KANSAS CITY, MO.- Brian D. Collier's projects, installations, and public interventions range across a wide variety of media, including websites, video, sculpture, photography, drawing, artist's books, and performance. His diverse practice focuses on investigating ways in which elements of the natural world exist, or have reinserted themselves, in severely human-altered habitats. Through his projects, he disseminates information about these sites, often proposing strategies to enhance or simply embrace the weedy margins of the contemporary landscape.

Collier’s Teach the Starlings in Kansas City is the latest incarnation of a multi-faceted, ongoing project that begins with the story of one of the most spectacular ecological disruptions ever perpetrated by an individual, the introduction of the European starling to North America. The starling population has grown from the initial 60 birds introduced in 1890 into NYC’s Central Park to an estimated population of well over 200 million.

It is a little known fact that starlings are extremely adept at visual mimicry, rivaling parrots in their ability to mimic human speech. Based on this fact, Collier has developed a program designed to teach European Starlings to say the name of the man who is primarily responsible for propagating this invasion, a wealthy and eccentric pharmaceutical manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin. Through a program combining the dissemination of the starling story, the construction and installation of audio-rigged “teaching” nest boxes and feeding stations, and direct teaching methods, Collier exploits the starling’s mimicry ability to turn them from unwanted pests into living advertisements for both their own history in North America and the devastating effects of misdirected ecological intervention.

Paragraph gallery will present framed photographs, videos, maps, and interactive models of the starling teaching devices. Additionally, the gallery will be used as a base of operations for tours of starling locations around Kansas City.

On Saturday, April 12, the public is invited to join Collier for a starling-focused walking tour of downtown Kansas City. Attendees will begin by learning how to identify starlings and find out where they commonly roost and nest. The group will also collectively work to teach the starlings encountered along the way to say the name of the man who introduced them into North America, Schieffelin. Free and open to the public; no reservations required.

Brian Collier earned his MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and his BFA from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1993, and is currently an Instructor in the Interdisciplinary department at Kansas City Art Institute. Collier has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in the US and abroad. A partial list of exhibition venues includes Neues Museum Weserberg Bremen, in Bremen, Germany; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO; Rowland Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Contemporary Art Center, North Adams, MA; Alice C. Sabatini Gallery, Topeka, KS; Washington University, St. Louis, MO; Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; and Galería Raúl Martínez, Havana, Cuba. He has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Bloomington Cultural District Commission .

Visit http://www.briandcollier.com/ for more information about Collier’s work, and http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net for more about the Starling project.

An initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.urbancultureproject.org or email info@charlottestreet.org.