Lynne Parks was born and raised in Northern Virginia. She's lived in Baltimore since 2003. Lynne has a B.A. from Hollins University with an independent major in creative writing/theater/film studies. She is the Outreach Coordinator for Lights Out Baltimore, a bird conservation and wildlife rescue organization. She is a practicing visual artist, curator, writer, and performer. In 2017, Parks curated a group exhibition at the Peale called "Birdland and the Anthropocene."
In this 30-minute interview, Lynne talks about her ongoing work documenting bird populations in the Baltimore area as well as how art and creativity have helped her through difficult times. Find a full transcript of this conversation here: https://www.thepealecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020.01.01-MD-Baltimore-LynneParks-Inteview-1October2020.pdf
Lynne Parks (00:00): Gosh, where do you start? I grew up in Northern Virginia, but I've been living in Baltimore for almost 18 years. I'm a visual artist, I do both photography and mixed media, and I'm also a writer. Storytelling is very much foundational in everything I do. What brought me to Baltimore, is actually fairly complicated. I am a person with a rare disease, I have metastatic fibrosarcoma, which is a rare cancer of the connective tissues. Honestly, part of what brought me here was Johns Hopkins because it was the closest sarcoma specialist to Virginia, where I'd grown up. I've had this disease all my life, diagnosed at age 14.
Lynne Parks (01:03): But also, as a creative person, I knew there was this tremendous arts community here, and that was also the deciding factor to move here. My art is very much advocacy based, both with my illness, the after effects of my illness, especially facial difference, I talk about that a lot and address that a lot in my artwork, but also, there's this whole other component. I've been through so much in terms of 30 surgeries, years of chemotherapy and radiation and experimental drug treatments. The thing that got me through that was paying attention to and learning as much as I could about birds. What got me through the pain and the discomfort, pulling myself up off the couch, getting outside and just learning to identified birds through both how they look, how they sound and their behavior.
Lynne Parks (02:15): There's this whole component, the other advocacy part of my art is that I was out there in green space with birds, and I realized each year there are fewer of them. I became involved with a conservation group here in the city, Lights Out Baltimore, we address the bird collision with glass issue, which is a leading cause of bird mortality. It's horrible. A billion birds are dying each year in the United States. I started out as a volunteer with Lights Out Baltimore, just monitoring glass collisions downtown, but then I started doing outreach, talking to school groups, mentoring groups like Lego League and partnering with [inaudible 00:03:10] giving talks, whoever would listen. Amidst of all that, I also started taking photographs of the birds that we found.
Lynne Parks (03:23): What we have to do with Lights Out Baltimore is collect data, and that data is used by scientists nationwide. The sad part of it is that we find a lot of dead birds during migration, because songbirds migrate at night, the light pollution downtown pulls them into these dangerous human environments full of glass, which when they wake up in the morning and they're hungry, what do they see? A tree, but it's not really a tree, it's a reflection of the tree in glass. We find a lot of dead birds, we collect the dead birds, they go home to the freezer. At the end of migration, we have an inventory and then we donate the birds to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, where hundreds of scientists use the data from these birds.
Asset ID: 2020.01.01
Image: Missing Birds: American Kestrel, by Lynne Parks
