Artists’ Morgan Hill Mushrooms Popping Up Downtown
I first wrote about the Morgan Hill Art Mushroom project six months ago. They crossed our radar again during the Morgan Hill Street Fair back in August when I grabbed the pictures you see in this post. Well, over the last week or two the mushrooms have found their new homes along Monterey in downtown Morgan Hill. Our favorite (the Wizard of Oz mushroom pictured at left) is installed in front of The Annex. There are at least a half-dozen others installed along that mile long stretch of Monterey as well, including some very intriguing designs. With the coming of the cold I haven’t taken a stroll downtown lately to get more pics or even a closer look at these magic mushrooms, but I hope to do so soon.
Having lived in downtown San Jose when they did a similar art project (with sharks to represent the San Jose Sharks hockey team) I did notice one major difference with Morgan Hill’s implementation of this concept though. Here in Morgan Hill every art mushroom I’ve seen is in front of a locally owned small business. Not a single corporation or national chain has a mushroom on display. In San Jose the exact opposite was true – Earthlink, Adobe and other national names scooped up all the sharks, once again squeezing out the people in favor of the corporations.
This is very much one of the things I love about living in a small town.
