French Market Planning Commission Plots Global Takeover by Ric Kasini Kadour
12″x16″; collage of bird illustrations by Gustav Mützel from Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt by Heinrich Nehrling (1891), illustration, “French Market, New Orleans, La” c. 1910 by the Detroit Publishing Company (LC-D4-71846 [P&P]}, inkjet photograph on 51lb Epson Ultra Premium Matte Presentation Paper; 2026. 2026-03-19B

As I get older, I start doing old man things. This year, I started feeding the birds outside my house in Gentilly. For the little birds, I leave piles of wild bird seed that I get from Jefferson Feed in Mid-City after the staff there were kind enough to suggest some food the local birds may like. The crows are different. They like unsalted peanuts I buy by the bag from Quicky’s on Franklin Avenue. One day, as I’m driving around collecting bird food, I realized I had become my grandmother, an old French woman who stocked a dozen bird feeders in the small citrus orchard she maintained behind her house in Florida.

I pour the bird food out from an old plastic mushroom carton and sit on the iron porch chairs and wait for them to come. They are watching me. I am watching them. I am judicious with the peanuts I leave for the crows, who, I imagine, are in a cold war with the squirrels over who gets them first. When I see a crow flying around, I drop a peanut or two on each of the lips of the porch’s columns. Then I cluck and point at the crow and then point at the peanuts. I want them to know it was me. The crows won’t come if I’m still on the porch, so I go inside and watch through my doorbell camera as they fly down and collect their treats.

I do all this because it brings me joy, because it keeps me off my phone, because it distracts me from the state of the world. We are blessed in New Orleans with many birds: ibis and egrets, mallards and ducks in City Park, an occasional heron by the river, or a pelican at the lake. The Canada geese are my brothers from my other country sent down to make sure I am okay. I started thinking of birds as guardians of the city, flying around, chasing away storms, keeping up on the neighborhood gossip to make sure the street beefs don’t get out of hand. I know they are just birds but the world is more interesting with fairies and goblins in it. Why can’t we imagine birds as equally magical creatures?

I came across Gustav Mützel’s bird illustrations in Heinrich Nehrling’s Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt (1891). Nehrling was an ornithologist and horticulturalist from Wisconsin who retired to Naples, Florida and built an experimental botanical garden that drew such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. (After his death, the garden fell into the hands of Jungle Larry and Safari Jane and it eventually became the foundation of the Naples Zoo.) Nehrling commissioned Gustav Mützel, an academically-trained science illustrator well-known in Germany for his work on birds and mammals, to illustrate his opus that described all the North American birds he had known. The book is lyrical in its descriptions of the birds, their behaviour and their habitats; “the rejoicing trill of the lark rang down from the blue heaven” and so on.

In the studio, I wanted to bring Mützel’s illustrations into my 21st century world. I combined my own photographs of highways, powerlines, and other infrastructure with photographic illustrations from Richard Halliburton’s The Complete Book of Marvels (1937 & 1960 editions). Halliburton (1900–1939) was an American adventurer who hung out with Hollywood stars and once emulated Hannibal by crossing the Alps on the back of Miss Dalrymple, an elephant on loan from a Paris zoo. A forerunner of 21st century influencer culture, Halliburton is a classic example of what Susan Sontag called “the theatricalization of experience” in her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp”, and yet, in her 2001 essay collection, Where the Stress Falls, she wrote how Halliburton’s books inspired her to become a writer. I clipped and cut Halliburton’s palaces of marvel to build an imagined city and then I sent the birds to look after it.

Spires Whose Silent Finger Points to Heaven
by Ric Kasini Kadour
20″x16″; images by W. Luthy from The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton (1960), found bird etching coloured with pencil on Strathmore 80lb drawing paper; 2026. 2026-05-10A

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The Alps Were Never the Same After
by Ric Kasini Kadour
10″x8″; bird illustration by Gustav Mützel from Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt by Heinrich Nehrling (1891), illustration from The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton (1960), laser-printed artist photographs of New Orleans and Quebec on acid-free 140lb watercolor paper; 2026. 2026-05-12A

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Look for the Little Bird
by Ric Kasini Kadour
15″x11″; bird illustration and other illustration by Gustav Mützel from Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt by Heinrich Nehrling (1891), illustration from The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton (1960), laser-printed artist photographs of New Orleans and Quebec, wallpaper on acid-free 140lb watercolor paper; 2026. 2026-05-11A

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The Beggars and Their Wooden Crutch
by Ric Kasini Kadour
10″x8″; bird illustration by Gustav Mützel from Die Nordamerikanische Vogelwelt by Heinrich Nehrling (1891), illustration from The Complete Book of Marvels by Richard Halliburton (1960), laser-printed artist photographs of New Orleans on acid-free 140lb watercolor paper; 2026.

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