Isabella Kirkland (born 1954) is an American visual artist and biodiversity researcher.Johnson, Ken. "Isabella Kirkland," The New York Times, June 10, 2011. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Phillips, Anna Lena. "Ars Scientifica," American Scientist, May-June 2008. Retrieved March 12, 2024. She is known for intricate, representational paintings that straddle art history, natural science and ecological activism.Revkin, Andrew C. "Permanent Art, Evanescent Life," The New York Times, November 1, 2007. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Roth David M. "The Nature Conundrum," SquareCylinder, June 2, 2021. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Baker, Kamrin. "Artist Advocates For Endangered & Extinct Species Through Paintings," Good Good Good, July 14, 2023. Retrieved March 12, 2024. Since the mid-1990s, she has documented biota in series focused on species that are extinct, disappearing, collected or illegally trafficked, or emerging from near-extinction.Weir, Alex. "Life in its Fleeting Glory," Riverfront Times, January 23, 2014. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Garchik, Leah. "Isabella Kirkland and the glories of the shell-less mollusk," San Francisco Chronicle, March 29, 2016. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Pollick, Steve. "250 new plants, animals at Art Museum," Toledo Blade, September 7, 2008. Her work fuses the classical naturalist tradition of wildlife painters like John James Audubon and the precise rendering style and time-tested oil techniques of 17th-century Dutch Master still life painters.Bonetti, David. "Three artists who grapple with history," San Francisco Examiner, November 20, 2001. Retrieved March 13, 2024.Pritikin, Renny. "Renny Pritikin on Isabella Kirkland @ Hosfelt," SquareCylinder, May 10, 2021. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Revkin, Andrew C. "Paintings of Nature's Comeback Kids," The New York Times, October 30, 2007. Retrieved March 12, 2024. Situated in the contemporary context of global warming, however, her paintings subtly upend such idealized traditions, invoking a sense of accountability in response to the specter of ecological flux and impermanence.Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Isabella Kirkland, Artist. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Dayton Art Institute. "Dayton Art Institute opens Isabella Kirkland: Stilled Life," February 24, 2014. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State. Isabella Kirkland, Personnel. Retrieved March 12, 2024. New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote that Kirkland "produces richly atmospheric pictures collectively populated by hundreds of animals. … Updating the peaceable kingdom genre, she is trying to make beautiful paintings of the world at its most beautiful, not for the sake of art but for the sake of our endangered biosphere. She does not preach but communicates an infectious spirit of care."
Kirkland's work belongs to the collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum of American Art. Isabella Kirkland, Canopy, Collection. Retrieved March 12, 2024. Berkeley Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM).Saint Louis Art Museum. Isabella Kirkland, Collection. Retrieved March 12, 2024. She has exhibited at the National Academy of Sciences, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) and SLAM, among other venues. She is a research associate in aquatic biology at the California Academy of SciencesLarson, Vicki. "Isabella Kirkland paints disappearing species—and newfound ones—with scientific detail," Marin Independent Journal, October 15, 2014. Retrieved March 12, 2024. and has spoken about ecological issues at conferences including several TED events.TED. "Isabella Kirkland: The Beauty of Wildlife," Talks, July 2023. Retrieved March 12, 2024.TED. "Isabella Kirkland," Speakers. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
Biography Kirkland was born in 1954 in Old Lyme, Connecticut.Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Isabella Kirkland, Project. Retrieved March 12, 2024. She attended Guildford College in North Carolina and Virginia Commonwealth University, before studying sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1970s.
Kirkland lived in New York City through much of the 1980s, pursuing her art career while also becoming a licensed taxidermist and teaching herself botanical illustration, both of which presaged her turn to naturalistic painting in the 1990s.Ames, Michael. "Going, going, almost gone," Idaho Mountain Express, February 15, 2006. Her early art centered on environments hovering between painting and sculpture and impermanent conceptual installations that used unusual materials (e.g., ice, trash) and examined contemporary social issues.Atkins, Robert. "Katherine Sherwood and Isabella Kirkland," The San Francisco Bay Guardian, September 25, 1980, p. 19–20. She presented this work in solo exhibitions at Gallery Paule Anglim, New Langton Arts (both in San Francisco) and Real Art Ways (Hartford) and group shows at The Alternative Museum (New York), Hallwalls (Buffalo) and The Living Room (San Francisco), among other venues.Reveaux, Anthony. "Looking at Contemporary Life," Artweek, 1984.Raynor, Vivien. "Past and Present Futurists," The New York Times, May 29, 1983. Retrieved March 13, 2024.Hallwalls. Isabella Kirkland, Artists. Retrieved March 12, 2024. New York Times critic Vivien Raynor wrote of the Real Art Ways exhibition, which addressed overpopulation, nuclear war and racism: "Seemingly reluctant to bully her viewers, Kirkland errs on the side of tortuousness and sometimes, of playfulness, but her integrity is unmistakable."Goldberg, Carole. Review, Hartford Advocate, May 4, 1983.
