Urban Mistletoe– A Personal Street Art Project Inspiring Kisses Around the Holidays
I wanted to create a social street art project that would be interactive and make people smile. No client, no brief, no money.
We got creative with the execution, making 3d mistletoes and posters that we plotted throughout San Francisco. We created a website that mapped the mistletoe locations, and displayed the #urbanmistletoe feed.
We got resourceful. We practiced our HTML, learned how to use our friend’s laser cutter, and made our own wheatpaste and snuck out at night to paste our posters on abandoned walls.
Featured on:
SF Weekly
SF Gate
SF Egotist
Broke Ass Stuart
Upout
I wish I could say I was the romantic type that wished for chance encounter with my soulmate under some mistletoe. But in reality, I was a recent Miami Ad School grad, trying to get noticed. I took a chance, and it worked. Not only did most local press sites pick us up, but so did SF residents. People seeked out our mistletoe for the few years in a row we pursued this project; taking photos and tagging us. It was so successful we carried it through 4 years in a row.
We launched a website, which had a map of the mistletoes around the city. Every time a new mistletoe was placed, we’d announce it on IG and update the map.
We had a mix of posters and laser cut 3D mistletoe spread throughout the city during the month of December.
Upgrading to laser cutting
The first couple of years that we ran this, we were using cardboard versions of mistletoe. In a windy and rainy SF December, they simply weren’t holding up. We knew we wanted something sturdier, and waterproof, and thus this design was born. It was a simple 2-part piece, whose pieces stacked ontop of each other, giving it more of a 3D feel. I quickly learned to use a 3D printer, bought some thick acrylic plastic pieces and set out to work. After 8 hours of laser cutting, we had our mistletoes ready to be assembled.
Concluding graf here
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