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Since we're talking about JJ Audubon & racism in natural history, Walton Ford is an American artist who uses Audubon's style as inspiration for paintings about Western imperialism & racism.
This painting, Funk Island, is abt the tragic loss of the Great Auk to European hunters.
This painting, Funk Island, is abt the tragic loss of the Great Auk to European hunters.
Great Auks were flightless seabirds wiped out by colonists in Canada--they were hunted for food & for feathers for making pillows & beds. In the smoke from the fires, you can see erotic imagery symbolizing the extinction of a species solely for human pleasure. The L AYERS.
The Island refers to the eradication of the Thylacine by (yup) European colonists. Thylacines were marsupials thought to attack sheep (they probably didn't) & were systematically wiped out by ranchers. The last one died in 1933. Here, a Thylacine island disppears into the sea.
Detail shows Thylacines attacking innocent lambs & each other, a window into the minds of 19th century British colonists, who believed that wiping out both the Thylacine & the indigenous Tasmanian peoples was the best way to spread Western culture to a "savage, untamed" land.
The irony of course being that Europeans were the ones bringing violence to Tasmania & other areas they colonized, & the genocide that they enacted against the Tasmanian Aboriginals was the true savage act. https://twitter.com/paigebyerly/status/1262833023843794944?s=20
My favorite series of Ford's, Der Panterausbruch, describes the (true!) escape of a black leopard from a Zurich zoo in 1933. She survived 10 weeks in the freezing Swiss mountains before being shot by someone who probably really really sucked.
The last painting in the series, called Flucht [flight] shows her departure and NOW I'M CRYING GREAT JUST GREAT
![The last painting in the series, called Flucht [flight] shows her departure and NOW I'M CRYING GREAT JUST GREAT](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EebQT82WAAAKkYL.jpg "The last painting in the series, called Flucht [flight] shows her departure and NOW I'M CRYING GREAT JUST GREAT")
JJ Audubon was an artist who changed the world & how we view animals. He was also a racist who owned enslaved people. We don't lose anything by challenging a historical figure's legacy, & I would argue that it's our duty to do so, through art, through writing, & through learning
