Red-breasted Nuthatch by Gloria Adams

Painted: 2/9/2024

About the Mural: These two nuthatches peek out from a residential gate in Harlem, peering curiously from their perch on the side of a painted tree. The birds are a personal favorite for Adams: “I like their effervescent energy and determination when searching for food,” she says. “I think that this serves as a good metaphor for the neighborhood where it is painted.”

Two days after Adams started painting the mural, she found her work had been tagged with graffiti. Instead of painting over the tag, though, she decided to incorporate it into the finished product, highlighting it in bright colors and working it into the swirling background design. “I didn't actually find out who made the tag or talk to them, but I tried to honor their part of the painting,” Adams says—transforming the mural into a collaboration with the neighborhood.

About the Bird: The petite Red-breasted Nuthatch makes its home in dense coniferous forests, where its tinny yank-yank call rings out among the trees. These plucky birds use their strong claws to clamber every which way along trunks and branches low to the ground, searching for insects hidden in the bark, and tend to show little fear when a human comes across their paths. 

Today, Red-breasted Nuthatches can be found year-round in Canada, the northeastern United States, and some high mountains scattered across the country—and every so often, they’ll swarm farther south in massive irruptions. Yet if climate change continues at its current pace, the species is expected to lose two-thirds of its summer range, pushed up into the northern edges of the continent, according to Audubon’s Survival By Degrees report. If warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, those losses would be cut in half, allowing these birds to keep finding habitat across broader stretches of the U.S. and Canada.

About the Artist: Gloria Adams grew up in western Pennsylvania with parents who were working-class, self-taught artists and environmentalists—her father a draftsman and carpenter, and her mother a gifted artist, gardener, and herbalist—and spent her childhood learning about the natural world. Adams went on to earn a degree in Studio Art and Sociology from Oberlin College and a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has since developed through her study of social and political intersectionality and by her use of plant and animal symbolism to explore topics that range from the global climate crisis to race and class in the United States. 

Adams has participated in artist residencies around the world and has received honors for her work including awards, grants, and scholarships. Although most often an oil painter, Adams also has a passion for making wooden furniture and various types of puppets. She teaches painting, drawing, and freshman seminars in puppetry and environmental art/earthworks at City College of New York, CUNY. She has also been a New York City public school teacher in Washington Heights since 2007. Last year, Adams painted another work for the Audubon Mural Project, featuring a lively scene of American Goldfinches and Chipping Sparrows in a community garden in Harlem.