I Love Furry: Bunker Projects' art exhibit showing the love of the fandom

Inside of Bunker Projects I Love Furry art exhibit -Photo by Kamen

As the city of Pittsburgh readied itself to welcome back Anthrocon, a small art gallery on Penn Avenue had viewers asking, “Why do they love furry?”

From June 5th to July 19th, nonprofit artist residency and gallery Bunker Projects hosted their second monumental furry art exhibition I LOVE FURRY. The gallery was created by Portland-based artist Tommy Bruce and involved asking furries in the fandom to submit photos, artwork, and stories about what they love about the community.

Bruce has been making art about the furry community and furry identity since 2010, and this is the second time his furry artwork has been featured in Bunker projects. Last year, he was featured among 60 other furry artists in an exhibit called “Room Party,” the first ever large-scale group exhibit of contemporary furry art. “Room Party” was featured at Bunker Projects last year from June 6th to July 20th, 2025, also meant to coincide with Anthrocon.

8 different prompts for the love of furry

After being accepted for the residency program, Bunker Projects asked Bruce if he was interested in putting together another group exhibition about the furry community to coincide with Anthrocon. For this time around, Bruce wanted to differentiate it from Room Party by focusing on the feelings of the fandom.

“This show is kind of an opportunity for casual participants in the furry community to show something about what furry means to them,” said the artist, “It’s a really important community to look at. It has so many connections outside of itself. Furry is a direct result of generations of people who grew up through having meaningful experiences with media, like cartoons, comics, and video games. It gives us an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Furry is this middle path where we invent a new version of ourselves that isn’t possible in the real world.”

For this exhibit Bruce had 8 prompts. The first prompt being “Furry Feels Like Home,” where furries shared photos that made them feel at home in the fandom. The second being “Fursona Self-portrait,” a drawing of the artist’s fursona in their typical clothing attire. The third prompt was “Flagging,” where people took a photo of something they wear or display to hint that they’re a furry. The fourth prompt was “First Encounters,” where people describe in text or draw from memory the first furry piece they saw. The fifth was “badge collection,” all custom badges of someone laid on their bed. The sixth was “the family photo”, a photo with your family in your fursuit. The seventh was “The Hug”, which showcased screenshots of VRChat and Second Life avatars hugging their furry friend. The eighth and final prompt was “The Bed Pat," a video submission where fursuiters filmed themselves patting their bed seductively.

“It’s not about that being the best picture you’ve taken, but it’s about a picture of one of the best moments of your life. That’s the kind of feeling that comes across in these pictures that I was really taken by and continue to really enjoy seeing” stated Bruce, as he discussed how I love Furry had over 300 participants in the exhibition and over 700 unique artworks and submissions.

Attendees visiting Anthrocon can take the Bus Line 88 Penn from the convention center to Penn Avenue to see the exhibit and explore the photos, videos, and stories presented at the gallery. Alongside the exhibit lies the Furpile, a sculpture pile of stuffed animals that viewers can pick up and touch. Created by Patrick Totally, the Pittsburgh native furry artist asked several artists to create a stuffed animal for the art piece. Totally was then asked by Bruce to do a joint viewing after the Furpile has been featured around several locations in Pittsburgh. The Furpile found a home at the exhibit for that Saturday, attempting to create an “incidental” and “weird” vibe.

Pile on the plushies! the comfort of the Furpile

The Furpile sitting in the middle of the exhibit in Bunker projects. -Photo by Kamen

“Many of my favorite art experiences are very incidental, weird stuff I find in thrift stores, Bandcamp new arrivals tab records that have cool covers, shitty throwie tags around town, cool looking sticks, stuff like that,” explained Totally, “Furpile, among other things, is an attempt to curate those sort of high entropy art encounters. I wanted to create paths between artists and audiences (as well as artists and other artists) that may not have met otherwise. The best artworks have the quality of an encounter like this.”

Building a relationship with Pittsburgh's art community

The Furpile, alongside I Love Furry, was well received by attendees who visited Bunker Projects, praising the creativity and the expression of the furries presented at the exhibit. The exhibit was also received well by non-furries, including Bunker Projects creative director Jessie Rommelt. After having a good relationship with “Room Party,” Rommelt was interested in displaying another art show curated around furries around the same time as Anthrocon.

A video displaying the bed pat submissions alongside a collage of prompt 3 submissions on the wall. -Photo by Kamen

“We love seeing the folks come out from the furry community and our normal arts people. It’s such a cool niche that has a lot of crossovers with contemporary art,” stated Rommelt, “I love the intensity of how the community is spread and just having an influx of people congregate is very interesting. I’m impressed with the furries.”

As the exhibit comes to an end, many look back fondly on not only I Love Furry and Furpile, but the future of furry art in Pittsburgh. Zephyr Kim, Bruce’s partner, loves the idea of Pittsburgh hosting furry art exhibits, and hopes they will be able to see more of them in the future.

“I am just happy to see the kind of convergence of contemporary art and furry culture continue to blossom and I think Pittsburgh is like the ideal kind of place for that to happen” noted Kim, who has been living and working with Bruce in the exhibit.

The Future of Loving Furry

For Bruce’s future work, he will continue to make art about the fandom and work towards an exhibition on self-portrait work for next Spring among friends and artists. Bruce’s next work will be in Richmond, Virginia, where he’ll be focusing on furry characters, fursonas, and fursuits as figures that can be used to tap into the mythologies of animals.

Bruce and his partner hope to continue seeing more furry art exhibits not only at Bunker Projects, but around the U.S. One where the creative aspects make the viewers say, “I Love Furry.”

Updated July 18: Patrick Totally is based in Pittsburgh, not New York City, and clarify the pile was just for one day.