A guerilla art installation that has been on display for nearly eight months in the Arts District has been taken down. An anonymous Downtown source says the slick installation was removed by someone in the area because nobody knew what it was or what it meant.

What's wrong with this picture? The city's Sculpture Park under construction is currently missing ... sculpture. Photo by: Justin M. Bowen

The Styrofoam installation on Main Street, just north of Charleston Boulevard, spelled out the words, “cage free arts” on a concrete structure, covering the original letters installed by the city that spelled “Arts District.” The structure was placed there to a accompany a fenced-in sculpture park built in 2009.

Those involved in the project said that “cage free” was a response to the idea of fencing in an Arts District sculpture park (which, incidentally, still has no sculpture).

“We were really just trying to do a public art project with some deeper meaning,” says a person involved with “cage free.” “Having a fenced-in area detracts from the idea of an Arts District.”

The park, formally known as the Boulder Park Sculpture Plaza, sits behind the Arts Factory at Charleston Boulevard and Main Street. Nearly $700,000 of Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act funds used to design and construct the plaza, meant to house three-dozen, 18-foot high, lighted towers created by artist Yaacov Agam. The city approved $30,000 to have the artist create a scale model, but there is no more money to fund construction of the sculpture. The park currently sits empty and unused.

The six people involved, who wish to remain anonymous, came up with the idea for “cage free” in the spring and expected the work to be short lived. They used a hot wire cutter to create the Styrofoam blocks and painted them, then installed the letters in the middle of the night. The staggering of the letters in three rows made it difficult to read and those who had been looking at it for months were still unable to figure it out.

“We didn’t even put a hard coat on it because we thought it would only be up for about a week,” says one of the people who worked on the project, which was installed April 1. “We figured that it was going to be up for a week at the most.”