"Although he espoused a life-long and deeply felt love for birds, in the pursuit of his project Audubon would trap, kill, and then string on wire the specimens he drew, the wire allowing him to pose his subject in the attitude he thought would best highlight its “beauteous form.” It was this “natural” approach to staging the birds he drew that set Audubon apart from other naturalist-artists of his time. In this disjoint between appearances and reality lies an apt metaphor for Audubon and his life project: A man of contradictions, the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Audubon’s Enlightenment empiricism extended to his views on race, regardless of, or perhaps because of, his own identity...Audubon relied on both Black and Indigenous knowledge to identify, locate, and track down the birds he painstakingly drew. He also incorporated what he was taught about birds by Black and Indigenous people into his writing. However, Audubon bought, held, and sold enslaved humans, at the same time."

An excerpt from “John James Audubon at Two Hundred and Forty” - Alina Romo, Allan Hancock College