Saad Ghosn

Saad Ghosn, a native of Lebanon, has been living in Cincinnati since 1985. A retired medical professional and educator, a Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati, Saad resorts to visual and spoken art to express himself and convey his social and political views.

Saad strongly believes that activism is at the heart of art expression. He is the founder of ‘SOS (Save Our Souls) ART’, a Cincinnati-based organization that promotes the use of art as a vehicle for peace and justice and for a change toward a better world, and which holds, now in its 21st year in Cincinnati, Ohio, a yearly collective art exhibit and an art festival of creative expressions of local artists for peace and justice. He is also the editor and publisher of the yearly ‘For a Better World, Poems and Drawings on Peace and Justice by Greater Cincinnati Artists’, now in its 20th year.

Saad has also written about many of Cincinnati’s Artists Activists, including in his monthly column, “Art for a Better World,” that appeared in Aeqai, the online art magazine, between 2012 and 2015, featuring each time side by side a local visual artist and a local writer, and in his 2015 book titled: “Greater Cincinnati Artists as Activists” featuring 50 such local artists.

Saad is the President of "SOS ART" the non-profit organization incorporated in 2015 whose mission is to encourage, promote and provide opportunities and venues for all the arts as vehicles for peace and justice and for all the artists to use their art as their voice for a change and for a better world.

For the past few years Saad has mostly used printmaking in his own art. In 2008 he received a Cincinnati Individual Artist Grant for his printmaking work that resulted in the creation of “SCREAM”, a socially and politically themed portfolio of 20 22”x30” b&w woodcut prints. He has shown his work locally, nationally and internationally in hundreds of solo and group exhibits, and his work is in many collections, private and public including the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Miami University Art Museum.

In addition to his own work, Saad has been curating art shows locally and internationally for the past thirty five years. His focus is on empowering local and other artists and on promoting their use of art as a vehicle for a change.

In 2016, he took SOS ART to his native country Lebanon. He has also worked with printmakers form Oaxaca/Mexico, Lebanon and Czech Republic, sharing their work as social and cultural reflections of their country’s reality.