American Chimera: Constructing the Bald Eagle
Event
Information
Dates
Thursday, July 23, 2026
6 p.m. — 8 p.m.
Location
Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Cost
Pay-as-you-wish
Artist Mark Kendall’s American Chimera is an enthralling meditation on cultural perceptions of the bald eagle.
Kendall’s extended multimedia project is rooted in a layered examination of the practice of Jim Day, a self-taught taxidermist who constructs “bald eagles” out of the parts of other birds, circumventing the federal prohibition against the unauthorized possession of actual specimens. The project considers the eagle as a chimeric figure in American life—simultaneously a living species and widely circulated symbol, operating as a site of cultural projections, values, memories, and fantasies. Like the bird at its center—shifting and chimeric—”American Chimera” fosters civic inquiry into American identity as a composite form, built from many origins and constantly remade.
After reflections by celebrated author, educator and curator Giovanni Aloi, PhD, we will screen an excerpt of Kendall’s single-channel video work American Chimera (2026). Then Aloi and Kendall will be joined by historian of science Katherine McLeod, PhD; Jason Weckstein, PhD, Associate Curator of Ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences; and moderator and Marina McDougall, Senior Curator at the Academy, for an interdisciplinary conversation on perceptions of the bald eagle — and the questions it raises about cultural representations of nature through mythology, symbol and natural science display.
Registration coming soon!
Thursday, July 23
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Schedule of Events
6-6:30 p.m. View visual culture material related to the bald eagle in Science Live
6:30-8 p.m. Remarks, video excerpt, and conversation.
Speaker Bio's
-
Mark Kendall is a conceptual artist whose work spans film/video, sculpture, performance and installation. His research-based practice explores the intersection of social, technological and environmental systems through poetic and material inquiry. Kendall has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, Sundance Institute, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation and American-Scandinavian Foundation and has exhibited internationally in museum, gallery and public contexts. He lives and works in Philadelphia.
-
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011); Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018); Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019); and Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), and the editor of Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020); Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (2023); Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant Thinking (2023); I’m Not an Artist: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content (2025); and Lawn (2025). Aloi has contributed to BBC radio and PBS TV, has worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. He has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.
-
Katherine McLeod, PhD is a curator, writer, and educator who researches the history of ecology, zoos, and eugenics in the United States.
-
Jason Weckstein, PhD, served as a staff scientist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago before joining Drexel’s Biodiversity, Earth, and Environmental Sciences faculty and Academy of Natural Sciences in 2014 as an Associate Professor/Associate Curator. Weckstein’s research utilizes field collected bird and associated parasite specimens to analyze their DNA sequence data to reconstruct their ecology and evolutionary history. Weckstein is a fellow of the American Ornithological Society and has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and delivered over 50 presentations at universities and both national and international scientific meetings. He has over 20 years of experience working in natural history museums and has conducted research on birds and their parasites in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Ghana, Malawi, Nicaragua, Brazil and Mexico.
