When I first spotted these giraffes behind the barricade shielding an empty lot on 5th Street in downtown LA, I assumed that the owner, recognizing that the bland and downright shabby wall was adding nothing to the neighborhood, had commissioned these delightful twins. No such thing, as it turns out.
So the other day when I ran into Wild Life, a friend of mine and a noted local artist, and he asked me, "What's shakin'", I mentioned the giraffes. "Oh, I did those." Duh. So, it turns out that pair of even-toed ungulates is the work of my friend, guerrilla street artist Wild Life and his partner, Calder Greenwood. The duo (the artists, not the giraffes) have a long history of depositing art all over downtown, in a series cheerfully dubbed "Art Appears", and have been written up in the Los Angeles Times and even Huffington Post.
Previous works have included a papier-mâché family of sun bathers in the empty lot across from City Hall and re-imagined baby dolls on lamp-posts, but most notoriously, an ultra-realistic and instructive bogus sign attached to the Walt Disney Music Center. Their main focus is art-bombing downtown with counterfeit signage attached to such mundane objects as potted palms and dumpsters, and labeling them as commissioned works of art. Additionally, their plaques are signed with rather good forgeries of the signatures of some famous names, including those of Yoko Ono, Andy Warhol, Werner Herzog and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.
