Grace Hood, 2, checks out the black crow sculptures on Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle on Sunday. Grace lives in the neighborhood with her mother, who said she loves birds.
Jess Lynn Goss / For the S.F. Chronicle
Artist Jack Champion stands with his art piece “An Attempted Murder,” on the Golden Gate Panhandle on Sunday. This crow is his favorite of the two, named Lucinda because he listened to Lucinda Williams while crafting the birds.
Jess Lynn Goss / For the S.F. Chronicle
Michelle N. is sick of the crows that normally walk up and down San Francisco’s Fulton Street near where she lives as if they own it. So on Sunday morning she and her friend Ana S. took her dog, Butter, for a walk down to the Panhandle to get away from them.
“I’ve been noticing more crows in my life, and now this,” she said while staring in disbelief at two anatomically correct huge black crows cast in bronze standing on the grass, beaks open and seemingly cawing at each other. “Isn’t this crazy? Who read my mind?”
The answer is Jack Champion, a Cotati sculptor who put those one-ton crows, named Lucinda and Tom, in the park last week at the behest of the Big Art Loop, a privately funded civic campaign to get oversize works of art out of storage and into the public domain in the parks of San Francisco. The work is titled “An Attempted Murder,” playing off the collective noun for a group of crows, but it is also what Michelle N. was feeling when a reporter approached her to gauge her reaction.
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Jack Champion unveils “An Attempted Murder,” a large-scale crow installation as part of the citywide Big Art Loop initiative.
Jess Lynn Goss
“These crows,” she said, partly joking but also rattled enough to decline to give her last name. “I’m seeing them and now you are asking me all these questions, and I’m spooked out. What’s that Hitchcock movie?”
There are similarities to the famed horror film “The Birds,” made just up the coast in Bodega Bay in 1963. A nest of real crows lives in the eucalyptus trees directly above Tom and Lucinda, and they’ve been swooping down to make their presence known.
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“I’m afraid of crows and ravens but still find them fascinating,” said Suki Frigarb, visiting from Los Angeles. “Something that makes you afraid, you can’t stop looking at.”
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Champion, the artist, developed his fascination with the Corvidae species while at Burning Man more than a decade ago. He was on the all-night crew building the eponymous wooden temple to be torched when he noticed that the lighting at the construction site on the playa attracted all forms of worm and bug life. When the sun came up, a flock of crows would swoop in to eat the bugs.
“I started playing with perspective,” said Champion, who ended up making a dozen aluminum crows, each 5 or 6 feet tall, at his studio in Oakland. All of these crows found homes, at winery exhibitions and sculpture gardens. He made more out of bronze, including “An Attempted Murder,” which premiered at an art museum in Laguna Beach (Orange County).
Susanna Young, her son Julien Mandelbaum, and their dog, Koda, interact with “An Attempted Murder,” a new art installation on the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.
Jess Lynn Goss / For the S.F. Chronicle
Lucinda and Tom were recruited to San Francisco by Building 180, an arts company that is curating the Big Art Loop. The company finds locations, gets feedback from neighbors and then submits it to the Recreation and Park Department for approval. Artists are paid a fee for loaning and installing their work.
“The Big Art Loop is about putting public art into the neighborhoods,” said Aliza Marks, the organization’s CEO. “All of these sculptures are existing works of art. We are bringing them out of storage and into public view.”
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The most prominent examples of the project thus far are the nude woman at the foot of Market Street at the Embarcadero, which was recently extended for six months, and the water-spewing sea serpent in a lake along JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park.
“I couldn’t ask for a better setting,” Champion said while standing off to the side of his Panhandle crows. “There are constantly people here interacting with them.”
Joseph and Jacqueline Martinez interact with a newly installed art piece by Jack Champion called “An Attempted Murder” on the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. Both live in the area and said the art piece is refreshing. “You don’t really see art much around here,” Jacqueline said.
Jess Lynn Goss / For the S.F. Chronicle
Dogs bark at them from afar, and some approach warily to sniff the tail feathers. Kids are not as wary as some dogs and most parents. At first sight, Grace Hood, 2, clambered out of the stroller being pushed by her mom, Marnie, and took off running toward the corvids. She didn’t stop until she had reached into Lucinda’s beak and patted her tongue.
“We see a crow like this every morning outside her bedroom window,” Marnie said. “We’ll be coming this way a lot.”
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Kat Lin was waiting to meet with a couple to teach them dance steps for their upcoming wedding. She took the whole thing as a sign.
“We will have them channel the crows in their first dance,” Lin explained. “They will be in the wedding in spirit.”
Ramee Opperude would like to see the birds go from the Panhandle to Skylawn Memorial Park, the San Mateo cemetery where he works.
Phoebe Johnson, 4, and her brother Eli, 2, play with the large crow statue. The statue is part of a piece called “An Attempted Murder.”
Jess Lynn Goss / For the S.F. Chronicle
“They would work really well down there,” he said. “It’s a nice addition to what could be a plain green space.”
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The crows are contracted to stay on the lawn, just west of Masonic Avenue and east of the playground, for one year.
“I hope they stay permanently, frankly,” said Mary Helen Briscoe, who lives across the street from the Panhandle. “I think it is fabulous.”
During the time spent installing and observing the art, Champion has noticed a pattern among real birds in the park. The crows, which have pretty much decimated the local pigeon population, hang around. The wild parrots will come through to laugh at it all in mockery, but they keep moving.
“The crows are the thugs of the neighborhood,” he said. “They rule this place.”