Elephant Parade

While we were in Copenhagen earlier this month, we stumbled upon the Elephant Parade. We are all about painting art on objects where art does not usually get painted (and I guess elephants come under that umbrella, but we would really rather people painted these statues of elephants rather than real elephants). The girlchild was fascinated by the elephants…

(Woodphant, Ekapong Ruenoon)

and had quite a few pictures of them…

(Elephant for the Polder Kingdom, Sven Hoekstra)

as did I…

(Sanctuary by Sara Stilling)

and we finally fell into the Elephant Parade store, where they had models of many of the elephants,

in all different sizes (and prices),

plus a book and postcards and a poster and all that (the shop on the website has all those things if you have an elephant-happy friend or family member). Most importantly, the store gave us an explanation of WHY there were painted elephants all over Copenhagen. Money from the auction of the elephants and the sales of related items are donated to the Asian Elephant Foundation, which farms the money out to places that need it, including hospitals and zoos and to find land for existing elephants.

It’s been in London and Amsterdam, and after the end of August (because it’s still in Copenhagen for the rest of summer), it moves on to Milan and Singapore. The group gets local artists to paint new elephants in each city and then auctions them off (I wish I had a house big enough to display one of these big boys), donating the money to the foundation. I’m not endorsing the organization; you’ll have to do your homework to decide if this is a good place to plant some of your hard-earned cash…I do like involving artists, although I think I’ve posted in the past about artists donating work for free…it’s a choice we make, and in this case, you could see your name gaining some recognition (of course, here I am, totally lame, not documenting the names of the artists who made these particular elephants…sigh…OK, I went through the website and found SOME of them…my apologies to the others). It’s actually hard to figure out whether the artists received any compensation; there are partners associated with them who may have paid for materials and even some of the artists’ time…it’s just hard to tell.

So there’s the Elephant Parade (well, minus the 250 pictures the girlchild took)…check it out…maybe everyone gets elephants for Christmas this year.