Grants Pass has, for the last twenty years, been quietly building a downtown public art collection of painted black-bear statues. Roughly 130 of them stand on sidewalks around the city, each sponsored by a local business and painted by a different artist. They are slightly larger than life-size and impossible to miss once you start looking.
Each winter the bears are removed from the streets to protect them from frost damage and stored together in a single downtown building. Locals refer to it as the Bear Hotel, and the bears are said to be hibernating. If you visit in winter the building's windows are sometimes open enough that you can glimpse the ranked statues inside.