You know that giant bird's nest looking thing on the Front Lawn at Brown?  It's wrapped around the base of a couple of the trees, and it's a great place to make out with your hot new boyfriend... er, I mean, it's a significant piece of art.  Apparently.  I just thought there were giant birds on campus or something...

Okay, not really.  I know "art" when I see it, but despite wandering inside the tree sculpture and wandering the perimeter, I had no idea who the artist was... until today!  Sweet!  See, when I made my first pilgrimage Brown, I saw the sculpture and thought immediately of an art exhibit I had seen in my home city of Pittsburgh* at Point State Park. 

* I saw home "city" because I'm actually from a small town forty-five minutes away from Pittsburgh, so I took road trips pretty often.

It had been a long day.  Parking was scarce with the Arts Festival was in town, but stupid me had worn black books, with chunky tall heels, in the hopes of finally looking sexy to the man with whom I was "just friends."  We walked across one of the many bridges that Pittsburgh is famous for and by the time we got to the park, I was a raging bitch with swollen feet and even the fact that he bought me a fairy princess tiara couldn't cheer me up.  The poor lad was actually quite terrified of me, and I suspect the gift was a bribe, which I accepted with only the tiniest of smiles inside. 

We saw Patrick Dougherty's art work, and I remember that when I walked through it, I forgot, temporarily, about how much my feet hurt because I was struck by how cool it was.  I had that same feeling again at Brown, which is how I knew, subconsciously, that the artists were one in the same.  The sculpture was damaged in March when an oak fell, destroying middle part that you see in the picture above, taken before the fall.  

"Part of me would have loved to keep the fallen tree there entwined with the sculpture, but that had obvious safety concerns," said Jo-Ann Conklin, gallery director and Art committee member. "There was just something very philosophically nice about Mother Nature taking over the sculpture."

Unfortunately, the powers that be didn't agree. The damaged portion was removed, and now the rest is up for removal soon. Better get your make-out dates in there now...