A Bird’s Eye View
New commissions paired with selections by John James Audubon
USA
Auburn University’s Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art commissioned Alabama artist Douglas Pierre Baulos to research and respond to etchings by 19th-century naturalist John James Audubon in a new exhibition. Douglas Pierre Baulos: A Bird’s Eye View, on view through December 6 at Auburn. The exhibition features textiles, drawings, photographic processes and found objects. Baulos discusses the project, their natural dyes, birding and material experimentation in a new podcast episode.
Baulos, an artist, writer and associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, developed the installations as part of Radical Naturalism. In this ongoing research series at Auburn, contemporary artists and scholars reconsider Audubon and prints in the university art collection from present-day perspectives.
The new works incorporate upcycled cloth, thread, natural dyes, photographic emulsion and found objects. Baulos uses those materials to consider ecology, memory, aging, extinction and the relationship between people and the natural world.
“When I first started my process, I wanted to make stories that combined both my personal life in Alabama with aspects of the Audubon prints,” Baulos said in an interview for The Jule Museum Podcast. “I wanted to look more poetically and make my own interiority visible in the work.”
Baulos frequently works with indigo, walnut, sumac, persimmon and other plant-based dyes. Some plants are grown in the artist’s garden, while others are sustainably foraged in Alabama. The exhibition also includes anthotypes, made with plant pigments, and cyanotypes, which use ultraviolet light to produce blue-and-white images.
The resulting installations function as creative scholarship. Baulos combines historical objects, field observation, material research and personal experience, then communicates that research through an exhibition and podcast. Presented beside Audubon’s prints, the new objects introduce perspectives shaped by contemporary ecological concerns, material reuse and life in Alabama.
Within an academic museum, the comparison also gives college students a way to practice visual awareness. Mindful looking requires visitors to recognize patterns, gather visual evidence, compare sources and reconsider first impressions. Those skills support learning across the arts, sciences and humanities.
“As a bird watcher and a scientist and an artist, I’m really interested in this complex disposition of knowing a lot of details about them when they’re close up,” Baulos said. “But one of the things that you learn early on in birding is that sometimes you’re only going to see the silhouette.”
Baulos visits Auburn University for a public engagement at the museum on Thursday, November 12 at 6:30pm ET. The artist residency also includes meeting with faculty and students during class time. For more, go to jcsm.auburn.edu.
