If you take walk around lakeview, lincoln park, and even some parts of downtown, you are bound to turn a corner and happen upon a neighborhood street flanked by two giant steel giraffes, or a yard scattered with bears and gorillas. It's a magical Chicago neighborhood moment, and one that I owe to the sculptor, John Kearney.
Kearney got a start as an art student, rummaging through junkyards for readily available sculpture material. What he found were car bumpers. What he made were the opposite of steel and technology: homages to the majesty of the natural world, life-size recreations of megafauna. The giraffes are around roscoe and belmont (I'm not going to tell you where since you have to find them yourself, that's part of the fun). There's a moose downtown on Michigan Avenue. A whole storybook full of characters from the Wizard of Oz border (appropriately) Oz Park. Make sure you get up close and see how he fit the bumpers perfectly into each other to create anatomically accurate figures.
The real jewel in the John Kearney decorative gammut is a house on belden in lincoln park that I can only find when I'm not looking for it. I sware this is true! It's a painted lady, with each victorian embellishment painted a candy color. The yard is littered with sculptures. My guess is home of the artist, but I can't say for sure. I walked by once and saw someone working on the house. I called out to ask a question but he was either deaf of studiously ignored my "excuse me?"s. Sometimes it's better to just appreciate than know, I guess.
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