Little Shop of Horrors: Artist Wins National Fellowship to Study and Paint Invasive Species

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Snakehead fish, honeybees, kudzu and feral pigs — also called razorbacks — are all invasive species. Some scientists think such invaders are among the top two or three forces driving other species into extinction. Kristin Musgnug finds in them the potential for art and for a different way of looking at the natural world.

Musgnug, an associate professor of painting in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, has won a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. From Sept. 23 through Oct. 19, she will be in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in rural Virginia, one of 20 fellows concentrating on their creative projects at a working retreat for visual artists, writers and composers.

She will spend her time creating works that focus on the effects of the hemlock woolly adelgid, a small, aphidlike insect that threatens the health and sustainability of Eastern hemlock forests. She will do on-site studies in the nearby Shenandoah National Park, which has been particularly ravaged by the insect. Her goal is to use an invasive as a lens through which to examine attitudes and assumptions people have toward the natural world.

“There is a kind of hysteria over certain invasives,” said Musgnug. “I don’t mean to minimize the risks, because some are truly horrible, like the zebra mussel and Dutch elm disease. But others are actually helpful, like honeybees. And some are even beloved, despite their tendency to spread and push out competing species, like the mimosas of southern France.”

A recent study belies the notion that certain exotic invasives such as killer bees and bramble are somehow malevolent species bent on ruling their biological domains.

Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University, and Steven Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have recently published research in which they argue that competition from certain exotic species shows little sign of causing extinctions. On the contrary, in six islands and island chains they studied, they found that invasive plants had become naturalized over the last two centuries and the total diversity of the islands had doubled.

“The implication that there is a pre-existing pure state which the new creature or plant or human will ruin seems to me more fantasy than fact,” said Musgnug. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates about 50,000 alien species in the United States, including plants, animals, insects, fungi and microbes. Although only a relatively small percentage of these are truly invasive, those that are can really do some damage. The truth is, there are some relatively pristine environments, like Hawaiian forests and the Everglades, which are being irreversibly altered by invasives run amok.” 

The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts is one of the nation’s largest year-round artists’ communities, serving more than 3,000 since its founding. Fellows have attracted attention and awards from around the world for their works, including Pulitzer prizes, MacArthur grants, Guggenheim fellowships, Rome Prizes and National Endowment for the Arts awards.