https://www.vianolavie.org/2014/12/15/the-tale-of-the-podesta-bunny-men-13024/Alex Podesta is known about town as the bunny-man artist.
He’s the one who created the quintet of whimsical men/bunnies, their hands wrapped securely around the stone parapet, who peer down at passers-by from the rooftop of a building on O.C. Haley Boulevard. He also created the pair of rabbit/humans who sprawl on their stomachs in front of the plate glass windows in the lobby of the Saratoga Building on Loyola Avenue. And, more recently, the two who bobbed up and down in the choppy waves of the Grand River in Michigan.
But there’s a lot more to Podesta – and his odd and endearing creatures – than surface humor. For one thing, they all are self-portraits – not only figuratively, but also literally, their visages having been sculpted from a plaster mask of Podesta’s own features. And for another, they offer a glimpse into the mind of an artist who is both humorous and whimsical, serious and studious, and always entertaining.
Three of Alex Podesta's 'bunny men' gaze down on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard from their rooftop perch. (Photo: Linda Friedman)
Three of Alex Podesta’s ‘bunny men’ gaze down on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard from their rooftop perch. (Photo: Linda Friedman)
Born in North Carolina and raised in southeast Virginia, Podesta says he always thought of himself as a Southerner – until he moved to New Orleans. “Now my ties here are so deep now that you’d have to force me to leave,” he says with a smile.
He’s from a long line of artists – an art director grandfather worked with Louis Bunuel, an artist grandmother with Diego Rivera – which taught him mostly, he says, that making a living creatively is a struggle.
But by the time he was 12, it was pretty clear that he couldn’t sidestep the family fate. A clever charcoal portrait of Mark Twain done in elementary school hangs in his present-day studio, and, with his bent for woodworking, “my Christmas gifts were tools, not toys.”
Early on, the love of three-dimensional crafting and artistic rendering steered him into sculpture. It was a different creative talent, however, that brought him to Louisiana.
“I’d been working as a line cook,” he says. “My mother had four sons before she had a girl, so she made sure we all knew how to cook. ”
A few years back, that led to a job at a jazz club in Baton Rouge, where he was hired to run the kitchen. When things didn’t work out, he headed the 70 miles south to New Orleans, and has been here ever since.
“At one time I actually intended to leave, but at the end of 2006, I met Arwen (now his wife), and that was that. She was here for her residency, but we sort of got entrenched here.”
These days, Podesta, with an undergraduate degree and MFA from the University of New Orleans, spends his days in a spacious studio at Art Egg, where shelves and cabinets are filled with the odd and mystical accouterments of a man who makes a living as a carpenter, while earning local renown as a sculptor. Stacks of unfinished wood, planers, joiners and table saws here; bags of Styrofoam, clusters of antlers, sculpted hands perched on a table there.