The Passenger Pigeon Portrait Gallery, one of three sections of Moving Targets, is now showing simultaneously in two locations: The Art & Environment Gallery in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (through October) and at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY (through December). The 14 artists, plus myself and my collaborator Steffi Domike, have each contributed one work that reflects the region in which each artist lives. Combined, the artists represent states within the former nesting range of the passenger pigeon.

Art & Environment Gallery director Sara Adlerstein, who is a research scientist at UM and is an artist in the exhibition, talks about the exhibition in a short video as part of an extensive article in the UM Record (be sure to click on Moving Targets on the right and then the “Read More” link for the entire article). Learn more about the project in the Moving Targets section of this site.

Moving Targets will be reunited and shown in its entirety November 10 – December 6 in Pittsburgh at Duquesne University’s Gumberg Library. Joel Greenberg will speak at Duquesne December 4.

Moving Targets is part of Project Passenger Pigeon Pittsburgh, a coalition of environmental, educational, arts, and historical institutions and independent performing and visual artists.

Artwork (above left): Ann Rosenthal, Safe Haven, 2014. In 1910, my mother and her family were making their way across Canada, having escaped the brutal pogroms in the Ukraine. Though the great flocks of passenger pigeons had disappeared by the time of my family’s migration, I like to imagine that their paths crossed as they both sought safe haven in distant lands.