Public radio from Western Michigan University 102.1 NPR News | 89.9 Classical WMUK
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
Available On Air Stations

Art Beat: A Crow a Day

Bondarchuk-1.jpg
Nicholas Anderson
/
Karen Bondarchuk
A panel from "A Crow a Day" by Karen Bondarchuk

Zinta Aistars speaks with WMU art professor Karen Bondarchuk about her project "A Crow a Day."

Anyone who’s lost a loved one to dementia will tell you that it’s an especially hard kind of grief to experience, watching a person fade away a little bit at a time. For Karen Bondarchuk, a Canadian visual artist who’s now a professor of art at Western Michigan University, her way of coping was immersing herself in a year-long project as she watched her mother disappear into a world beyond her daughter’s reach. Along with a traveling art exhibit, Bondarchuk has published a book about the project, called Ergo Sum: A Crow a Day.

A conversation with Karen Bondarchuk

“The project actually started at a residency in Virginia, at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, in August of 2014,” says Bondarchuk. “I had discovered these wonderful new surfaces on gesso panels. I had gotten them from an artist friend in New York. I started working on this new surface in my studio and discovered that it was a super resilient surface allowing me to experiment with all sorts of different kinds of materials, which was very exciting to me because, prior to that, I had been working exclusively with charcoal and paper.”

As for the crows, Bondarchuk says that they had been an evocative subject for her for many years. The crow-a-day project evolved from a long-time passion for the birds.

“It also coincided with the time frame in which my mom was declining with dementia,” she says. “And so, I started creating a drawing a day, starting on August 1, 2014, as a way to mark the days she no longer seemed to recognize. Her dementia had gotten to the point where she still spoke, but it was really incomprehensible.”

Bondarchuk-2.jpg
Nicholas Anderson
/
Karen Bondarchuk
Installation of "A Crow a Day" at WMU's Richmond Center

Witnessing her mother’s deterioration from an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished woman who had been a legal editor to someone “speaking gibberish,” Bondarchuk says was a startling experience, but also made her keenly aware of the passage of time.

By end of the year, Bondarchuk had a collection of 365 panels showing crows in various positions and perspectives. The collection has become a traveling art exhibit, most recently at the Richmond Center for the Visual Arts at Western Michigan University through November 13, 2022. It will also appear in her companion self-published book, which she was able to publish through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign.

Zinta Aistars is our resident book expert. She started interviewing authors and artists for our Arts & More program in 2011.
Related Content