A bestiary is a compendium of beasts. Originating in the ancient world, bestiaries were made popular in the Middle Ages in illustrated volumes that described various animals and even rocks. The natural history and illustration of each beast was usually accompanied by a moral lesson. This reflected the belief that the world itself was the Word of God and that every living thing had its own special meaning. For example, the pelican, which was believed to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a living representation of Jesus. Thus the bestiary is also a reference to the symbolic language of animals in Western Christian art and literature.
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Ryan McGinley is an American photographer and lives in New York City. He began taking photographs in 1998. In 2003, at the age of 25, he was one of the youngest artists to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine. In 2007, he was given the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography. In 2009, he was honored at The Young Collectors Council's Artists Ball at the Guggenheim Museum. A 2014 GQ article declared McGinley, "the most important photographer in America."
Alexis Rockman is an American contemporary artist known for his paintings that provide depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering. He has exhibited his work in the United States since 1985, including a 2004 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, and internationally since 1989. He lives with his wife, Dorothy Spears in Warren, CT and NYC.
Animal-made art consists of works by non-human animals, that have been considered by humans to be artistic, including visual works, music, photography, and videography. Some of these are created naturally by animals, often as courtship displays, while others are created with human involvement.
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections.
Elephant cognition is animal cognition as present in elephants. Most contemporary ethologists view the elephant as one of the world's most intelligent animals. With a mass of between 11-13 pounds, an elephant's brain has more mass than that of any other land animal, and although the largest whales have body masses twenty times those of a typical elephant, a whale's brain is barely twice the mass of an elephant's brain. In addition, elephants have around 257 billion neurons. Elephant brains are similar to those of humans and many other mammals in terms of general connectivity and functional areas, with several unique structural differences. Although initially estimated to have as many neurons as a human brain, the elephant's brain has about three times the amount of neurons as a human brain, this is in addition to their brain being about four times the size of a humans. However, the elephant's cerebral cortex has about one-third of the number of neurons as a human's cerebral cortex. Still, elephants have the largest brain of any land mammal.
Ashes and Snow by Canadian artist Gregory Colbert is an installation of photographic artworks, films, and a novel in letters that travels in the Nomadic Museum, a temporary structure built exclusively to house the exhibition. The work explores the shared poetic sensibilities of human beings and animals. Ashes and Snow has traveled to Venice, New York City, Santa Monica, Tokyo, and Mexico City. To date, Ashes and Snow has attracted more than 10 million visitors, making it the most attended exhibition by a living artist in history.
Simón Vélez is a prize-winning Architect and thinker from Colombia, most famous for his innovative use of Guadua bamboo as an essential building component. Vélez was born in Manizales, Colombia, in 1949. His father and grandfather were also architects. He has designed buildings in over 11 countries.
The BBC Wildlife Specials are a series of nature documentary programmes commissioned by BBC Television. The series premiered in 1995, and 22 specials have been produced to date, with most of the more recent ones consisting of multiple episodes. The earlier programmes were produced in-house by the BBC's Natural History Unit, but the more recent Spy in the ... titles were made by the independent John Downer Productions. The first 18 specials, through 2008, were narrated by David Attenborough. Polar Bear: Spy on the Ice (2010), Penguins: Spy in the Huddle (2013) and Dolphins: Spy in the Pod (2014) were narrated by David Tennant.
Survival is one of television's longest-running and most successful nature documentary series. Originally produced by Anglia Television for ITV in the United Kingdom, it was created by Aubrey Buxton, a founder director of Anglia TV, and first broadcast in 1961. Survival films and film-makers won more than 250 awards worldwide, including four Emmy Awards and a BAFTA.
Nick Brandt is an English photographer. Nick Brandt's photographs focus on the impact of environmental destruction and climate breakdown, for both some of the most vulnerable people across the planet and for the animal and natural world.
Jon Cone is a collaborative printmaker, pioneer and developer of photographic ink jet technologies, educator, and photographer. Cone is best known for the founding of the world's first digital printmaking studio, Cone Editions Press and developer of quad-black ink jet systems for printing fine black-and-white photographs including the first commercially available method of producing fine art black-and-white prints in the digital darkroom.
The Natural History Museum of Bern is a museum in Bern, Switzerland. In its teaching and research it cooperates closely with the University of Bern. It is visited by around 131,000 people yearly.
Yang Fudong is a Chinese contemporary artist. In the early 1990s, he began to work with film. He began creating films and videos using 35 mm film. Currently Yang directs films, creates photographs, and creates video installations.
Gary Hodges is a British artist and publisher much admired internationally for his graphite pencil wildlife art. His original drawings and limited edition prints have sold widely in the UK and throughout the world and is collected by large numbers of ordinary citizens, many not previously seeing themselves as "art collectors". During his career he has sold over 110,000 limited edition prints from 130 editions. His popularity has influenced and encouraged many other artists to develop intricate styles with pencil. He has a close connection to various environmental and wildlife conservation groups for whom he provides considerable financial support.
The AMNH Exhibitions Lab or AMNH Department of Exhibition is an interdisciplinary art and research team at the American Museum of Natural History that designs and produces museum installations, computer programs and film. Founded in 1869, the lab has since produced thousands of installations, many of which have become celebrated works. The department is notable for its integration of new scientific research into immersive art and multimedia presentations. In addition to the famous dioramas at its home museum and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, the lab has also produced international exhibitions and software such as the revolutionary Digital Universe Atlas.
Ala Younis is a Kuwaiti research-based visual artist, painter, and curator, based in Amman, Jordan. Younis initiates journeys in archives and narratives, and reinterprets collective experiences that have collapsed into personal ones. Through research, she builds collections of objects, images, information, narratives, and notes on why/how people tell their stories. Her practice is based on found material, and on creating materials when they cannot be found or when they do not exist.
Giacomo Brunelli is a British/Italian artist working with photography, who lives in London.
R. J. Kern is an American artist, known for his photographs exploring identity, culture, and philosophical questions about nature and heritage through the interaction of people, animals and landscape. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Canada, China, England, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Japan and Norway, at venues including the National Portrait Gallery, London, Rourke Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi, and Yixian International Photography Festival among many. Kern has received awards and recognition from the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, the photography non-profit CENTER, and the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and was chosen one of PDN's "30 New and Emerging Photographers" in 2018.
