Margaret Morgan Grasselli, curator and head of Old Master drawings at the National Gallery of Art, stands next to a 1578 drawing of a red squirrel by German artist Hans Hoffmann.

"I did that in 2016 and 2017. This year I got to thinking that I should drop a real piece of art, so I brought out my pens and inks and went to work creating two original realistic black squirrel ...

Raleigh will soon remove from Nash Square the downtown art piece, which is crumbling, and allow it to decompose at Marsh Creek greenhouse. It came from a 100-year-old oak.