The city of Bend, Oregon, has recently become the site of a mysterious art intervention. Someone has been placing googly eyes on the city’s public art, delighting the residents and angering the city officials.
Bend is home to Roundabout Art Route, a stretch of artworks situated on the roundabouts of the city’s main road. In recent weeks, several of those artworks were targeted for a humorous makeover with googly eyes by unnamed individuals.
The pieces that had googly eyes fitted on them included Joe Halko’s “Big Ears,” which shows a bronze-cast family of deer, Brandon Zebold’s “Orb I,” a six-foot-tall sphere made of metal, and Frank Boyden’s sculpture of a bird named “Phoenix Rising.”
While the public was overwhelmingly entertained by this unusual intervention, the city officials have been urging the Googly Eye Bandit, a nickname given to the mysterious culprit, to halt its project. According to them, the adhesive used to secure the googly eyes could damage the sculpture.
“We love our roundabout art in Bend, so let’s do our part to take care of it,” the city of Band wrote in a social media post. “While the googly eyes placed on the various art pieces around town might give you a chuckle, it costs money to remove them with care to not damage the art.”
