His first true Roadside-scale work was his 1976 “Map of the USA,” a bicentennial Land Art project the size of a football field that was inspired, he told us, by similar-style maps on placemats in truck stops.
“There was this really high scaffolding down at the tip of ‘Texas.’ You’d climb up this little ladder and get the perspective,” said Bob. “It was the 1970s. Everything was looser back then.”
Properly inspired, Bob has since created dozens of Roadside-scale artworks, from Lone Star Iguana (1978) to Junk Yard Dog (2006), all of them designed to not only catch your eye but to slap you in the face as you drive by. Bob’s work is so unavoidable that he’s been taken to court by three different municipalities to have it removed, and Bob won all three times with the argument that he was an artist and that what he had created was art, even if to the untrained eye it was just, say, a ten-foot-tall frog wearing a coconut-shell bra.
