Tarantula

A red-legged tarantula said to span 16 feet climbs a downtown parking garage in Morgan Hill, California, and its body is built from headlights. The sculpture is on the Fourth Street side of the garage between Third and Fourth Streets; the City of Morgan Hill's public art inventory places it on the south side of the structure. It is the work of Napa artist Gordon Huether. His studio says it celebrates the annual October migration of tarantulas to Morgan Hill, marked each year by a Tarantula Festival at Henry Coe State Park, and describes it as a playful, three-dimensional arachnid crawling up the façade.

A crane lifted the sculpture onto the garage's three-storey wall in March 2016, according to the Morgan Hill Times, which reported that the headlights forming the body would light up at night. The Times gives limbs of waterjet-cut aluminium; Huether's studio lists eight powder-coated steel legs and hundreds of vintage automobile headlights; a 2016 trade-magazine feature describes the legs as powder-coated waterjet-cut aluminium, about 12 feet across. The studio and the city inventory both date the work 2015, the year the city council approved it, although the installation came the following spring.