In the same way that the Eastside Culture Crawl has evolved over the last 20 years, so has the symbol that represents it.

According to Richard Tetrault, artist and founding member of the annual visual-arts festival, the crow wasn’t the first to be considered.

“We went for another critter, a grasshopper, at the beginning. I think we even talked about a cockroach,” he says. “We were just kind of being irreverent. It went with the whole ‘marginalized East Siders’ thing.”

The reason for deciding on the crow had more to do with the idea of strength in numbers.

“There’s such a migration of crows that come into this area,” says glassblower and long-time Crawl participant Heather Dahl. “If you have a studio on the East Side, you’ve definitely seen them.”

Sculptor Roy Mackey created the original steel cutout that eventually became the symbol we see now. On the heels of the 10-year anniversary in 2006, the crow was adopted as the Crawl’s official symbol.