Posted by Illustrator and Artist: Amie Ziner on Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Chuckles, a ring-necked African dove in mid-molt, is perched on the top of his cage, strutting, cooing, and preening. Artist and educator Amie Ziner explains that “preening is what birds do to clean their feathers and to make them more usable for flying. Now, Chuckles can’t fly, not because he was ever hurt or anything, but because he has special feathers.” Feathers, Ziner explains, that she talked about the day before.
Tuesday marked the latest installment in a series of online classes Ziner has been conducting through her professional Facebook page since the beginning of last week, in response to the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent school closures.
Ziner has done and will do three classes a week, each at 10 a.m. and each an hour long.
Mondays find her teaching art classes for elementary and middle school students. Tuesday is science class. And Friday is a nature class, focusing on plants, “because that’s a special area of interest,” Ziner said.
In conducting her classes, Ziner is drawing on a lifetime of experience. Ziner is a prolific artist — primarily an oil painter — who has exhibited in dozens of New Haven shows. Her work ranges from cartoons and drawings of burlesque dancers to still lifes and nature illustration. She collaborated with author Bob Crelin on the children’s book There Once Was a Sky Full of Stars. She has taught art for decades in school and with private students. In the past, she has been a substitute teacher with ACES. “I got to teach at most of the schools in the New Haven area,” she said. She has done set designs for stages, often with fellow artist David Sepulveda, working with Yale Repertory Theatre, Bregamos, New Haven’s Puerto Rican festival, and most recently Collective Consciousness Theatre. And she’s currently a ranger at the Ansonia Nature Center, where she works with school and daycare groups.
“I don’t have a single focus,” Ziner said. “I have that curse that I think that everything is interesting.”
But why online classes?
“Like many people, we’re basically furloughed,” Ziner said of her work at the Ansonia Nature Center. But that didn’t mean she had to stop what she was doing there, or stop with any of the education she was involved in. In the current situation, she thought, “what did it mean for a mom with kids at home? What is that going to feel like? Kids have to be really frightened by all this. The conversation around the dinner table has to be really unusual. It’s almost an emergency. I have to address how those kids are feeling. How kids feel about the natural world is my priority and it is a priority for us to understand our relationship to this planet, that it’s not abusive. It has to be one of nurturing, just like we take care of our kids.”
Ziner.
With the blessings of senior staff at the nature center, “I went to the nature center and picked up our dove” — that would be Chuckles — and “I have a tank with the Madagascar hissing cockroaches” that the nature center keeps. Ziner referred to them as “Hollywood bugs,” since they’re usually the kinds of insects seen in adventure movies featuring pits full of insects (which requires there to be a “bug wrangler,” Ziner noted, in the credits).
As would be true at the Nature Center, Ziner’s classes will feature the animals, though they will also find Ziner heading outside to give further instruction. She lives close to the shore in Milford, which “has 22 miles of coastline — more than any other town in Connecticut,” Ziner said. In a visit to the beach, she will “talk about the littoral zone and the splash zone and how much biodiversity there is,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go wading in the water a bit.”
“I’m going to be talking about really basic stuff because I think there’s a tremendous amount of disengagement with nature,” Ziner continued. She meets people who come to the Ansonia Nature Center who “don’t know what kind of maple tree makes syrup, or don’t even know that it comes from a tree,” she said. Ziner wasn’t blaming them as individuals for this disengagement. To her, it was a symptom of a broader societal condition — one that more knowledge about the world, and art, can disrupt.
For Ziner, art “helps with looking at things, with seeing things. Artists have an internal dialogue going on with whatever they’re working on. They’re used to thinking deeply about things. You see lots of meditation and poetry where people are talking about other ways to be in the world, and that’s art — another way of being in the world. It takes me out of the everyday, and it’s something I can’t live without.”
For decades, Ziner has made the commingling of art and life an everyday pursuit. “Art is what makes life accessible and interesting,” she said. “So the thing I’ve tried to do is expand my practice. It’s not being in a studio. It’s all the things. It’s making videos about the wildlife in the area. It’s doing public service through posters. And teaching is a quintessential part of what I think of as my practice.”
Every day, she added, “I try to make something beautiful, useful, or tasty. Sometimes I get lucky and do two out of three. Everything you do is part of your practice.”
Her approach made it easier for her to see ways to act when the Covid-19 outbreak began. She asked: “’How can I help with that?’ That’s what teachers do,” Ziner said. In addition to starting her online classes, she is joining the effort nationwide to make face masks. “I ordered supplies to make a ton,” including bleached muslin, thread, and twill ribbon. “I’m going to use my 40-year-old sewing machine and pop out as many as I can.”
Ziner’s age and asthma mean that she is statistically in a high-risk group should she catch Covid-19. She worries that “a lot of the people I know have serious health issues are going to be directly affected by this in a bad way…. We could do a better job of reaching out to people who are marginalized — people in homeless shelthers. The weather is still not warm at night. I worry about elderly people. We have no formalized system for taking care of older people in this country.”
“What can we do for each other? I think that’s what we should take from this experience,” she added.
And at the same time, she has noted the outpouring of artistic endeavors that she has seen in the past couple weeks. “People are posting poetry and art, and all of these creative endeavors,” she said. She finds hope in it. Art is a chance to “look at things more philosophically and spiritually,” she said, and to process what’s happening. “To take it all in and be present — that’s a gift,” Ziner said. “All those things that are important to you — your friends and family and people you love. As an artist, your practice has to embrace this. If you’re in the middle of a war and you’re Picasso, you do Guernica.”
For Ziner, there are lessons to be learned from the outbreak that speak to the disconnection from nature she noticed in some visitors to the nature center, and the disconnection she feels many have from one another. The outbreak and the social isolation has given everyone a chance to stop and look around, and reassess.
“People are noticing things because they’re forced to be quiet,” she said. She’s hopeful that they “will find things that are important to them that they’ve overlooked.”
For her part, Ziner said, “I’m just going to be present in this, and let it teach me, and tell me what’s important. So often we think of living as imposing our wills on situations.” Now, when she looks around, she notices, under the commotion of the news and the fear of contagion, a paradoxical underlying calm. There are no contrails in the sky because there’s so little air traffic, she noticed. “It’s kind of an amazing thing,” she said.
“This virus is a horrifying gift — a life-and-death gift — for us to examine our priorities for how we want to be in this world,” she continued. “I’d like to think that people are sick and tired of this kind of selfish evilness that has taken over this country…. I think people are really tired of that, and they’d like to see beautiful things, profound things, deep things, that move us forward in a positive way.”
That could begin with very simple steps. “Go outside and the spring is happening,” Ziner said. “The swamp maple is covered with little red furry blossoms. The iris is poking out from the ground. The daffodils are blooming like mad. Those are things that happen every year. This is not about the chaos. This is just Earth doing its thing. Every year it comes to life.”
Amie Ziner’s art, science, and nature classes, respectively, appear on her professional Facebook page Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays at 10 a.m.
Just for the record, ALL the animals from the Ansonia Nature Center are being cared for by staff, and some by licensed animal rescues like Wings of Hope, who are keeping our owls safe. We are so grateful for their help.
We all get through this, together.