I’m climbing a rusty fence in a vacant lot behind Tin Lizzy’s in Grant Park, ignoring the fact that I can’t afford a tetanus shot. I’m a man on a mission: to adopt my very own Catlanta cat. But it’s to no avail — the cat has already been adopted.
It was the same story the day before as I snooped around the catless street sign at North and Seminole avenues. Earlier that same day, I checked at the Margaret Mitchell House, but the cat was already gone with the wind. Adopting your own Catlanta cat, it turns out, is no easy task.
This genre-bending project started around the time of the January snow storm Atlantans know as “Snowpocalypse,” when an anonymous artist started leaving cutouts and magnets featuring a doodle of his own cat around town.
“I had been drawing the Catlanta cats for the past two or three years, but it wasn’t until the snow storm that I went out and painted a lot of them,” the artist wrote in an e-mail to The Signal. “The streets were so dead that you could paint anywhere you wanted, so I did with some friends. I was spray painting another character up a lot during the ice storm, but the few Catlantas I did got a lot more notice so I figured I should go with it.”
The artist, who cut his teeth as a studio art major at Georgia State, got to work creating magnets and cutouts of his emblem, dropping them around town and putting pictures and clues on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Participants can track down the cats and “adopt” them as their own, or they can take the kitties, do their own drops around town and put the photos online. You might see Catlanta’s cats on street signs, mailboxes, restaurant entrances and even Atlanta Police Department cruisers.
That give and take between Catlanta’s artist and his fans is the crux of the movement.
“I take the advice and criticism from followers of the project very seriously,” he wrote. “I want the city to support Catlanta, so I try my hardest to present pieces that every resident will enjoy, but given the nature of street art and the stigmas that come with it, I know that will never be completely possible. I don’t think Catlanta necessarily needs an audience to survive, but one definitely helps.”
Catlanta’s apparent lack of meaning, however, might be its noblest aspect. The project is guiltlessly cute, clever and fun, a celebration of our city and a way to get people to engage in the Atlanta art scene. The artist has chosen to sacrifice his name and recognition, content to sit back and enjoy watching people use his project to get to know their communities better and have a little fun in a hectic day-to-day existence.
“Ultimately Catlanta will last as long as I’m happy with what I’m putting out in the city,” he wrote. “I’ve been told by several people that Catlanta makes them happy, and I’m glad. That’s my goal, to make the city as a whole a little happier.”
