Who's behind the mysterious public art over Bay Pines Boulevard?

SEMINOLE

The first calls came into the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office Monday morning. Something weird was on the pedestrian bridge near the Tom Stuart Causeway.

A deputy went out and found four life-sized cardboard cutouts lined up, resembling the classic Evolution of Man series. Only in this version, a fourth figure stood upright, pointing a handgun at the others.

The deputy took the cutouts down and threw them away.

If the mystery guerrilla artist was trying to make a public statement, this one was short-lived.

Or was it?

Thanks to the Internet, and with a little help from the media, more than just the rush-hour commuters were exposed to the artist's message, whatever it was. When local news outlets posted photos of the cutouts, commenters flooded the websites with their own interpretation of the artwork.

"We spent several million years evolving only to turn around and kill each other," one commenter posted on the St. Petersburg Times' site, tampabay.com. "The gun is symbolic, the weapon could be any."

The world may never know what these cardboard cutouts were trying to tell us. And that may be part of the intrigue, and part of their value, said Margaret Miller, director of the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum.

"There's no artist to give you a testimonial, so it creates this ongoing debate and conversation," she said. "It's interactive."

But because the actual exhibit is in the garbage, the dialogue will be only on the Internet.

"It's functioning in another realm now," Miller said. "Now it has a new life and is being seen by far more people than those who drove under the bridge."

Miller, who has been involved in several public art projects through USF, thinks this is a good thing. Controversial guerrilla art is common in New York City, Los Angeles and Seattle. In her opinion, "we've had very few of these gestures in Tampa, St. Pete and Clearwater."

We have had some, though.

In 2008, a Tampa group called artLOUD plastered murals along two blocks of a downtown street in a quick overnight attack. There was no public reaction, and even police didn't seem to care until some of the artwork was reported stolen.

The same year, a mystery artist removed streetside poster ads featuring attractive female models from a construction site at Six Ten Franklin condominiums in downtown Tampa. He replaced them with ads of the same logo and design, but they depicted a man sweating and drooling ink. The condo developer quickly took them down.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a local guerrilla artist named Mark Michaels made headlines for his art banners and sidewalk pranks. In 1999, he placed in front of the St. Petersburg Times' downtown office a suspicious-looking metal drum decorated with faces of newspaper columnists, the nuclear symbol and ominous warnings such as "The End."

Police, fire trucks and bomb experts descended on the drum, which contained only cement.

Michaels now owns a tree-cutting business and seems to lie low. When reached by phone Tuesday evening, Michaels said he wasn't behind the stunt and hasn't done that kind of art in years.

But someone was responsible for cutting out the cardboard pieces, climbing the spiral stairs and affixing them to the pedestrian bridge.

"There was nothing written on them, no names attached," said Pinellas County sheriff's spokesman Sgt. Tom Nestor. "No sayings, no explanation."

You can't just post whatever you want on a public right of way, he said.

So the deputy took the artwork down and disposed of it, and the Sheriff's Office went about its business. Unless someone called in with a name, deputies weren't planning to waste time investigating.

And even if deputies identify the artist, Nestor wasn't sure what the charge would be.

"They'd probably just call the person and ask, 'What was this all about?' "

Emily Nipps can be reached at nipps@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8452.