Catlanta Drops Kittens Like They’re Hot

When I met up with Catlanta at Esther Peachy Lefevre Park in Cabbagetown on a recent Saturday morning, he looked like he’d been on the losing end of well, a cat fight. Faded purple and yellow bruises marbled the left side of his face, and a spider web of scabs snaked alongside his eye like misplaced mascara.

But I quickly came to find out that this street artist ain’t no street brawler. He had face planted off a fixed-gear recently, barely escaping the spill without stitches. Catlanta’s a lover, not a fighter.

“It’s kind of like meditation,” Catlanta says. “Just doing it and making cats.”

That day, we shuffled our way toward Reynoldstown on one of his kitten drops. Every now and then, he’d spot a good hiding place, leave behind a Catlanta kitten magnet, and snap a picture of the prize with his phone to post on Facebook for his fans can later venture out and find it.

“I enjoy making them, but it’s the interactive part that’s the real draw for me,” he says. “This is something I did in a few hours on my living room floor, and people are out looking for it. It’s really grassroots and great that people are actually getting out and looking and walking around their city.”

Although the Catlanta project got started as a spray paint tag he tossed up along Dekalb and Wylie to kill time during January’s Snowpocalypse, he’s abandoned the graffiti and now focuses full-time on the magnetic and cardboard kittens he sprinkles around the city.  That way, he doesn’t have to worry about catching flack from disgruntled neighborhood associations and possibly getting caught by the cops with a can of spray paint in his hand.

“It’s too much stress when I have more fun doing this,” he says.

But even more than that, Catlanta just doesn’t think his tag is up to snuff.

“The tag is cute, but it’s not like it was ever really a good tag,” he says, explaining his move away from graffiti. “It’s takes a long time to learn to spray paint and do a really effective tag. So one, I don’t really like them, and two, I was getting a lot more negative feedback about it. I had tons of people who enjoyed it, but there were also a lot of people giving me shit.”

That’s the funny thing about Catlanta. While his tag has become one of the best-known around town in a short time spawning rip-offs including Ratlanta, Batlanta and Copy Catlanta, the artist is somewhat ambivalent about the cartoonish cat designs saying, “They were just like really stupid cartoon drawings.”

“I never really wanted it to be called Catlanta,” he says. “I wrote it with that, but I wasn’t wanting that to be my tag.”

In fact, he didn’t come up with the word “Catlanta” either, but snagged it from an Atlanta t-shirt he inherited from his grandmother.

“It’s actually a really awesome t-shirt,” he says. “It’s three cats jumping in an arc over the city and the skyline, and it says “CATLANTA” in big block letters.”

Awesome indeed.

And like Catlanta tag, the kitten drops also began purely out of happenstance.

“I was working at a mall job and found a ton of magnets and just started making magnets and giving them away to people. I wasn’t even planning on making it like a hunt, but I posted some pictures [of Catlanta kittens] to the Internet, and the next day this guy who commented on it was like ‘I looked for FIVE HOURS and I couldn’t find it anywhere,’ because I hadn’t put where the locations were,” he recalls. “I thought that was funny and thought I’d see if people would react to it and actually go and look for them.”

Sure enough, people have reacted and then some. Depending on the neighborhood, the collectible kittens disappear in mere minutes, his Facebook fans always ready to pounce at the next chance to go Catlanta-caching, whether in nearby Cabbagetown or Decatur, in more prominent locales like the High Museum and Philips Arena — even in Athens.

“I’ve actually started watching some of [the people Catlanta hunting] sometimes from a distance if I can tell they’re not going to know if I’m there, and it’s pretty interesting,” he says. “I never stay long though. After someone finds it I want to leave because other people will come up and try to find it and look sad when they don’t.”

After he stashes the final kitten on the drop outside Park Grounds, we go inside so he can grab a coffee and upload the pictures to Facebook and let the day’s Catlanta prowl commence.

Not ten minutes later while we’re idly chatting about possibilities of Catlanta merchandise, such pet clothes — “My cat will wear clothes, so he could be a model for it,” he jokes — a woman arrives outside the coffee shop and starts rooting around the entrance for the stray kitten.

Grinning wide and looking around as though awaiting congratulatory applause, she strolls inside Park Grounds cradling not one, but two, Catlanta kittens, circles the seating area and walks right back outside.

Hot on her trail, a guy shows up whom Catlanta recognizes from a previous kitten drop and sees he’s too late.

But then the Catlanta magic happens.

Rather than hoard her litter of kittens and scurry away, the woman hands one to the cat-less fellow, and they both smile — along with Catlanta who’s been watching the exchange go down.

“I’m glad he found one, actually,” he tells me. “A couple weeks ago I was in Decatur, I did a drop, and he didn’t find one. We were sitting at a coffee shop across the street and saw him not find it and we were laughing because within five minutes two people had come to claim it. Then I saw on Twitter later ‘Oh hi people laughing at me because I didn’t find a Catlanta across the street’ — oops!”

And that’s really the point of the whole thing for Catlanta. He doesn’t care about out-tagging other street artists or making some Humane Society statement about being kind to kitties. He’s just getting a kick out of a project that was born out of boredom and randomly evolved into something that’s aroused a novel excitement and afternoon adventures for strangers around Atlanta.

“People have asked me, ‘What’s the message?’ and there’s not a message,” Catlanta says.  “It’s just wanting to get people to interact. People get their own thing out of going to look for it, and it’s that experience that I’m more worried about.”

Photo Credit: Jason Travis