Those who attended Treefort this year may have noticed one concert-goer that stood out from the rest. Among the performers, vendors and music enthusiasts, Mortimer Maximus, a giant woolly mammoth puppet, also traipsed the grounds of Julia Davis Park.
Morty is the brainchild of the Colossal Collective, a Boise-based group that aims to spread joy via interactive art — namely, enormous puppets. The Colossal Collective has built over a dozen larger-than-life creatures over the past 14 years, which it brings to community events in Boise and beyond.
DIY art since 2012
The Colossal Collective traces its origins back to 2012, when founding member Michelle Estrada (BA, visual art and philosophy, 2017) met Sam Johnson (Career-Track MBA, 2016) at an art event. Johnson was in the process of building a squid puppet.
“I didn’t know who this person was,” Estrada said. “I just saw a giant squid being put together, and me being me, I questioned it. I was like, ‘I don’t know. I think you’re doing it wrong.’”
At the time, Johnson was a professional bicycle racer. “That occupation doesn’t pay terribly well,” Johnson said, “but I had a bunch of extra time, because you can’t ride your bike that many hours per week. … So I did a lot of drawing and painting and sculpture art.”
Estrada helped Johnson bring the squid to life. They lovingly called it “trash squid,” because it was composed of a Gatorade bottle, hula hoops and pool noodles.
The next year, Estrada and Johnson, along with a small group that Johnson assembled, built a dinosaur puppet together. Estrada also invited Chris Owen, a performance artist and Estrada’s now husband, to join the group.
The collective of artists continued to build puppets year after year. They would start from scratch each time, often making an entire new Instagram presence for each creature.
Art means business
It wasn’t until 2016 when the Colossal Collective was formally named and became a perennial business entity.
The Colossal Collective is nobody’s full-time job (Johnson is a high school teacher, and Estrada and Owen are staff members at Boise State), but the group charges to bring creations to events, and members earn a bit of cash for their labor. The group applies for grants, which help pay for materials. Johnson credits Boise State’s Career-Track MBA program for helping him better organize the collective, and he believes all artists could benefit from dipping their toes into business.
“Anybody who’s going into arts, I’m like, great, keep doing your art — and take an accounting class, take a business law class, take a quick little strategy class,” Johnson said. “It’ll help shape your expectations, and then also give you some tools that a lot don’t have.”
An ethos of community
Though money is essential to creating and sharing larger-than-life pieces, the Colossal Collective prioritizes community over profit. Anyone is welcome to lend their skills to the group.
“A lot of the Colossal Collective is made up of various parts of the community that you wouldn’t normally see together,” Estrada said. “We’ve got electrical engineers, we’ve got artists, we have first responders. We have so many teachers, pre-K up to higher ed.”
The group also wants the public to interact with their creations.
“You can move the body,” Estrada said. “You can turn on and off lights. You can push that button, you can pull this tail.”
According to Estrada, the best way is to get involved with the Collective and to find them in the wild, and ask how you can help.
“We don’t spend a whole lot of time anymore advertising build times online, or through various social media,” Estrada said. “It’s quite time-consuming, and we are a very dynamic group that makes last-minute changes for meeting times, locations and places.”
From trash squid to national treasure
The group has grown immensely since its humble beginnings almost 15 years ago. Puppets attend a range of community events in the Treasure Valley and beyond. These have included First Thursdays in downtown Boise, Bug Day at the Idaho Botanical Garden, and ILLUMINATE, a free light technology festival in Salt Lake City.
“Over the last six years, we’ve been lucky to have a lot of event coordinators, companies and organizations approach us,” Chris Owen said. “One of the design challenges that we always encountered for many years was that everything had to be very modular and break down so that it could be transported in a single vehicle. We just purchased, as of this year, our first trailer.”
Because it’s such a massive undertaking, the Colossal Collective typically only creates one puppet per year. But last year, they created three interactive puppets — four, if you count the one they started in 2025 and completed in 2026.
Part of the reason for this unprecedented pace? Meow Wolf, a popular immersive art exhibit, approached the Colossal Collective to create two giant slug creatures for its “Phenomenomaly” events in Las Vegas and Denver.
“And they needed them kind of quickly,” Johnson said. “We were just working feverishly to get them done.”
What’s next for the Colossal Collective?
Where’s the collective off to next? Boise State’s campus – where they’ll bring their dragonfly puppets, as well as Baroness Bitsy, the pink praying mantis, to Spring Fling Saturday, April 18, 2026.
Whether they’re roaming the streets of Boise or garnering national acclaim, the puppets are sure to make an impact.
“Our world is different than it used to be,” Johnson said. “Our media environment is saturated. Our attention spans are kind of fractured. So it’s nice to have some art that — for a split second, at least — punches through the noise. You can’t avoid reacting when a giant praying mantis is lumbering towards you.”