The Art of Birds: Fall Online Lecture Series
September 09, 2024
Avians as Symbols, Stewards, and Storytellers
October 8 - December 4, 2024
Learn from our distinguished group of lecturers about the wonder of birds as inspiration for diverse artistic traditions, cultural storytelling, and effective social change.
Explore new perspectives on bird art through a diverse range of subject areas through the research and work of curators, artists, conservationists, and scholars, in this series of five free programs, which all take place via Zoom. All registrants will receive a link to a program recording after each lecture.
Martin Johnson Heade's The Gems of Brazil: Hummingbird Paintings and the Feather Industry
October 8, 2024, 7:00-8:00 pm
In this talk, Dr. Francesca Soriano reinterprets Martin Johnson Heade’s paintings of hummingbirds in the context of the 19th century feather and bird trade. Considering himself a “monomaniac on hummingbirds,” Heade first came to the subject after a trip to Brazil in 1863, when he embarked on a project titled The Gems of Brazil, a chromolithographic album of the birds in tropical landscapes.
In those works, and in later paintings, Heade underwrote the international feather industry in two ways; by helping popularize conceptions of hummingbirds as decorative embodiments of color and by engaging with a set of marketing practices used in the display of both avian specimens and feather fashion accessories. In Brazil, Heade sketched from specimens, aware of the burgeoning feather trade and back in New York his paintings mimicked techniques used in both millinery and taxidermy, demonstrating overlap between popular modes of display, such as shop windows, natural history dioramas, and art.
About the Speaker
Francesca Soriano is the Associate Curator of American Art at the Farnsworth Art Museum. Francesca graduated from Colby College with a major in Art History and minor in German. She has held positions at the Dallas Museum of Art, Di Donna Galleries in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, as well as fellowships at the Colby College Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Malian Birds are Good to Think: The Power of Avian Imagery in West African Art
October 23, 2024, 7:00-8:00 pm
Among the Bamana and Boso of Mali in West Africa birds are regularly featured in epic poetry, popular proverbs and adages, songs, and masquerade performances. Dr. Mary Jo Arnoldi explores the ways that different bird species not only mark the rhythm of rural life but serve as commentary on ancient and contemporary histories and as powerful symbols of cultural values and human relationships.
About the Speaker
Dr. Mary Jo Arnoldi is the Curator Emerita for African arts and ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She has been doing research on arts and performance in Mali, Senegal and the Gambia for over 40 years. She has published numerous articles and several books on Malian puppetry arts and performance and on African art and material culture. She was lead curator on the permanent exhibition, African Voices and co-curated the exhibitions Mud Masons of Mali and Objects of Wonder all at the Smithsonian. She also co-curated the Mali program, From Timbuktu to Washington: Mali on the National Mall, for the 37th Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2003 which featured the work of over 150 Malian artisans and musicians.
Coloring the Conservation Conversation
November 7, 2024, 7:00-8:00 pm
Dr. J. Drew Lanham will discuss what it means to embrace the full breadth of his African American heritage and his deep kinship to nature and adoration of birds. The convergence of ornithologist, college professor, poet, author and conservation activist blend to bring our awareness of the natural world and our moral responsibility for it forward in new ways. Candid by nature—and because of it—Lanham will examine how conservation must be a rigorous science and evocative art, inviting diversity and race to play active roles in celebrating our natural world.
About the Speaker
J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies. Lanham is also a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.
Journeys through Art, Sound, and Birding
November 20, 2024, 7:00-8:00 pm
As the American Birding Association's Bird of the Year artist, Natasza Fontaine created the cover of the January 2024 issue of Birding magazine—illustrating the Golden-winged Warbler. In this talk, Natasza will share her art and talk about what inspires her as a natural science illustrator. She will also discuss her birding adventures, which include bioacoustics and fieldwork as an avid avian recordist.
About the Speaker
Natasza Fontaine holds a Master of Science in Biology from Florida State University. Prior to obtaining her Master's, Natasza worked at the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. Natasza worked as an avian field biologist in the Southeast and Southwest and currently she is a shorebird/seabird biologist for Audubon Florida, based in the Florida Panhandle. She is interested in understanding habitat associations for migratory species, bioacoustics, and bioacoustics monitoring. Additionally, she is a visiting biology professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her course, Sound and Color, focuses on exploring the biodiversity of birds through a creative lens.
Ya’at’eeh: “Everything is Good” (Navajo Greeting)
December 4, 2024, 7:00-8:00 pm
Known for his intricate woodblock prints that draw on a variety of Native and pop cultural elements, Marwin Begaye will discuss how his work examines the issues of cultural identity through the intersection of American Indian and popular cultures. He will talk about his ongoing research which investigates the technical processes related to printmaking and construction of mixed-media art. He often negotiates the cultivation of his own skills and opening doors for his students.
About the Speaker
An internationally exhibited artist, Marwin Begaye, Navajo, is currently living in Norman, OK, where he is an associate professor of studio art at the University of Oklahoma, School of Visual Arts. His ongoing research investigates the technical processes related to printmaking and construction of mixed-media art. He received numerous awards as an Artist in Resident and through juried exhibitions. His work has been featured in exhibitions in New Zealand, England, Argentina, Paraguay, Italy, Siberia and Estonia. He is in private, museum collections and the United States Library of Congress, Prints and Photograph Division.
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