In Conversation: Matthew Day Jackson and Jennifer Farrell

Please join us for a conversation with Matthew Day Jackson and Jennifer Farrell, The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Associate Curator of Drawings and Prints, on the occasion of a presentation of Jackson’s portfolio of twelve four-color, four-plate etchings ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ published by Collaborative Art Editions. Jackson re-etched 12 copper plates from the 1930s originally owned by the American Museum of Natural History that were created by James John Audubon, an artist known for his extensive documentation of birds. In Jackson’s appropriation of the plates, he presents Audubon’s birds sitting in front of apocolyptic events. The suite’s title is taken from a poem by American poet Sara Teasdale written in 1920. The artist hand-punched each of the twelve prints with one line from the poem, which as a whole illustrates a tension between nature and man in a post-war landscape. Three of the twelve birds depicted in the set are now extinct; including The Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, who were hunted and whose habitats were destructed by humans. Within this work, Jackson brings renewed relevance to iconic imagery and language of the past and provokes a dialogue between artists (himself, Teasdale and Audubon) working in various media. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is on view in the Hauser & Wirth Publishers Bookshop through 29 June.