Date and Time: August 14 – September 21, 2025
Event Details
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love,
We will love only what we understand,
And we will understand only what we are taught.”
– Senegalese environmentalist, Baba Dioum
Featuring: Heidi Broner, Susan Bull Riley, Linda Mirabile, Adelaide Murphy Tyrol, Susan Parmenter, Gabriel Tempesta.
A Critical Balance explores a selection of birds found in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, Africa. This exhibit provides six featured artists a unique opportunity to share their observations and use their art to convey both the beauty of their chosen endangered species and the need to protect them. Each artist has chosen one or more birds that reside in or are seasonal visitors to Amboseli. All species of birds showcased in the exhibit are listed on the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Red List as endangered or threatened. The artists’ intent is to inspire and educate in ways that will reach beyond statistics, policy, and politics.
Extinction is the death of all members of a species of plants, animals, or other organisms. One of the most dramatic examples of a modern extinction is the passenger pigeon. Until the early 1800s, billions of passenger pigeons darkened the skies of the United States in spectacular migratory flocks. Easy to trap or shoot, passenger pigeons became a popular, cheap food. Commercial hunters killed them in vast numbers, eventually decimating the population. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden in 1914, and was donated to the Smithsonian Institution.
Recent studies estimate about eight million species on Earth, of which at least 15,000 are threatened with extinction. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact extinction rate because many endangered species have not been identified or studied yet. A number of scientists grapple with improving methods for estimating extinction rates.
Regardless, scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate. Judging from the fossil record, the baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year. Scientists are racing to catalogue the biodiversity on Earth, working against the clock as extinctions continue to occur. (data from The Smithsonian)