ON THE TRAIL WITH AHD

KINSHIP

Back in Tucson, the spring bloom is offering clouds of yellow as the palo verde trees leap into bloom. Entire hillsides are covered with this exuberance. I like to think of palo verdes as very smart trees. It isn’t easy for a plant to grow in a desert, but the palo verde is a lesson in adaptation. A desert plant needs to conserve water. Leaves offer a lot of surface area from which water evaporates. So the palo verde slivers its leaf design down to thin needles. Problem solved. But it has reduced its green surface area that does the work of photosynthesis. So the palo verde comes up with green bark, that can photosynthesize. Problem solved.

Of course, such adaptations take a Big Time. And human culture moves very fast. Thus we find ourselves at odds with the very processes of nature that sustain the web of life. Nevertheless, the lesson remains, that nature is brilliant at problem solving, and we are nature, therefore, we can hope that we will get smart enough, soon enough, to stop the destructive madness of the greed-mongers among us.

This week The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum’s Art Institute hosts “Kindred Spirits,” an exhibition of works by Amanda Stronza, Rachel Ivanyi, and Hannah Salyer. I had a chance to preview the show, in anticipation of moderating an artist talk today, April 25 at 4PM, about their arresting work. All three artists bring empathy and artistry to their love of the animal world.

Stronza has a long-standing artistic practice of creating mortuary art out of natural materials for dead animals, many of them found killed on roads. The adornment of our human dead has been a practice going back to our earliest forebears—a means of honoring the dead and our love for them. Here coyote, squirrel, vulture, and bobcat kitten are given a similar respect, dressed with flowers and leaves, creating a vibrant beauty that mourns and defies their deaths.

Ivanyi, with a background in zoology, has a keen interest in rattlesnakes. One collage titled “Dead on Road (DOR)” creates a record of 106 rattlesnakes found on one road over the course of a year. Shed skins line up, as if a glistening highway, beneath which are lined up coiled mementoes, heart-shaped and snake-shaped, of each snake mounted on a lace background. She yokes art and science in a depiction of rattlesnake family life (who knew?) in “A Mother’s Love,” after learning that rattlesnake young stay with their mother until their first shed.

Salyer, a illustrator, mixed media artist, and Maurice Sendak Fellow, pulls cultural references into her work. She creates partially open vessels in the form of eagle and coyote in the spirit of ancient Egyptian canopic jars. And she renders the vulture as Charon, an agent of transformation from Greek mythology, who ferries the dead across the river of death. For her ceramic works, she uses an anagama kiln, which is wood-fired, the fire, a living creature that must be fed, a process of grieving and letting go.

These works may stir grief, love, and even joy, at seeing honor paid to the creatures that live among us. They suffer from our presence, and this exhibition insists that we see them, that we seek in ourselves a capacity for reverence for their presence with us on this astonishing planet.

The exhibition is up until July 13th.

First saguaro blossom of the season in my neighborhood.

And this, popped up in my Facebook feed this morning:

"Let’s make a world in which all sentient beings are respected, even the smallest ones," says London School of Economics & Political Science’s Philosophy Professor Jonathan Birch.

The world’s first Centre for Animal Sentience will launch at London School of Economics (LSE) in autumn 2025.

Professor Jonathan Birch continues: "Our goal is to use the emerging science of animal minds to design better policies, laws, and ways of caring for other animals. Our work will put Britain back at the leading edge of animal welfare globally and help restore the harmonious relationship with other species that we all want and need. That mission will be at the heart of everything we do."