And finally… Cookie monster mural mysteriously commissioned on commercial property
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The owner of a commercial building in Illinois was none too pleased to show up there shortly after Thanksgiving to find a giant Cookie Monster mural on the side of the place, stretching about 30 feet long and 16 feet high.
Image courtesy of Joshua Hawkins
Having found out who had painted the mural at 1301 NE Adams in Peoria, Nate Comte called up local artist Joshua Hawkins to ask him who given permission for the project.
It turns out that the artist was approached a month earlier by a man who identified himself as Nate Comte and offered to pay him to paint a mural at number 1301.
“He said he remembered me from an art show a year or two ago, that that’s where I first met him,” Hawkins told Artnet News. “I didn’t think much of it. He said we had talked about getting a mural done on a building of his downtown.”
The fake Comte sent Hawkins an image of the mural he wanted painted.
Cookie Monster holding aloft the beloved eponymous baked good, which shoots forth a rainbow beam, alluding to Soviet-style propaganda art. Below, the text reads, “мир, земля, печенье” (“Peace, Land, and Cookies” in Russian).
“It was a bit of a weird image, but some of my paintings are kind of weird so maybe that’s how I captured his eye,” Hawkins said.
The real Comte told the Peoria Journal-Star: “It wasn’t a mural. It was graffiti.”
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