This is more philosophical than legal, and I might be ruled in the wrong if I get hit with a takedown, but whatever, I'll risk it while I make my little treatise on street art and soverignty.
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The thing is, pasteups and slaps are illegal, but they are a part of the urban landscape. Who do they belong to, and who gets to iterate on them? I would argue that once they are public, they belong to all of us.
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Who do the Hollywood Hills belong to? The lions were here first, and we slapped up roads and houses and cut up the landscape so that they can't use them the way they had for thousands of years. We call it Property Rights. Those who fight against changes, particularly changes that increase access like Public Transit, or maybe even wildlife corridors, or laws that protect animals' free movement, we derisively call them NIMBYs— not in my backyard. But whose backyard is that, really?
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P-22 roamed those highways and set up house in Griffith Park for ten years. Photographer Steve Winter carefully set a camera to caputre the shot that made him famous. He became a darling of the Los Angeles conservation movement, and captured the public's attention in a way that helped ease the creation of the Wallis Annenburg Wildlife Crossing in Calabasas. We made the space for mountain lions like our boy to take back their ranges.
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Meanwhile, downtown, three highrise buildings meant for luxury condos stalled out in development and stood abandoned for years. Street artists (or taggers, if you want to be a jerk about it) broke in an painted over the balconies on every floor, and because the development is effectively abandoned, whoever owns the property on paper has not come to cover or clean it. So there they stand, range reclaimed by people who would never be able to afford what was going up there.
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I don't separate people from wildlife. We are the same. We have a different job in the landscape, and we forgot it for a long time. We're stewards of all of this, because we have the ability to destroy it, we are obliged to care for it. We are P-22's posse, and every other animal we share this space with.

So, apologies to Shepard Fairey, but not too many. I couldn't get the idea of this shirt design out of my head over the last several years, especially not after our celebrity mountain lion of Los Angeles came to the end of his life, and I've been chasing his likeness for a while. I finally got to a place with both of these pieces where I'm feeling pretty satisfied about it.
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Part of my profit from these pieces will go toward an annual donation to Save LA Cougars.

—Veronica

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