The 34th Western Visions Show + Sale commenced on September 16, 2021, with a hybrid in-person and virtual event at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. Artwork sold benefited both the .
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Audubon Mural Project Rockford is hosting a free Zoom event on Tuesday night with the goal of bringing more bird murals to Rockford.
Baltimore Oriole bird mural by Brett Whitacre located at 203 N. Church St. in Rockford.
Credit Jennifer Kuroda
If you ve been in downtown Rockford the last three years, chances are you’ve seen at least one of the four colorful bird murals. Jennifer Kuroda is the president of the Sinnissippi Audubon Society and she spearheads this public art project. She says the murals feature birds named in a study of birds and climate change by the National Audubon Society.
Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi
THE PURPOSE OF THE TRIP was to see my mother’s father one last time, but on the way in we stopped for a day in Mumbai to stretch our legs. I’d drawn a whole map for myself on the plane and now was following my dotted line through various markets and bakeries, culminating in a visit to the CSMVS, the city’s largest art museum. As with many other of India’s cultural institutions, the price for admission varies for local visitors and international tourists, and as I thumbed through my wallet in the queue, I realized that I’d overspent at the underground zine fest and only had enough cash left to cover the local rate. I don’t speak Hindi, but I thought, if I kept my mouth shut, I might look the part I had no American flags on my shirt, anyway but when I got to the front and wordlessly held out my several dozen rupees, the guard saw right through me and pointed to the tourist rate on the sign. Too embarrassed to explain myself or double down on t
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IF I CAN BE CALLED A BIRD-WATCHER, my spark was a pair of burrowing owls, painted on the narrow storefront gate of a shuttered real estate business on 145th Street in Harlem that brokers single-room occupancy housing for two hundred dollars a week. I spotted them after ice-skating with one of my kids at the rink in the shadow of towering smokestacks at Riverbank State Park. The park is a concession to the community for the massive wastewater sewage plant hidden beneath it. It was midway through the Trump years: January, but not cold like Januaries when I was little, not cold enough to see your breath. It wasn’t snowing, and it wasn’t going to snow. The owls watched me quizzically with their heads cocked, their long skinny legs perched on the colored bands of a psychedelic rainbow that seemed to lead off that gray street into another, more magical realm.