Mice on Main – Greenville, South Carolina
Mice on Main sculpture in Greenville. Credit: Greenville Roots.
Mice started as a public art project thought up by Jim Ryan, a senior at Christ Church Episcopal School in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2000. Artist Zan Wells made a clay sculpture of each mouse. Then they were cast in bronze and installed throughout the downtown — creating a scavenger hunt. A children’s book was published in 2008 by Linda Kelly, also of Greenville, providing a back story for the mice.
The whole project cost less than $2,000 though has proven an invaluable addition to the town. As Peter Kageyama writes in Love Where You Live (2014): “The moment of discovering one of Grenville’s bronze mice, and then laughing at the charm of the idea, is priceless. Generating fun, surprise and delight do not have to cost a lot of money, but they do require us to think of those emotions as legitimate and expected goals of the urban revitalization projects we undertake.”