The Elusive Chicken Tender Man is hiding in the woods waiting to freak out or charm you

One thing I love about Pittsburgh is that, after 20-plus years living here, the city still manages to surprise me. In the case of the Elusive Chicken Tender Man, however, I should amend that to surprise/horrify me. The life-sized sculpture — located at 801 Rothpletz St. on the periphery of the North Side’s Riverview Park — has perplexed outsider art enthusiasts for years. Who made it? Why? And who is changing its little outfits? In a three-year-old Reddit thread , one user claims his neighbor (who remains nameless) inherited the “art piece,” and that said neighbor’s girlfriend dresses it in seasonal outfits. The Chicken Tender Man sculpture in Woods Run Credit: CP Photo: Mars Johnson The sum of Chicken Tender Man’s parts equals a truly wretched creature, a Frankenstein’s monster made from discarded building materials instead of corpses. Spray foam insulation mimics a rough, uncannily breading-like texture. Awkwardly stapled fabric bits create a “face,” its wonky X-eyes and rictus grin resembling a more deranged Deadmau5 mask. Chicken Tender Man’s odd physique recalls McDonald’s Grimace, if someone covered Grimace in egg wash and panko crumbs and deep-fried them (yes, I think Grimace is nonbinary). As a rural Pa. native, I’ve crossed plenty of outsider art like Chicken Tender Man. Growing up, my school bus passed a house with a herd of folky deer sculptures in the yard, all made of concrete, all with bizarre, unnaturally narrow faces that barely resembled their inspiration. The Chicken Tender Man sculpture on Rothpletz Street These kinds of DIY works reflect the inherent human need to create, even among those who would scoff or take offense at being called an artist. In some ways, that makes them more compelling than anything you would see in a gallery: the result of truly unpretentious creative expression where someone with no fine arts background looked around their garage one day and thought, “Ya know, I bet I could ma