In late 2005 I hatched the idea of Project Egg, by which the act of hiding Easter eggs would be turned into a fine art installation. Originally conceived as a strictly local project for Easter 2006, it soon got more and more grandiose until it included several American cities, and ended up with eggs being distributed throughout April 2006, not just Easter weekend. From the original press release: "JEFFREY SCOTT HOLLAND, American painter, has a special Spring surprise popping up where you least expect it: As part of an enormous art installation, at least 10,000 plastic easter eggs will be distributed across several U.S. cities, including Chicago, Cincinnati, Nashville, St.Louis, Atlanta, and Holland's hometown of Louisville. These green-colored eggs will contain a variety of objets d'art by Holland, including tiny sketches, trinkets, mysterious pieces of microsculpture, and some will even contain examples of his famous postage-stamp sized miniature paintings. Some special "prize eggs" will contain even more elaborate and valuable items. All eggs will contain a serial number with which the finder of the egg can go to jeffreyscottholland.com and register it, listing where they found it and what was in it. The Easter season makes perfect timing for a scavenger hunt of such monumental proportions, but eggs have always been a recurring motif in Holland's art. Holland considers not only the content of the eggs themselves to be the art, it's also in part contained in the entire act of the dispersement and the subsequent finding of them. "The element of chance, of mystery, of discovery, these are all factors of the egg-hunt concept we're initiated into as children, and which resonate throughout our lives as adults", he says. "I've always been intrigued by the process of the scavenger hunt; there's still a little hunter-gatherer in all of us."

Although the egg hunt begins in April, it is open-ended since it is likely that many eggs will take months or even years to be discovered. Some of them may never be. The eggs will be hidden in all manner of places ranging from the obvious to the absurd." Out of almost ten thousand plastic eggs hidden out there in the world, only 57 were reported back to me. That's actually not a disappointing ratio to me, if you consider how the odds are against someone not only finding the egg, but then bothering to pick it up and open it, and then bothering to go to a website and register it just because a piece of dirty cardboard inside the egg told them to. By and large, the press didn't get it. Several arts-editors of newspapers that should know better asked "But what gallery is it in?". When I patiently re-explained that it's an outdoor installation and not in any gallery, they were even more confused than before. I never thought an Easter egg hunt would be such an avant-garde concept to wrap one's head around. Radio and television understood it better than print media, and I credit most of the project's success to the appearances made on local talk radio and coverage from local TV stations in the target cities. One TV news show actually went as far as to give out my phone number from the press release, resulting in a flood of people actually calling me long distance to ask for egg-hunting hints. (Of course, no hints were given.) Update! Never knowing when to quit while I'm ahead, I'll be kicking it up a notch in April 2007, with Project Egg Phase Two. This time, the egg distribution will be spread out nationwide, hopefully with eggs reaching most of the fifty states of the USA. (However, due to the recent paranoia-fest in Boston over Cartoon Network's public installations of Aqua Teen Hunger Force lightboxes, I will be avoiding that city like the proverbial plague.)