Date of Award

Spring 6-1-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Painting

First Advisor

Kevin Zucker

Second Advisor

Angela Dufresne

Third Advisor

Jackie Gendel

Abstract

I started taking walks at sunset to feel better. It was January of 2021, nearly a year into the COVID pandemic. On these antidepressant walks, I kept running into crows, participating in their own sunset ritual, hundreds of them in a raucous shimmering black net. They flew around the city, my hometown, gathering, gossiping, and ultimately sleeping together in trees. I was both intoxicated by and jealous of the nightly crow party—standing under them was my only crowd experience in nine months. For the next three months, I tracked them every night I could. My solo practice of paying the crows attention grew into a participatory art project. The 50 human participants were my community in Providence: my classmates, partner, students, professors, mother, childhood friends. I had the urge to share the crow crowd with my crowd, keeping the parameters of human engagement loose enough to leave room for chaos, refusal, or play. Each walk was different: the crows took a different route, the weather changed. I invited the more performative humans to bring something to share: a poem, a song, a dance, a ritual. I shot video and wrote journal entries documenting each night’s quest. In this thesis book, I have modified my journal to tell you the story of the project, which began with these participatory walks and developed into a video installation. You will get to know the humans and crows whose labor, play, and care intermingled to make the piece. I will bring you into the mess and joy of making work about non-human animals as a human—and the complications, limits, and possibilities brought up by paying close attention to specific communities of crows and humans.

Comments

View exhibition online: Hannah Lutz Winkler, Everyone I Have Ever Crowed With 2021-

Download

Included in

Painting Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.