Beets, Birds and Bees 1 by Debra Olin, 2014, monoprint collage
Beets, Birds and Bees 1 by Debra Olin, 2014, monoprint collage
Beets, Birds and Bees 2 by Debra Olin, 2014, monoprint collage
In 2015, I was invited to view the collection of the Duxbury Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, Massachusetts, and to choose and respond to a print. I was inspired by a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, "Helft Russland (Help Russia)." Kollwitz created this print to raise awareness of the 1921 Volga famine in Russia. I started to think about what famine looks like today, in this country. There appears to be an abundance of food yet many urban dwellers have no access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and GMO’s are irreversibly changing our agricultural landscape. Instead of death by starvation in the United States, we have death by obesity, working it’s destruction through illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. Guided by a variation on the Aztec God of Rain, these two images explore plant life, birds, and bees -- important pollinators and spreaders of seeds that are in danger of disappearing.
