Curated by Norah Lovell
“These days, I prefer to get my news from birds…” Elizabeth Gross
The Ancient Greeks and Romans practiced augury by interpreting omens through the observation of bird behavior, and during this global pandemic, we are also looking to birds for signs and new meanings at this perplexing crossroad. In Birding in America: An Augury artists Lee Deigaard, Nikita Gale, Norah Lovell and poet Elizabeth Gross share new works informed by bird watching during the pandemic.
The originating impulse behind Birding in America: An Augury centers the nonhuman perspectives of birds on our human world brought to a sudden halt and turned upside down. Although the upheaval of the past year began with our attention to being “grounded” and how that left us looking at the sky, the killing of George Floyd in May and the Black Lives Matter uprisings that followed have also informed our shifting perspectives on the status quo.
My images for Birding in America: An Augury feature the images of black birders alongside endangered and extinct birds, bringing the questions of racism and ecology together into the double view of the binocular framing. The intersection of racism and birdwatching also comes through in other aspects of the exhibit as Lee Deigaard focuses on connections between watching and surveillance, themes that also come up in Elizabeth Gross’s poems. “YouTube Parrot Augury”, the final poem in Gross’s series and developed collaboratively from Deigaard’s video research, takes its source text from the voices of parrots on the internet, who overwhelmingly, horrifyingly, discuss the police.
Birding in America: An Augury also showcases “White Peacock” by L.A. based artist Nikita Gale, which dramatizes an unexpected urban encounter with a white peacock with ambient music that elevates the peacock to a kind of revelation appearing, as Gale noted, “exactly as Toni Morrison described him.”
The artists also engage in direct collaboration through an interactive set of augury cards and exhibition goers are invited to play along by adding their own signs and meanings to an open-ended deck.
The exhibition points to larger questions raised by birdwatching in the pandemic regarding access to natural spaces and ways that an historically white conservation movement dictates who in the words of author and wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham, ”beyond the largely homogenous choir of restoration ecologists and wistful wishers for the good old days of yore — gets to say what wild nature is.”
The first venue for this exhibition was at Staple Goods Gallery in New Orleans, April 2021. The collaborating artists (Lovell, Deigaard and Gross) have since formed a collective and hope to travel the exhibition and engage with additional collaborators and communities.