If you haven’t been to the Golde Gate Park Panhandle in the last week or so, you have not stumbled upon these large, six-foot-high crows standing, mid-caw, across from each other on the grass.
The cast-bronze crows, named Lucinda and Tom, are the work of Cotati-based artist Jack Champion, who was given a commission by the local nonprofit Building 180 as part of their Big Art Loop initiative. As the Chronicle reports, Champion installed them himself in the last week on the lawn west of Masonic Avenue, east of the playground.
The title of the piece: An Attempted Murder.
On the Big Art Loop website, the nonprofit describes the sculpture saying, “Balancing humor with unease, Attempted Murder invites reflection on how we navigate tension: how we argue, how we listen, and how we choose to remain in relationship, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
The Big Art Loop “is a public art initiative transforming San Francisco into an open-air gallery, placing bold, large-scale sculpture across 34 miles of the city.” The installation last year of Marco Cochrane’s 45-foot-tall nude woman sculpture, titled R-Evolution, is part of the initiative, and Building 180 is seeking private funders for more large-scale installations of existing works.
One upcoming installation is The Pushers, by Zambian artist George Mubanga, which depicts two Sysphian figures pushing large spheres, and which is apparently coming to the McLaren Park Overlook.
As Aliza Marks, the CEO of Building 180, tells the Chronicle, “The Big Art Loop is about putting public art into the neighborhoods. All of these sculptures are existing works of art. We are bringing them out of storage and into public view.”
The thing with the crows is that crows actually have been proliferating in San Francisco in larger numbers than in years’ past, they’re loud and cocky, and they’re reportedly killing off the local pigeon population. They’re taking over basically, like in Hitchcock’s The Birds. And to hear Champion describe it, the crows around the Panhandle might even be flattered by this oversize depiction of them now on display.
So, kind of scary, really.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source sfist.com ’
