A Preview

In October, there’s going to be an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called Birds of a Feather: Avian Imagery in Contemporary Art. I was digging around the scheduled artists and found this (which may not be on exhibit, btw):

Rachel Berwick, which is a good name for a bird artist, has trained parrots to speak a dead language. The back story: the great Alexander von Humboldt is said to have been given two parrots that were all that was left of an Amazonian tribe who had all been killed off by another tribe. The parrots, mimicking what they knew, were thus the last “speakers” of the language of the May-por-e’ (there are variant spellings); Humboldt transcribed their words, making a record of a dead language. Well, there’s some debate about the parrots, since this guy says Humboldt’s journals don’t mention any, but he did makes notes on the language. Check out Berwick’s other projects.