On a sunny day in Oakland, we sat in a parklet at a Brewery in Ghost Town, drinking beers and chatting about how haunted the neighborhood must be when a small, mousy woman wearing a spandex bodysuit decorated with a ‘laser cats’ print, drifted by our table and began staring at us through large sunglass lenses shaped like alien eyes.

When the four of us stopped talking and returned her gaze, she hovered away silently and vanished down the sidewalk. “Did that just happen or am I just on mushrooms?” I asked the group. Everyone giggled, and my friend replied, “Ya, it’s the third time someone has stopped near our table and stared at us…”

We shrugged it off and continued enjoying our drinks in the sun, but the shrooms had begun taking effect, the table seemed to have an aura to it, and every now and then the tree next to us seemed to be breathing.

“Let’s cheers to our luck today,” my friend announced, “we may actually get up and go look for art!”  We were, in fact there to play ‘the Game of Shrooms‘,  a once-a-year art scavenger hunt that we learned about from our friend ‘Katy’. Artists all over the world make mushroom-themed art through the year and, for one day only, hide it all around their communities, for enthusiasts to go find, for free.

But our mushroom-hunting expert, guide, ‘Katy’, was nowhere to be found, she had abandoned us for some kind of last minute ‘artist-emergency’, (which we all rightly assumed was just an excuse for her to go get laid, instead of helping us find art.)

1900 Broadway, Oakland. Image by sfghostsigns

We’d been having such a nice time chatting and tripping we had forgotten to go look for any mushroom art at all, just then a couple wearing matching felt toadstool hats popped up over our table.  And as soon as they discovered the booth was occupied they shrugged their shoulders, disheartened, and murmured, “Ah, too late,” and shuffled off down the road.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked, “Why are all these mushroom people obsessed with us?  This is freaking me out a bit.”

We then decided it was time to leave, and go hunt for art ourselves.  But as we stood up I discovered I’d been sitting on a piece of mushroom art the whole time.  “Holy guacamole!” I exclaimed, “We already won, I think!?”  The people who had kept visiting our table were following the ‘mushroom pin’ dropped by an artist, giving the location of hidden art, and I’d been sitting on it the whole afternoon.

I left the piece of art there, for some other enthusiasts to find (karma), and later that day we found another piece of mushroom art in a park, so the trick to finding mushrooms, is to first take mushrooms.  It’s very simple.  OR you can use the google map and instructions below:

And by following awesome participating artists who will post clues!

 

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A post shared by John Casey (@johncaseyart)