PITTSFIELD — The Guerilla Bunny has struck again, this time hiding more than 100 hand-painted eggs in sprawling public spaces throughout the city of Pittsfield. This Easter-morning ritual marks the 14th year that the anonymous artist has engaged Berkshire County residents in what has become a much-anticipated public art project. Its aim is to prove that art — and not just the kind that hangs in museums and galleries — has the power to change people’s lives.
“The opportunity to have art at ground level — literally in the dirt, the crotch of a tree, by a mud scraper to a door threshold — has an incredibly human appeal because it’s not set above us, away from us, or in a cordoned-off area,” Suzi Banks Baum, part of the Guerilla Bunny team, told The Edge in a recent phone interview. “[Guerilla Bunny] has really created this project as a way of delivering what they, as an artist, believe to be potent imagery of transformation,” she said, which makes the artist’s choice of an egg as a proverbial canvas no accident.
The egg, if nothing more, is a timeless symbol of fertility and fragility, both of which are inherent to the cycle of life. Last week, Jews observed Passover (a festival celebrating the early Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and freedom from slavery); today, Christians celebrate Easter (the third day following the crucifixion of Christ, when he is said to have been resurrected). March 20 marked the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere, and it is now spring. While the Guerilla Bunny’s annual distribution of eggs habitually happens on Easter Sunday (save for last year, when it took place on the summer solstice due to the questions surrounding COVID), it is a secular tradition — one that celebrates the common threads that bind us together rather than those that divide us. Baum likens it to the “rising energy of transformation and rebirth.”
The project’s genesis ultimately emerged as a form of healing. “I went through a really, really intense time in my life, which was really dark,” the Guerilla Bunny divulged in a short film created about the project (produced by Sophia deBoer and directed by Rick Sands, but currently unavailable to the public as it hits the film festival circuit). During this period, they “completely lost faith in the divine.” At some point, they started reading the Harry Potter series of books, which the Guerilla Bunny said “literally saved [their] life” and gave them hope of living in a world “where magic exists … where [one] can actually fight a battle against darkness, and fight for the light.” Fittingly, the public art project is designed to provide random moments of disbelief, magic, and joy to the finders; to bring magic into a world of harsh realities; and to provide lasting inspiration.
It is believed that each egg, carefully hand-blown before painstakingly painted in a process spanning up to 10 hours per egg, will be found by precisely the person who was meant to find it. “They are magical gifts,” said the Guerilla Bunny. “The one meant for you will find you.” Guerilla Bunny emphasizes intention by directing people, when they pick up an egg, “to stand quietly and ask if that egg is for you. If it is not, put it back and move on to find another,” Baum explained. Fragility is also part of the game. Every once in a while, an egg will break in someone’s hand. According to Baum, “Guerilla Bunny has a firm belief that when an egg breaks, it was time.”
Hence, ephemerality is underscored. “Don’t think that this is something you are going to invest in,” Baum, who found close to a dozen eggs before joining the team, said of the delicate works of art. Rather, they are created to invite people in and capture their imaginations. She likens each work of art — ranging from images of myth and tarot to Dark is Rising (a series of books by Susan Cooper) — as conveying “some sort of story that feels magical and mysterious and persuasive. The hand of some finely-skilled artist laid these layers of paint in these patterns on this homely little egg, and suddenly [one] can feel the presence of art … it becomes so immediate.”
Until 2019, the project took place in Stockbridge. “The magic of the eggs … is largely in the surprise, the experience of finding, and the complete lack of context,” according to the Guerilla Bunny website. Last year, the “team” shifted gears. (Apropos, considering the term guerilla describes one acting against convention, using fluctuating, if not stealthy, tactics.) One team went to Albany, following protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, citing an ardent desire to connect with that community; another team scattered eggs in Hillsdale and Chatham.
Regardless of where the Guerilla Bunny strikes, one thing remains constant: their work is a roving public art installation like no other. “These little eggs … there is an element of delivery to them,” said Baum. “They can’t hang out in a public square, [rather] they find their audience,” she said in a nod to the fact that each work is designed to bring the finder into a very personal experience.
Since 2008, when Guerilla Bunny first struck, nearly 1,000 works of art on eggshell have been found in small Berkshire towns. “There is very little between an egg and a human; [the medium] is very related to who we are as human beings,” Baum said, calling the project a way to spread the magic a bit. “[The eggs] are not meant to be held by a small group of [elite] people … that is not what public art is.”
Note: The Guerilla Bunny invites finders of eggs to post their stories on the @GuerillaBunny Facebook page or Instagram site.
