Today is an Auspicious Day

Today is an Auspicious Day is a faceted Corten weathering-steel sculpture of a coyote, ~12 ft, seated, head raised mid-howl, being built by Glass House Arts for the Escondido Creek Trail for a 2027 install.

Artist Statement

When one of us sees a coyote, we tell the other: today is an auspicious day.

It’s a small ritual, and we’re not the only ones who have it. A coyote sighting is a piece of luck. You’re driving, or walking the dog, and one crosses at an hour you thought was yours alone, and the day shifts a little.

The coyote is the one who stayed. When this valley got surveyed, paved, and channelized, when the creek became a concrete flood control channel, most of the wild things left or were pushed out. The coyote adapted. It learned the culverts and the trail edges, how to use the creek trail to navigate from Daley Ranch to Elfin Forest. It still works the creek at dusk. The coyote belongs here.

We want to build that animal at a scale that makes you stop. Twelve feet tall, seated, head raised mid-howl. Then anyone walking the trail gets the sighting, on an ordinary Tuesday, whenever they want it.

The coyote is fabricated in corten, a weathering steel that rusts on purpose. The surface oxidizes into a tight, stable skin that protects the steel beneath, so the thing gets tougher as it ages instead of failing. An animal that persists, made of a metal that persists.

This would be the fourth native animal we’ve built in this faceted style, following a rabbit now on permanent display at a gallery here in Escondido, a fish that debuted at the Bombay Beach Biannale, and a hummingbird poised over the native wildflower it feeds from. Making an organic shape from flat planes of metal does something we love. From across the trail it reads instantly as a coyote, showing its clean silhouette against the sky. Up close it dissolves into geometry, into the individual plates and seams and the evidence of how it was made.

We make our work in a home studio a few miles from this trail, on a creek we walk and bike ourselves. We think a city’s public art should come from its own hands when it can. This one would.

The wild didn’t leave. It’s still here, at the edges, howling at dusk. And now, at one bend in the trail, reliably.