In 2004, Kirkland suffered neural and motor control damage from parasitic infection after a tropical roundworm attacked part of her spinal cord. The incident and its effects—so rare that doctors were unaware of the symptoms or treatments—left her unable to draw for several months.Colliver, Victoria. "Home DNA tests create medical, ethical quandaries," San Francisco Examiner, August 21, 2007. Retrieved March 13, 2024.Wynn Newhouse Awards. Isabella Kirkland. Retrieved March 12, 2024. She eventually recovered full control of her right hand, but was left with chronic neuropathic pain in the upper right quadrant of her body, most critically, dysesthesia (sometimes described as a burning sensation under the skin) in her hand and wrist; she has stated that the condition can abate during the flow-state induced by painting. In 2008, Kirkland received the Wynn Newhouse Award, which recognizes contributions of artists with disabilities to contemporary art.
Since 2000, Kirkland has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc. (New York),Feature, Inc. Isabella Kirkland, Nova, 2011, Exhibitions. Retrieved March 12, 2024. the National Academy of Sciences, Toledo Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Dayton Art InstituteKamholtz, Jonathan. "Death and Taxa: Isabella Kirkland: Stilled Life," AEQAI, April 26, 2014. Retrieved July 31, 2014. and Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco), among others. She has shown in nature-related surveys at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art,Nilsen, Richard. "How Real Can It Get? Perceptions Always in Flux," The Arizona Republic, May 30, 2004. Tucson Museum of ArtTucson Museum of Art. Trouble in Paradise: Examining Discord in Nature and Society. Retrieved March 12, 2024. and Whatcom Museum.Whatcom Museum. "Thought-Provoking Exhibition to Explore Endangered Species and Biodiversity," 2019. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
Kirkland lives in Sausalito, California with her husband, Chris Tellis, on a yellow ferryboat docked in the San Francisco Bay.Surtees, Joshua. "If you're going to San Francisco – stay on a stylish Sausalito houseboat," The Guardian, June 28, 2013. Retrieved March 12, 2024.Tropiano, Dolores. "Natural wonder show," Scottsdale Republic, September 2004.
Naturalistic painting
In the 1990s, Kirkland's early artistic focus on impermanence shifted to a consideration of art's lasting power; the change was cemented by a museum exhibition of Dutch Master works, which convinced her to learn to paint in that style. Her initial foray was the "Nature in the Margins" series (1995–99), consisting of realistic paintings of individual, rare animals living in human environments that raised questions about wildlife survival amid overdevelopment. In 1999, a Sierra Club list of the 100 most-endangered animals in the U.S. crystallized parallel themes in her work—the durability of art and naturalist painting—into a single concept and her first mature series: the "Taxa" works, which catalogued various species groups.Bossick, Karen. "'Gone,' 'Back,' and 'Nova,'" The Wood River Journal, February 15, 2006.
Kirkland's naturalist paintings are characteristically large, lush works composed like well-balanced tapestries that both celebrate decorative beauty and address environmental degradation and homogenization.Eclectix. "Isabella Kirkland, Eclectix Interview 47," September 19, 2013. Retrieved March 13, 2024. She meticulously depicts species that do not necessarily belong together, generally at scale. Her concentrated level of detail and complex compositions function to slow down the viewing process and encourage deeper connection—and potentially—a sense of responsibility. American Scientist writer Anna Lena Phillips noted, "perhaps paradoxically, by removing species from their habitats, the paintings acquire the power to change our perception of the plants and animals within them. In this sense, Kirkland's work moves beyond the representation of scientific ideas to offer new ways of thinking about the organisms she depicts." Kirkland carefully researches the species in the paintings—which can take more than a year to execute—using original scientific descriptions, specimens, rubrics and databases often made available to viewers through keys or explanatory texts.
Writers such as Renny Pritikin place Kirkland among a generation of artists reclaiming traditional realist painting and "moving it toward extra-aesthetic ends" and complex, contemporary concepts. She applies the accurate depiction of flora and fauna once used in scientific illustration to different means, regarding her intentionally durable oil paintings as a hedge against a possibly dystopian future—"alarm clocks" or analog "time capsules" of biodiversity that may outlast both the species depicted and the ephemerality of digital records. In this sense, like Dutch Master still lifes or history and political paintings (e.g., Guernica ), they serve the functions of bearing witness and carrying cultural or metaphorical content.
Painting series, 1999–ongoing
The six large imaginary landscapes of Kirkland's "Taxa" suite (1999–2004) represent dynamic change in the natural world caused by human agency through depictions of nearly 400 life-size species. New York Times writer Andrew C. Revkin described them as "a mix of Dutch Master and "Where's Waldo?" … full of hidden things worth looking for." Descendant (1999) portrayed 61 endangered or extinct species in the mainland U.S., Hawaii and Central America, while Ascendant (2000) depicted non-native species that are crowding out native residents in the U.S. In Trade (2001) and Collection (2002), vivid tableaux of depleted species that are highly valued (and thus harvested, poached and sold) underscored the human desire to possess exotic creatures. Back (2003) presented 48 species thought to be extinct but brought back into existence, using warm natural tones to convey the resilience of life; in contrast, the darker Gone (2004) catalogued 63 organisms that underwent full-species, worldwide extinction, many due to the colonization of the New World.