1834 Ohio Penitentiary founded. 1870 The Ohio State University founded. 1878 Columbus Museum of Art founded (as Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts). 1929 Writer Chester Himes enters Ohio Pen. 1930 Ohio Pen fire kills over 300 inmates. 1934 Chester Himes’ short story about the Ohio Pen fire (“To What Red Hell?”) from the perspective of […]
Last episode I left you with Cornel West. He was speaking about the blues as part of the exhibition Blues for Smoke, which was on show here in Columbus at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2013 at the same time as Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai, with its concluding poetic call for the […]
The demolition of the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus was completed in 1998, the same year that Chester Himes’ novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry, set within that very same prison’s walls, was published. The autobiographical novel narrates the story of Jimmy Monroe, Himes’ white alter ego, who finds himself doing time at the Ohio Pen, where […]