KANSAS CITY, MO.- On Friday, March 21, Urban Culture Project’s Third Friday Art Downtown features the openings of three new art exhibitions as well as Open Studios. All free, open to the public, and within walking distance of one another in downtown Kansas City.

Teach the Starlings in Kansas City - A project by Brian Collier, Paragraph. Brian 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.