A Fox Stalks Grand Avenue

El Segundo’s newest mural was created by artist Bunnie Reiss and brings color and beauty to the 200 block of West Grand Avenue.

By Maureen Kingsley

A brand-new mural by artist Bunnie Reiss now adorns and enlivens a 70-foot-wide expanse of concrete at 219 W. Grand Avenue in El Segundo, the home of small business Sweet Spot Media. The artwork features an orange fox on the move against a lavender background that suggests dusk or dawn, the animal’s eyes fixed at a point in the distance facing north, green earth beneath its feet. Created in Bunnie’s signature folk-art style, the mural is full of pleasing geometric shapes and patterns evocative of quilts and other textile-based artworks.

“I learned from my research about this area, and through conversations with others, that during the height of the novel-coronavirus pandemic in 2020, red foxes were spotted in all sorts of places in the South Bay: roaming the streets and even seen on the beaches,” Bunnie says of her choice of mural subject. “Pack animals seemed to come back to public spaces while we humans took a break, stopped driving so much, stopped making noise,” she continues.

Her color palette for this mural, Bunnie explains, is a reflection of her view of foxes as “interesting” and “feminine.” She adds that while so much about El Segundo is industrial and high-tech, the natural elements of the city were something she wanted to highlight.

Bunnie single-handedly painted the entire mural in the week leading up to El Segundo ArtWalk, which was held on Saturday, August 28 and included a ribbon-cutting for Bunnie’s work. She says she took care to really use the architecture of the building in her design, including windows and sections of roof that reach different heights. As with all of her murals, she adds, the process is “very mathematical at the beginning, then gets more fun” as she completes the large, anchoring shapes in the work and moves on to the smaller details.

View El Segundo’s newest mural at 219 W. Grand Avenue, west of Main Street.

Photos by Mark Knight, Five-to-Nine Photography. Top: The mural spans 70 feet and makes impressive use of wall space. Middle: The mural’s ribbon-cutting took place on August 28, 2021, at ArtWalk. Bottom: Staff of El Segundo Media pose with the mural.

This story appears in the October 2021 issue of The El Segundo Scene.