A self-diagnosed ornithophile, Susan Chevlowe was already “totally mad” about birds before spring 2020, when the pandemic shut much of New York City down, and one could hear birds better sans traffic din. The Hebrew Home’s Riverdale campus, where Chevlowe directs the Derfner Judaica Museum, is home to a wide variety of birds.
“I was very conscious of them during this time. I think this awareness spilled over to my starting to notice works in our collection that feature birds,” said Chevlowe, who is also the museum’s chief curator. “The idea came to me that we could put together an exhibition of birds as a subject in art.”
The Derfner’s show, “Aviary Aesthetic: The Symbolism of Birds,” is on view until May 8. It is not the first museum to host a bird exhibit. The Toledo Museum of Art held “Rare and Wondrous: Birds in Art and Culture 1620-1820” last year, for example. But as Chevlowe scoured the museum’s collection and database, she noticed how widespread a theme birds have been and how different artists brought their unique approaches to bear on it.
Religious approaches to bird art, and Jewish ones in particular, are not an emphasis of the exhibit. But some compelling objects fit that bill (or beak?). A 19th century Chanukkah lamp from Warsaw (pictured) features two doves flanking a crown, while another Warsaw silver Chanukkah lamp contains a double-headed eagle. That Russian imperial symbol incorporated in a ritual object “graft[s] it to an item with a uniquely Jewish function,” Chevlowe told Rough Sketch.
Chevlowe also notes Jewish Soviet artist Anatoli Kaplan’s 1962 lithograph “Feigele Sing Mir A Liedele” (Little Bird, Sing Me a Song), which adapts the traditional broadside, called lubok, to a Yiddish folk song. “Artists bring their own traditions to both the form and content of their creations and their subjects,” she said.
At first, a form in the top right corner of Chagall’s “Garden of Eden” (from his 1960 drawings from the bible lithograph series) struck me as angelic, or perhaps siren- or sphinx-like. But Chevlowe correctly pointed out the face resembles Chagall’s, and, in light of Chagall’s broader repertoire, the bird feet and human face rule out an angel and a dove, respectively.
“Chagall is well known for including self-portraits in his works,” Chevlowe said. “A siren is a possibility, although in other examples, his sirens are more mermaid-like. While angels and doves are ubiquitous in his work, including in Drawings for the Bible, it struck me that this one was different.”
Unlike Chagall, most of the artists in the Riverdale show did not make explicitly-religious art, according to Chevlowe. But in Kaplan’s print, for example, a multitude of doves symbolizes love but is also “open to a more specifically-religious interpretation as well—the idea of the soul striving toward God,” Chevlowe said, “or hope, rebirth, fidelity, affection. It is a very rich symbol.”
There are no Catholic holy-spirited doves in this show, but rich symbolism abounds. Lars Bo’s somewhat-surreal “A Sea Change” (1963) depicts two human figures composed of birds in flight. (Talk about bird brain.) And there is something graphically wonderful about the tsar’s daughter combing his bright-orange beard as four caged birds and two painted ones look on in Irina Belopolskaya’s gouache “If You Are Afraid of Grief, You Will Never See Happiness” (1963). Other works address environmental concerns and Native American and First Nations symbolism.
Researching the Native American artists from the southwest, Chevlowe was moved by the ways their jar- and pot-making and craft skills are passed down matrilineally. Hummingbirds and roadrunners appear in the pots of artists Loretta Huma and Rachel Concho, respectively, each associated with its artist’s family. The artists draw on ancestral traditions, but their work is uniquely their own, Chevlowe said.
She hopes visitors will take away from the exhibit that many artists are drawn to birds’ beauty and grace.
“From there, viewers might learn about how their representations are tied to the artists’ backgrounds and how they imbue or evoke in their subjects deeper spiritual and cultural significance,” she said. “The next step is to connect to the idea of whether the birds have any meaning to you, the viewer, individually. What kind of impact does their presence have?”
For Chevlowe, birds help measure environmental health.
“I’ve become more conscious myself of issues of eco-diversity, how what we do to the earth—even when we rake the leaves—is disturbing habitat,” she said. “That art can remind us of our responsibility to nature means that art is deeply relevant. It matters.”