Birds of Paradise Catalog

Birds of Paradise was a catalog published to accompany the installation of a public art project of the same name at the Louis Armstrong PS 143 in Queens, NY in 2020. The catalog featured background information on the conceptualization of the project, including historical research and reference images of past works by the artist.

The public art project itself consisted of five murals, made with 4x4 inch square tiles, each installed on different floors of the school. The geometric abstractions in the compositions were created by sampling colors from the photographs of parrots taken in Brazil and arranging them as rectangles and squares within the frame of the image (a la Mondrian), resulting in a “color chart of the natural world.” From the catalog:

“A color can be contained in an ideal concept like the color chart and also materialized in the real world like in the feathers of a parrot. In the end, it is the same color, or almost the same color.”