How one artist is ‘painting’ eastern Iowa to attract songbirds

Some of Hembrey’s latest paintings only last a few minutes before they’re destroyed.

He’s delighted when they are.

For the past few months, the contemporary artist has traveled eastern Iowa to create colorful images in the ground; a unique, biodegradable art form he calls “landscape painting.” He uses soil supplements he mixes himself, like charcoal, clay, lime and bone meal, as his “paints.” After one or two rains, his creations are fully absorbed into the earth. But even moments after he finishes, they could be blemished by bird tracks, insect trails and gusts of wind.

A completed pattern of an orchard oriole.

Fortunately, that’s the goal of the Songbird Project, Hembrey’s latest artistic undertaking. His landscape paintings, imprinted in circular stamps of sod, depict designs of native Iowa bird plumage, like black-capped chickadees, orchard orioles and wood thrushes.

Each painting and its location is intentional. The colors of the birds, and their corresponding soil supplements, are chosen by Hembrey to provide necessary nutrients for native tree species to thrive. He plants the trees — white oaks, black walnuts, silky dogwoods and red cedars — once the painting is absorbed, in hopes that, once grown, native birds and other species will call the tree their home.

That’s because habitat loss is the primary reason why two thirds of North American songbirds are at risk of extinction, according to the National Audubon Society. In Iowa, threatened bird species include the black-billed cuckoo and the Kentucky warbler.

“I feel so impotent about climate change in our environment,” Hembrey told IPR in his studio, a cluttered corner of the university’s Visual Arts Building that, nonetheless, had space to put his artwork on prominent display. “Like, what can you do? What can one person do? And as an artist, you can call attention to it. But in this case, I’m actually doing tangible habitat restoration.”

Hembrey just finished his residency as one of the University of Iowa’s Grant Wood fellows for painting and drawing, but his artistic endeavors also span installation, experimentation and questioning the very essence of art itself. His “100 artists” project from over a decade ago, for which he put on a fictional global art showcase featuring the work of 100 artists that he invented identities, backgrounds — and even art — for, was the subject of a TED Talk and several national features.

Shea Hembrey poses for a portrait in his studio at the University of Iowa. Hembrey created the Songbird Project, which aims to attract native birds to Iowa through biodegradable art.

The Arkansas-born artist is now back to creating under his own name, and said the Songbird Project was the perfect way to merge his interests (he says a fated painting class deterred his path to becoming an ornithologist) while creating art and involving the community. He’s done landscape paintings in several Cedar Rapids parks, on the University of Iowa campus and at several private locations, by request. Preschoolers helped paint alongside him at an installation at the Indian Creek Nature Center.

“I think, especially after the derecho, people are really like, ‘Yes! Plant trees!’” he said in his warm Southern drawl. “It’s an easy sell.”

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— Sod

Hembrey “paints” on a 30-inch diameter circle of sod in the ground. A tree will be planted on this spot.