Connecting and Gathering Across a Flyway through the Arts

Flyway Project, a multi-year initiative, brings together artists, scientists, farmers, conservationists, rural and urban communities, and organizations along the spine of major bird migration routes (known as 'flyways') that stretch through the North and South American continents. Key pieces of the project include a series of locally-centered gatherings along the flyway aimed at sharing knowledge and promoting citizen science, art and culture.

For Flyway Project, Canadian-American artist and past Wormfarm resident Austen Camille explores the rich connections between the health and well-being of migratory bird populations and that of rural communities. Meanwhile, the project ties those connections to stewardship and migration in ecologically rich and threatened bioregions that transcend state and national borders.

Conversations on Cultural Change

In 2026, Austen’s work at Wormfarm, along with the first cohort of Flyway Fellows Tia Kramer and Amanda Leigh Evans of Deep Time Collective, and Mark Menjivar, sets in motion a two-year curatorial research effort focusing on building partnerships with local Sauk County stakeholders, including the Aldo Leopold Foundation and International Crane Foundation.

At each location, the team will work to cultivate trust with the intention of deepening relationships and balancing the exchange of listening and sharing. The project will center questions like how do we better tend to the things that connect us? How can we best use conversations to be a vessel for public art? And who gets to participate in and create public art?

I hope Flyway Project creates conversations, both locally and at scale, about imagining new possibilities for what rural abundance can look like. By considering the species whose migratory patterns connect our landscapes, the work intends to impact both the human and other-than-human communities who rely upon a healthy flyway.”

- Austen Camille
Flyway Project expresses over ten years of Austen’s dedication to topics that cross disciplinary boundaries, facilitate understanding between human and other-than-human, build bridges between urban and rural, and connect distant points on a map.

Along with partners, participants, and host sites, Austen and the artist team will develop site-responsive artworks and gather and construct a multimedia archive of conversations, soundscapes, and documentation.

Ultimately a collaborative, community-directed research initiative where every encounter with an individual and a landscape has agency in determining its unfolding, Flyway Project celebrates multiple forms of expertise and artistry, and creates opportunities for ongoing relationships and conversations to connect across the scale of a flyway.

All photos courtesy of Austen Camille.