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Entry 489Filed under Breeding

Holly Greenberg’s Bird Collision Art: Turning Loss into Community Action

Artist Holly Greenberg’s Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene uses bird-replica making and community workshops to draw attention to window collisions and threats to birds.
3-minute read By Animalso Team
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Artist Holly Greenberg turned her concern about birds killed at windows into a participatory art project: Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene. It began, she says, after roughly 1,000 birds died in one night at Chicago’s McCormick Place on October 5, 2023. Through bird-replica making and community workshops, the project invites people to engage with the problem and consider action.

How Holly Greenberg came to this work

Greenberg told the American Birding Podcast that she trained as a printmaker and taught printmaking and drawing at Syracuse University for 25 years. She connected her later turn toward bird-focused work to volunteering in habitat restoration, where she learned about birds striking Chicago windows.

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She also reconsidered the materials she used in her art, which she viewed as environmentally damaging, and began gathering invasive plants for artworks. As she put it, “I had a shift about five years ago where I became a sustainable artist.” That change in practice became part of a broader effort to use art to bring attention to threats facing birds.

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What prompted Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene?

Greenberg identifies the project’s catalyst as the mass collision at McCormick Place on October 5, 2023. In the interview, she said about 1,000 birds died at the building in a single night. She also said the site had been associated with 1,000 to 2,000 bird deaths annually; that annual range is her account in the interview, not an independently verified count.

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Greenberg said McCormick Place’s windows were treated with a grid of white dots spaced two inches apart before the following fall migration. The interview transcript available at the cited page does not include the subsequent fall’s death count, so it does not establish what effect that treatment had.

What the project does

Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene uses art and community engagement to raise awareness of threats to birds and encourage action, according to the episode description. A central activity is making bird replicas in workshops. Greenberg describes replica-making as a focused, tactile way for participants to engage with the subject and feel a sense of agency. That is her perspective on the activity, not an independently measured program outcome.

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The approach gives participants a way to spend time with the issue rather than encounter it only as a statistic. It also connects a specific local tragedy to a wider concern: birds can collide with windows that are difficult for them to perceive as barriers.

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What the interview establishes—and what it does not

The interview offers Greenberg’s account of the project’s origin, her shift toward sustainable art, the replica-making approach, and the dot-grid treatment at McCormick Place. It does not provide a measured before-and-after collision result for that treatment. Nor do the cited pages establish current project progress, replica totals, workshop attendance, final installation details, or a complete set of instructions for organizing a workshop.

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The episode summary says Greenberg discusses how listeners can host workshops or contribute, but current instructions and availability could not be confirmed from the accessible material. Anyone interested in taking part should look for current guidance from the project itself rather than assume that a particular set of materials or process is required.

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Why the art matters beyond the finished object

The project’s emphasis is not simply on making replicas. In Greenberg’s account, the act of making creates a concrete point of attention: participants work with a representation of a bird while considering the circumstances that put birds at risk. That can make an abstract conservation problem more immediate, while leaving room for discussion and community involvement.

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The available interview is a firsthand account of the project’s intent and methods, not an evaluation of its impact. It supports understanding Bird Collisions in the Anthropocene as a public-engagement effort; it does not establish how many collisions the workshops prevent or what measurable change they produce.

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Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.

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