Laurel Roth Hope Regalia 2011
Private Collection © Laurel Roth Hope. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris
Smithsonian American Art Museum
8th and G Streets, NW
Washington, DC
Some 50 works by more than a dozen contemporary artists who employ avian imagery as a conduit for understanding contemporary culture are on view. The exhibition explores the following themes:
- How we identify and describe birds.
- What birds reveal about our evolving relationship with the environment and about our competing impulses to control and conserve nature.
- How birds are significant in our imaginative and emotional lives as emblems of the great American wilderness.
- Why the search for avian life has become a sacred ritual in secular society and how this search effects the way we see ourselves as individuals and as a society.
