Husband and I started collecting the army men that had been placed inside people's artwork or on their frames last week. There were too many for us to manage so the following day, while Geoff and I were GMing, we sent a few artists to do a sweep of the second floor to collect the army men and repatriate them to their tanks. (Barry was out of town at the time but I know he and Jeanan are now officially working with the artist on this so I have neither official info nor input into the issue).
The figures had worked their way into every artist's area on 2 and I suspect visitors see the tank, think it's a cool idea, grab a couple, and then get tired of carrying them around and abandon them.
I mention this because the figures were in many of the sculptures on the floor and I want to promise you all that I personally removed the figures from sculptures so that no volunteer would have to feel responsible if a piece had gotten damaged during removal. I also wouldn't have attempted to extract the little bastards from a piece if it looked like a damage risk - luckily this was never an issue. It's not that I didn't trust the volunteers that day - but I felt like 1 person should be responsible for any work that involved possibly coming into contact with artwork. I dragged Nancy around with me as both witness and helper :-)
I also mention all of this because I know lots of photos were popping up on instagram and flickr of artwork with army men in or on it and I wanted to assure any of you that might happen to see your work so-adorned that, as of last week, we'd removed all of the army men.
If they continue to migrate into your work and this is a problem, drop Barry an email to let him know.
I agree that they aren't causing any harm when they're just sitting in someone's postcard holder or on their table but artists may not want the addition of a politically or culturally loaded image into their exhibit space that they're worked hard to establish a specific tone or theme for so overall it's better if they aren't left anywhere on the floor outside the original artist's space.
