating 15% of the proceeds to Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville and has donated $315 thus far.
“It kind of makes it feel like there might be more nerds out there than I thought,” Pitcock said.
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