“The Wall of Birds will be finished next week.”

Jane Kim’s announcement on Facebook, posted Dec. 1, heralded the completion of her two-and-a-half year project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y. – a mural that depicts the evolution and diversity of birds.

Explore the Wall of Birds

The 2010 graduate of CSU Monterey Bay’s science illustration program has painted one representative example from every bird family in the world – all 271 of them – including extinct species. The project is called “From So Simple a Beginning,” after a passage Charles Darwin wrote to sum up his view of evolution in The Origin of Species. It is located in the lab’s visitor center, and covers an enormous space – 40 feet high and 3,000 square feet. The birds are painted true-to-size against the silhouette of the continent where they originated. In order to complete the project in time for the lab’s centennial celebration, she had to paint a bird a day. Kim, 34, spent a year sketching the birds on paper at her studio in San Francisco before starting to paint in 2014. That required her to spent most of her time in Ithaca, with only occasional visits home. “Other projects, different techniques allowed me to create off-site and then install. But this being completely hand-

painted directly on the wall requires me to be here full-time," she told the Chicago Tribune. This week, Kim is finishing the last section – dinosaurs and prehistoric species. On Dec. 7, she’ll give a seminar at the lab on “The Marriage of Art and Science: A One-of-a-Kind Mural of Birds.” For those who can’t visit in person, the lab plans an interactive feature where viewers will be able to find high-resolution images of the mural.

South America! This was one of the most challenging and exciting continents to paint, simply because of the beauty and abundance of biodiversity!</em

– Jane Kim

Published on Dec. 1, 2015