Aviary art is all the rage these days. Four parrots and a cockatoo are on show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami as part of an installation (Speechless, until 21 February) by the Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol, and 12 pairs of zebra finches will be at New York’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery this month, as part of Mark Dion’s exhibition Library for the Birds of New York and Other Marvels (25 February-16 April). At the centre of the gallery will be a tree holding hundreds of books. “The books are about things birds should know about,” Dion says, noting that a number of them will be about cats. “My rule about working with animals is that I have to leave them in a better state than I found them,” he says. “I’ve never done this project before where I haven’t ended up with more birds than I started with. That’s another way to tell the birds are doing well—they’ll start to breed.”
