Wild at art
OKC Zoo marks eighth year of fundraising program.
As the art supplies were set out in front of him,
Zeppy squealed and chattered in excitement.
When it came time to actually put paint to canvas, though, he suddenly went silent, focusing intently on dragging the slim brush across the blank white surface, leaving bold streaks of blue and orange.
“You want to paint? You want to paint? Good. Good,” said Sandra Erickson, a senior keeper in the Oklahoma City Zoo’s bird department, encouraging the salmon-crested cockatoo as he again took the small paintbrush in his large beak, made another mark on the canvas and then dropped it.
“This is why it gets a little messy,” she added with a grin. “He throws it occasionally. Zeppy, paint? Good. Can you pick it up? Good.”
The boisterous almost-50-year-old bird isn’t just one of the OKC Zoo’s longtime ambassadors. In the past few years, Zeppy also has become one of the regular contributors to “Art Gone Wild,” an annual benefit art show and sale that features paintings by a veritable menagerie of the zoo’s denizens.
The eighth annual “Art Gone Wild” exhibit will display artwork from alligators and anacondas, ocelots and okapis, snow leopards and sea lions throughout September in the south lobby gallery of the Myriad Botanical Gardens’ Crystal Bridge. Among the new artists who will be showing their work are the zoo’s 3-year-old Indian rhinoceros Rupert, two baby flamingos and a group of juvenile Galapagos tortoises.
Returning favorites like the great apes and Asian elephants were provided a few larger canvases than last year, meaning that there will be even bigger paintings for their fans to admire and acquire.
“It’s a very unique thing to be able to have something on your wall than an animal has created … and it’s a great way to support everything that we do here,” said Kimberly Leser, the zoo’s curator of behavioral training and enrichment. “We have strong connections with our animals, and we want our guests to have strong connections with our animals. … That’s what we’re here for, is to connect people with the animals and the animal world.”
Enrichment project
The pieces in “Art Gone Wild” are created with safe, nontoxic paint in art sessions done voluntarily by the animals. Painting is part of the eclectic enrichment programs developed by the creatures’ caretakers.
“Our animals get enrichment every single day and stimulated every single day, but how it is (done) is different every day,” Leser said. “Painting with animals is what we call a novel enrichment activity with them, something that we don’t do often. But we’re always looking for budding artists.”
While Zeppy the cockatoo and Piper the sea lion use paint brushes they hold in their mouths to color their canvases, other creatures paint with their flippers, trunks, paws, tails or noses.
“It is a true expression of how animals explore their world. Parrots, they explore using their beak; they don’t have hands like us,” Leser said. “Red pandas, they explore using their hands. Primates, a lot of times they’ll get it all over them, because they explore a lot with their mouths, their lips, but also with their hands and their feet.”
“The Red River hog is one of my favorites, because they start with their snout and then it turns into, like, a full-body experience. I love it. They rub and they get into it,” added Candice Rennels, the zoo’s public relations director. “That’s how they are. They’re always rooting, and they root with their full bodies.”
The snakes also tend to be fullbody painters, creating patterns on canvas after they are covered in the mudlike paint, while the stingrays don’t even realize they are painting. As the flat-bodied fish are sucking shrimp out of a hollow toy in the water, the PVC pipe anchoring the plastic ball to the bottom of the tank sports a paint-loaded brush on the other end that strikes a canvas, creating an abstract work of art every time the stingrays indulge in their special snack.
“People ask, ‘How does a stingray paint?’ Then, you see this contraption,” Rennels said. “It’s a food treat. And it gives them time with the keeper, which they love it when she’s in with them.”
“We don’t just enrich the fluffy animals,” Leser added. “Every animal we touch, every animal we care for, we’re thinking about their mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. We’re thinking about their stimulation. From the smallest insect all the way up to the biggest elephant, they’re all getting choices. They’re all getting opportunities, and we’re always trying to come up with, ‘Well, what else can we provide for them?’”
The paint projects often reflect the individual animals’ personalities and preferences, too. Among the elephant artists, she said one prefers to wield a brush, one uses its trunk in lieu of a brush, and one likes to blow paint onto the canvas.
“We want to encourage those species-appropriate behaviors: The bat that flies, the pig that wallows, the animals that scent and track, that mark, that breed. All of those elements come together to create a full, dynamic life for that animal,” Leser said. “And we’re going to make adjustments so that we’re addressing not only the species opportunities, but the individual opportunities because they all have unique histories.”
Conservation cause
The paintings in “Art Gone Wild” reflect the vast array of techniques the zoo creatures great and small use in their enriching art sessions. Although the zoo sells its animals’ paintings all year, Rennels said “Art Gone Wild” is the only time that such a wide range are shown together and that people can buy them outside the zoo.
Canvases are priced starting at $55, with all net proceeds benefiting the zoo’s conservation efforts.
“Last year, $15,000 actually went to support the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Saving
Animals From Extinction program. … We were very excited we could make this contribution, and Oklahomans helped. It supports 10 endangered species,” Rennels said.
“That’s a collection of years of the show, but that’s a significant donation. The community that is supporting this, we couldn’t do it without them.”
This year’s “Art Gone Wild” sales will go to a new grant program providing OKC metro-area schools money to plant butterfly gardens to support Monarch conservation.
“It’s ‘backyard conservation’ if you will … right here in Oklahoma. It’s an opportunity to work with the Oklahoma City Public Schools and the kiddos, so we’re very excited about that,” Rennels said.
Plus, the exhibit will give Zeppy another reason to keep working on his painting technique. Although his beak is strong enough to crack nuts and seeds and chew down a two-byfour into a thin stick, he handles a paint brush with surprising delicacy and dexterity as he begins work on a second canvas.
“Out in the wild, if you think about it, animals spend a lot of time just looking for food and watching out for predators. Here they don’t have predators, and a lot of times we just give them their food. So, if we just do that, they’re going to get bored easily,” Erickson said, holding the second canvas steady as the cockatoo continued making his mark.
“Parrots can be very smart, and they need a lot of interaction. They’re very social birds; out in the wild, they’re going to live in large groups. So, we try to give them things to kind of keep them busy. … He was one that we were looking for other behaviors, so we decided to try painting. He picked up on it really quickly, and he seems to like it.”