By Suzanne Charlé, Publications Committee Member | October 24, 2024

In 2014, art dealer Avi Gitler opened Gitler & ___ on Broadway between 149th and 150th Streets in northern Manhattan. Hoping to draw attention to his gallery, he asked one of his artists to paint the roll-down security gates of the building. Soon a bright pink flamingo landed, creating quite a stir among neighbors. One, Mark Jannot, worked at National Audubon Society at the time, and thought more birds should land on the neighborhood’s walls and boarded up windows. The site was perfect: Just blocks away near the Hudson, John James Audubon, National Audubon Society’s namesake, built his home; his final resting place is in nearby Trinity Cemetery.

Soon, Gitler was commissioning artists to paint murals throughout the neighborhood, funded with stipends from the Audubon Society. The goal: to depict all 314 North American birds threatened by climate change—a number that has since escalated to 389 according to the National Audubon Society’s most recent Survival by Degrees climate report.

“It was magical,” says Gitler, who really hadn’t thought much about birds before getting involved with Audubon. “The idea of talking about nature in an urban environment, connecting people to nature,” much like landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead did with the rectangle of green that is Central Park.

More spray-painted birds landed in Washington Heights: a Rusty Blackbird, a Tundra Swan, a Cerulean Warbler sitting on Audubon’s shoulder. Some took only a half day to finish. As larger canvases were offered, artists worked a month or more. 

Street artist Gera Lozano, known as Geraluz, painted a pair of Hooded Warblers on a tenement building in 2017. The birds, she told Audubon, “celebrate the natural fauna and flora of the local area where the mural lives,” adding that she loved “drawing and painting birds because they invoke freedom, focus, and having a higher perspective.”

As the popularity of the murals spread, so did their range; painted birds appeared in midtown Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. 

In late 2023, Geraluz and Jari “Werc” Alvarez completed “Above and Beyond” in Dumbo. Utilizing arctic boom lifts, they painted a brilliant three-story visual mantra, inspired by the Aplomado Falcon. Painted hands perform madras near the falcons which, the artists explained, “are symbolic of a higher perspective and the expansion of our spirits that enable us to envision a more holistic world.” 

In his most recent mural, George Boorujy heralds birds’ long migration around Red Hook Park, and like the migration, the mural is a long distance at an impressive 963 feet. “I wanted to use the length of this site to show the length of these migration journeys,” explained Boorujy, whose studio is close by. 

Eight birds perch around the field, ranging from the Eastern Meadowlark, which commutes from New Jersey to Brooklyn, to the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, which makes a long-distance flight all the way from Venezuela. Silhouettes of the birds soar over stretches of pink, sunset orange and azure, marked with the regions they fly over. 

“Some of these birds are easily overlooked,” Boorujy said. Making them “large and in charge,” he hopes to create “a visual, two-way conversation with the viewer,” adding that birds and humans are linked: “we all have migrated to survive, on some level.” 

It is important for people to understand that during their migration journeys, birds rely on the park and other areas—green spaces that are at risk because of climate change. The Eastern Towhee will lose 83 percent of its current summer range if climate change continues at its current rate, while the Yellow-throated Vireo will lose 84 percent of its wintering grounds.

Native New Yorker Jessica Maffia chose the American Robin for her project. The bird itself never appears in her 10-by-16-foot mural; unlike the other works, the mural is abstract. “Robins are every-day, familiar, ubiquitous,” Maffia noted. 

Her task: to make people see them anew. “I was interested in their sound, I wanted to visually represent the bird song with spectrograms.” Walking in Highbridge Park, she wondered how. “A lot of drinking goes on there and the path is littered with glass shards,” the artist said. “One day they called out to me.” 

“It took months to forage the glass—many passersby helped me,” said Maffia. She used the green glass shards to make two mosaic sound clouds, one showing part of the robin’s song, the second a spectrogram of its bird call. On orange-painted brick (reminiscent of the robin’s breast), she cast the hands of local environmentalists in concrete and painted them “robin’s-egg” blue. 

If climate change intensifies, both bird and song will be absent, Maffia noted. “We all have to realize this and do something.”

One of the newest murals to be installed is also one of the most intricate: After nine months Susan Stair, who has produced numerous public art installations focusing on nature and the environment, has just finished installing “Birdwatching in the Boreal Forest” on 170th Street in Harlem.

Known as the lungs of the forest, “the Boreal Forest is critical for human survival,” said Stair. “Ninety-five percent of the people I talk to aren’t aware of it.” 

Using traditional smalti mosaics and 24K gold on a weatherproof backing in her studio, the artist created four mosaic panels, each focused on one habitat of the boreal forest. The panels are populated with 17 birds from 14 different species, ensuring that if for some reason the mural needs to be removed, they can be installed at another site. (It’s another form of survival: Gitler notes that several older murals have been painted over or demolished, as owners of the sites changed.)

“By the end of the year, we should have depicted more than 185 climate-threatened birds across more than 130 installations in all five boroughs,” says Gitler. “All visual reminders of the avian population that visits the City and counts on us to act now to save them and ourselves.”