Did you know that a flock of feeding vultures is called a “wake”?
I learned that fact thanks to the artist Ebony G .Patterson, who has just placed 400 larger-than-life sculptures of glittery black vultures in the New York Botanical Garden as part of her expansive new show “…things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting….”
The exhibition, on view through September 17, is split between two locales amidst the botanical garden’s 250 verdant acres. The vultures sit on a lawn that has been sliced into, like a wound, and filled with a tight palette of bruise-like red, black and purple flora. (Note, among the medicinal plants, the toxic ricin.) Patterson says she specifically worked with the gardens’s horticulture staff to include specimens that will die as summer heats up and directed that they be left to decay so as to regenerate the soil, and “so that the full cycle remains visible,” she says.
