On Friday, Oct. 6, 2006, Bird x Bird (bird by bird) presented its fifth annual fall exhibition and auction featuring works in all media about and for the birds, with more than 300 works of art by 100 regionally and nationally known contemporary artists hailing from around Minnesota, as well as from several other states and the United Kingdom. The fall [2006] issue of MOQ featured an interview with BirdxBird founder Cynde Randall, which follows.

Five years ago Cynde Randall was working for the Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program (MAEP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and volunteering at a small wildlife clinic in North Minneapolis when she thought of a way to bring artists together to benefit the clinic. “It began as an idea about acknowledging the birds that were patients,” she said.

An artist herself, she recruited nine other artists and found them to be enthusiastic about “making a visual archive” of the birds at the center. One of those artists was David Lefkowitz. “This was a good opportunity to make work about local wildlife and to support the bird shelters,” he says, adding. “A lot of my work deals with the human relationship to the environment.”

The program’s mission, as stated on its Web site (www.birdxbird.org), is “to stimulate a creative interface between artists, scientists and the public in an effort to enhance the stewardship of wild species and the environmental education of human beings.”

They hatched BirdXBird (Bird by Bird) in 2002 with an exhibition and auction at a South Minneapolis gallery to benefit the shelter.And the program was a successful fund-raiser for the clinic. “The two years we did the auction kept it going through the winter,” says Randall. But other funding was lacking and so, despite the artists’ efforts, the clinic closed in 2004.

Rather than declare an end to the program, they decided to look around for another bird beneficiary—and incorporate as a nonprofit organization. They now partner with Audubon Center of the North Woods and Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary.

While the art is inspired by the birds, and participating artists consult the field notes from the two centers as a starting point for their artwork, it is far from traditional scientific illustration. “It’s the sole discretion of the artist as to how they would respond to the data,” says Randall, explaining that some will do work that doesn’t appear to relate to the data at all. “It’s definitely a contemporary show,” she says.

While most of the work is visual art, there are also sculptures and sound installations in the mix. Lefkowitz has taken to creating a series each year—of trading-card-size oil paintings modeled loosely after baseball cards.

Other works may be realistic or abstract, humorous or political or just plain poignant, as these artists contemplate the plight of the birds and those who care for them. “Birds can be very poetic starting points,” says Randall.

Proceeds from this year’s Bird x Bird auction will support programming at Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary in Theodore Wirth Park, Minneapolis; bird banding and wildlife rehabilitation at Audubon Center of the North Woods, a K-12 environmental learning center in Sandstone, Minnesota; and provide support for Bird x Bird’s 2007 activity. www.birdxbird.org

Detail from the Bird x Bird postcard.