“Paint in the New Year” arrives: Mike Neary carries his “Crow Show” entry, “Paint in the New Year,” into the Arts Illiana gallery on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. Tribune-Star/Joseph C. Garza
“Paint in the New Year” arrives: Mike Neary carries his “Crow Show” entry, “Paint in the New Year,” into the Arts Illiana gallery on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022. Tribune-Star/Joseph C. Garza
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The curious crow in artist Mike Neary's latest painting gets a bird's-eye view of 2021 life.

It's perched on an awning above the revolving-door entrance to a building.

"An observer of sorts," Neary said Wednesday afternoon, as he delivered his "Paint in the New Year" painting to Arts Illiana gallery in downtown Terre Haute for its biennial "Crow Show." The show opens tonight, with a reception from 5 to 8:30 p.m. in a more low-key than usual fashion to prevent spread of COVID-19. Visitors are asked to mask up.

Neary's bird is surrounded by a busy street scene symbolic of the past year. A teetering Confederate monument is roped to the Washington Monument. Beneath the monuments, two men — one white, one Black — talk, while a guy in a red ballcap faces away from all the activity. An elderly man watches a young woman enter the revolving door as an older woman exits. A discarded cloth face mask lies in the street. A woman removes the head from a male mannequin in a business suit. A kid holds an ice cream cone in one hand and a cellphone in the other as he unwittingly steps toward the roadway.

"It's kind of like taking incidents in the news and seeing how they fit together," Neary said. "A lot's happened in the past year."

Crows must be scratching their little bluish-black heads at humans' COVID-19 pandemic behavior. They're smart enough to exchange information with each other and use a vocabulary of several calls, according to scientists. So, crows notice our increased expressions of anger, anxiety, isolation, exhaustion, loss and confusion.

Nah. They probably still focus on our sloppiness, waiting for us to litter roadsides and parking lots with their favorite drive-thru restaurant leftovers.

Either way, Terre Haute serves as a ripe case study of mankind's connection with the corvus brachyrhynchos, better known as the American crow. They've been wintering in this city in epic numbers since the 1990s, drawn by the mix of nighttime urban heat and light with the daytime proximity to farm fields and water along the Wabash River and chronic fast-food litter. A few U.S. cities share this status in attracting tens of thousands of crows, including Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, Auburn and Ithaca in upstate New York, and Danville, Illinois. Even the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale, California is feeling the impact of crows in recent years, though the influx disturbing residents there numbers only around 1,000, according to a New York Times story.

Compared to Terre Haute, that's just a bird dropping in a bucket.

Wabash Valley Audubon Society birders estimated the local roost at 45,895 crows during the outdoors organization's 62nd annual Terre Haute Christmas Bird Count last month. That number resembles those from the city's peak years of 1997 to 2009, when the winter crow roosts ranged from 23,000 to 66,000 birds, said Peter Scott, a Bird Count organizer and retired Indiana State University ecology professor. He and his wife, Diana, were part of a team of 20 Audubon members counting all species of birds in that Dec. 19 outing.

Scott emphasized that he and Diana made an enhanced crow counting effort this time, hanging out for nearly 45 minutes near Fairbanks Park and Woodlawn Cemetery to watch the crows' traditional eastward flight into the city. "Sure enough, a huge flock came over when it was nearly dark," Scott recalled.

Eye-catching scenes such as that epitomize Terre Haute's love-hate relationship with crows. Downtown, just a block from the Arts Illiana gallery, lurks the other side of being a crow city — white splotches covering the Wabash Avenue sidewalks under trees, where the birds perch overnight, cawing and defecating.

Artists in Arts Illiana's "Crow Show" capture it all, unfiltered and often tongue-in-cheek or poignant.

"It's not always pleasant," Jon Robeson, Arts Illiana's executive director, said of the annual crow influx. "But you can have fun with it [in the show]. You can feel the levity."

As Robeson spoke Wednesday, a mechanical crow crafted in typically humorous style by Terre Haute artist Michael Tingley loomed in the center of the gallery. The crow's movements are activated by a motion sensor.

Sixty-five art pieces by Tingley, Neary and 42 other artists were selected for this year's Crow Show by guest curators Haley Burton and Marquise Gibbs, both ISU alums. The artists hail from Indiana, Illinois, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts and Canada. They crafted paintings, and 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional artwork in abstract, symbolic, literal and silhouettes forms.

Neary's latest painting marks his first entry in the Crow Show, but the angular figures in his pictures are evident all around the city. His paintings and murals grace the walls of The Verve, Java Haute, the Black Angus, Industrial Supply and a law firm building's exterior facing Fifth and Wabash.

Neary lived and worked in Terre Haute from the early 1990s until nearly a decade ago, when he and his wife, fellow artist Amy MacLennan, moved to Lebanon, Illinois, where she taught art at McKendree University. Last year, Swope Art Museum hired MacLennan — a Terre Haute native — as its curator, and now Neary is finalizing their move back here. He originally came to this town for a job with Whiteco billboards after earning art degrees from Kansas City Art Institute and Indiana University.

Now 70 years old, the artist is energized by the thought of returning to Terre Haute. "I miss it," Neary said, "and I look forward to getting back to it."

Crows come with the package, of course. He understands. In fact, Neary would like to see crows become the next subject of street-corner sculptures, after years of decorated Coke bottles.

In 21st-century Terre Haute, crows are indeed the real thing.
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