Polar bears have been popping up all over Manhattan.
Actually, they’re plastic bags fashioned into the animals by Brooklyn artist Joshua Allen Harris, who designed them to inflate over street-level subway vents as trains rush by below.
Proving one man’s trash is another’s treasure, Harris said he was inspired when he saw discarded construction tape billowing from a subway vent on West 21st Street.
The 31-year-old Williamsburg artist then spent three months perfecting the lifelike polar bears using recycled white shopping bags.
They have created widespread enthusiasm among pedestrians – and video posted on an Internet arts site of the bears swaying to the gusts of passing trains has delighted thousands of Web viewers.
“We all walk with our heads down in New York thinking that maybe that could be the person who rips my head off,” said Harris, a fine-arts student at the School of Visual Arts in Midtown.
“When I set them up, the surprise brightens people up. They say, ‘I can’t have a bad day now. I have seen that.’ ”
Trish Tillman, 33, a grad student from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, noticed Harris’ bears and sent photographs to the Wooster Collective art Web site, sparking a frenzy of interest.
“It is the most inventive thing I have seen in a long time,” she said. “It is amazing how [a bag] comes to life when the air moves through it.”