 Guerilla sculpture.
I don’t know how I got there, but I ran across the term in a blog that included a story about Home Depot Guerilla sculpture. “What?” I thought. “How could this phenomenon have evaded my usually sculpture-sensitive radar?”
The Home Depot stuff is made by the displaced artist Stefanie Nagorka. When she lost her studio over a year ago she decided to carry on her craft in Home Depot stores. Using just what she finds in the store, (which is plenty!) she builds sculptures in the aisles for the enjoyment of all. But because she doesn’t actually get permission (and, obviously, no commission) for boosting the artistic ambience of the place, the pieces are pretty temporary. Interestingly, the pieces are very similar to her earlier work. The audience may be larger, though the run is considerably shorter than her gallery pieces.
Guerilla sculpture is well-recognized, though.
In Baltimore, the city’s ArtScape project this summer will include guerilla sculptors on Mount Royal Avenue in its LoCoMotion exhibit.
Meanwhile, in New Orleans, neon sculptor Eric Ehlenberger has been placing bright wands and globs of light around town in his “Phoenix” series. Each piece sparks up a place for only a few hours and lends an eerie presence, an hallucination, to its location. The artist says he hopes to elicit genuine emotion response in people who neither expect nor are prepared for the experience. In other words, if you walk into a gallery, or know what you’re going to see ahead of time, your reaction to a piece of art is going to be filtered. But with guerilla art, what you feel is really what the piece conveys. (Theoretically).
The most famous piece of guerilla sculpture, though, is the famous bronze “Charging Bull” in front of the Stock Exchange in NYC. The artist, Arturo Di Modica, placed it there in 1989 without blessing, permits or permission. When the cops seized and stabled it in an impound lot, the public (as only a NYC public can) bellowed, and today it sits in Bowling Green plaza, ready to charge up Broadway at any time.
(Photo from the NPR website)
1:06:58 PM 
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