A few months ago someone on my favorite discord forum posted a call for artists from the Cicada Parade-a public art project, where an art collective in Baltimore started making plaster cicadas to decorate & hang up this summer celebrating the emergence of Brood X. I picked up #26 and #30, spent far too long decorating them, and then got permission to hang them up at my local library:
“Kayla” was named & designed with (partial) direction from my 8 year old, who insisted that she needed a superhero cape.
“Ecosystem” is a mix and match and re-configuration of embroidery designs (mostly from Urban Threads & Embroidery Library) to represent the web of life-forms the cicadas live inside-- they spend most of their 17 years underground drinking the phloem (root sap) out of the roots of whatever deciduous trees they’re underneath, and then come out in such huge numbers that they can reproduce despite the fact that everything eats them.
AMAZING! I love these so so much! Brood X is such a cool natural phenomenon to learn about and do art to celebrate. Oddly, this the second time today typing and reading about Brood X and I don’t live anywhere near cicada territory!
Awesome!! I keep waiting for them to arrive in my area; no signs yet. And I would imagine that many of these art pieces are going to have actual cicadas sitting on them pretty soon.
I actually missed the 2004 emergence because I spent half the year working on a ranch in CO, so my last giant Cicada summer was when I was the same age my kid is now.
They only come out once the soil temperature gets up to 64F. We only really started to see them in our neighborhood this week, and the back yard is still a little too cool; we were at my mother’s in NoVa on Sunday, and her lovely shaded yard had a few, but the schoolyard down the street with the big open field had hundreds climbing their fence.
