I still get excited when I see one, since there are so few of them left, but it's a sad kind of excitement. The 9/11 bear, the stained glass bear:Īnd a pink bear that I saw once but didn't take a picture of because I didn't have my camera with me are all gone. I know there still was one inside the visitor center downtown after the culling, but those are the only survivors I've encountered. The bear at the zoo escaped, hidden in the bushes above the black bear enclosure:Īnd the one at the crew team boathouse survived the purge: This weekend, at the Rossini Festival, I spotted the Italian bear on the corner of the opera stage:Īnd it's not the only one that survived. Some of the bears, though, escaped extinction. They added a sense of charm to an area where the city wants to attract tourists, but then they were suddenly gone. Sure, some of them were a little tacky, but some of them had a sense of whimsy that's lacking in a plain sidewalk. They're not the only thing that went the city also lost a large treble clef and a huge Frederick Remington reproduction on Gay Street:īut it's the bears I miss. The city decided to form a Public Art task force, and even though they initially said that no art already in place would be affected, the order eventually went out that the bears had to go. They adorned sidewalks, walls, and a few lobbies, and it always made me smile when I saw one I hadn't encountered before.Īnd people started protesting. The fun of it was that no one seemed to have an exact map of bear locations, to know how many of the original 30 were left on display, or how many had been added since then. Many of them were purchased by downtown merchants, and every once in a while when you were walking downtown you would stumble across one. The Art Bears were fiberglass sculptures painted by local artists and auctioned off as part of the 2001 Dogwood Arts Festival. When I moved to Knoxville in 2006 I spent a lot of time walking around downtown to go to the Farmer's Market:Īnd to look at the graffiti at construction sites:Īnd somewhere along the way I became kind of enamored of the Knoxville Art Bears.
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