Following installations in Washington, DC, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and Wyoming,The Lost Bird Project will exhibit at Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art on the museum grounds. The bronze memorials are in response to extinct birds from Northern America. So far, subjects include the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Labrador Duck, the Great Auk, and the Heath Hen.
The artist, Todd McGrain, has been a sculptor for over 25 years and has focused on the Lost Bird Project for the past 10 years.
Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website
Whether you go or not, The Lost Bird Project is part natural history, part artist’s diary, documenting the extraordinary effort to place a series of public memorials to birds driven to extinction in modern times. As a chronicle of humankind’s impact on our changing world and a moving record of dwindling biodiversity, The Lost Bird Project is an ode to vanished times and vanished species. The Great Auk, Labrador Duck, Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, and Heath Hen once populated North America from the shores of Labrador and New York to the midwestern plains. Across the continent the skies were once nearly black with Passenger Pigeons whose disappearance, like the buffalo’s, was thought to be inconceivable. As works of site-specific environmental art, the sculptures featured in The Lost Bird Project were placed in the location where the bird was last seen in the wild and are now permanent public sculpture installations at a wide range of sites, from Newfoundland to Florida, Ohio to Martha’s Vineyard. Ten years in the making, The Lost Bird Project has been the subject of a feature-length documentary film that premiered in New York City in December 2011.
The Lost Bird Project
