SoBo’s Mysterious ‘Art Frogs’ Explained

(This article originally appeared in the December 2024 issue of the South Baltimore Peninsula Post.)

The Peninsula Post first received reports of the colorful, diminutive amphibians scattered around SoBo this spring. At first, they were sighted on top of utility boxes and abandoned newspaper boxes – solitary, stationary, and silent – held in place with adhesive putty. Then, they began to appear bolted to signposts at eye level.

Each frog sculpture, about 2.5” tall, sat clutching a sphere on a 2.5”-wide base emblazoned with the same phrase: GAME OF FROGS. Clearly, the challenge to the SoBo finder was to engage with these frogs and decipher the rules of their game. The Peninsula Post responded by launching an investigation that unearthed their secret and verified their peninsular origins.

This reporter contacted the anonymous art-frog creator through the game’s Instagram page (@gameoffrogs) and was granted an interview and a tour of the secret “frog factory” in a residential area of southwest SoBo. We agreed to respect the anonymity of the creator, who will be referred to as Jeremiah in this article.

The frogs began as “a pandemic project that cheerfully got out of hand,” Jeremiah recalled as we talked in his rowhouse living room in November. Then living in the Woodley Park neighborhood of Washington, D.C., he turned a long-time hobby of casting household items out of concrete into a quirky art project in the spirit of the painted “kindness” rocks popular during the pandemic. At first, he sculpted tiles with a figure on them – an alien or the hand-clasped face from Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream” – and placed them around his neighborhood for people to find and enjoy as random acts of art.

Toward the end of 2022, Jeremiah decided it was time for a change. “I was having fun with the project but thought it could have a little more upbeat feeling. I wondered if I could make a frog.” He molded one out of clay and began casting dozens of them that he painted by hand. In January 2023, over 150 frogs were unleashed on Washington, supported by an Instagram account encouraging people to post photos of their finds and tag them with #gameoffrogs.

The frogs sparked a joyful response, Jeremiah recalled, with many finders pleasantly perplexed about the nature of the game, which, he notes, has no connection to the Game of Thrones. “It literally is just a game with frogs. There are no rules. Just find them and enjoy.”

In the spring of 2023, Jeremiah and his wife moved to the SoBo peninsula and brought the frog factory with them. The Charm City frog invasion began in earnest soon after, as about 200 SoBo-born amphibians were deployed at Artscape that September.

On the day of my tour of the factory in November, 100 multicolored frogs sat in formation on a workbench set up on Jeremiah’s rowhouse parking pad, awaiting their deployment to the Jones Falls Family Fun Fest at the Baltimore Streetcar Museum on Falls Road, where they would become a scavenger hunt for visiting children.

The parking pad and adjoining sally port serve as the frog factory floor and warehouse. Here Jeremiah mixes concrete (readily available from Federal Hill Ace Hardware) and fills a dozen silicon molds he has made from one original clay figure. Once the concrete has hardened and the dust settled, the frogs are brought inside for painting.

Jeremiah estimates he has created at least 700 of the little frogs so far, with about 150 scattered across the SoBo peninsula. He stealthily sets them free on doorsteps, in planters that catch his eye, and public spaces. “If I adhere them to something, I only stick them to things that are public and nonutilitarian. They pop off fairly easily. If someone wishes to take them and keep them, that’s fine.”

A dozen giant, intricately painted frogs, each about 10” tall, stand along the edge of the parking pad looking down on their smaller siblings from atop stacks of hexagonal pavers. Jeremiah explains that he crafted these mega-frogs for Artscape in 2024, where they were placed outside the Charles Theater along with the pavers to resemble some sort of demented game board, leaving passersby puzzling over what exactly the game was.

The giant frogs will winter in the sally port, Jeremiah said, where they stand ready for a new mission (whenever their creator comes up with one). In the meantime, Jeremiah expects the smaller frogs to continue to propagate around the area in 2025. They may even jump the pond and appear in Europe, where he has sent molds to two Game of Frogs fans. So, if you hear about an art-frog outbreak in Great Britain or Poland next year, remember that you heard about it here first. – Steve Cole