Year: 2018
Lead Artist: Cameron Cartiere
As the Crow Flies was an unprecedented six month long public art event taking place along a 10 kilometer span across Vancouver running from the neighborhoods of Strathcona to Marpole, thus becoming one of the longest public art installations in Canada. This initiative, conceived by Cameron Cartiere and developed with the chART Projects team, took place in conjunction with the Vancouver Bird Festival and the 27th International Ornithological Congress, which was hosted in Vancouver for the first time. This remarkable public art project aimed to raise awareness of the plight of urban birds, focusing on the thousands of crows that fly daily across Vancouver skies.
Every day, thousands of crows migrate tens of kilometers from their roost at the Still Creek Rookery in Burnaby to destinations throughout Vancouver, returning home every night. As a result, crows have become almost synonymous with our city. To celebrate our feathered friends and raise awareness of the vulnerability of native bird species trying to raise their young in our shared city, chART spent six months creating As the Crow Flies.
This public art event took place in the weeks leading up to and in conjunction with the Vancouver International Bird Festival and the International Ornithological Congress, two events that bring thousands of bird enthusiasts from around the world to British Columbia. Bird enthusiasts from around the world focused their attention on BC. chART’s public art project took advantage of this amazing assembly of scientists, conservationists, and advocates, but the aim of As the Crow Flies is to have a sustainable effect on the general public’s relationship to birds, before and far beyond the arrival of the Congress.
As The Crow Flies featured multiple interventions along the 10 kilometer line of the project, ranging from public sculptures (Fledglings and Nesting Nests), to music and video projections (On The Wing), as well as education, conversations, art-making workshops and community engagement activities.
