Enjoy A Monarch Migrating Mural This Earth Day

Artist Jane Kim can't help herself from comparing the butterflies she draws to the millions of Americans presently quarantining themselves across the country.

“It’s kind of the perfect symbol for what we’re going through, cocooning in our homes right now and being able to come out more beautiful,” Kim said.

When Americans emerge from their coronavirus cocoons, visiting one of Kim’s Monarch Migrating Murals would serve as a great reminder of the natural beauty surrounding us, even in urban areas. It’s a particularly meaningful lesson with the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day being celebrated on April 22.

Kim has always been interested in the environment. She has a degree in science illustration motivated in large measure by her interest in observing the natural world. It was a three month fellowship at Yosemite National Park, however, that inspired the idea for her migrating murals.

“I learned about the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, I had no idea that we had big horn sheep in California, I didn’t even know we had desert bighorn, but there’s this other subspecies of bighorn and they have this incredible story of nearly being wiped out by a disease in the 90s, so there were only 100 of these sheep left,” Kim said. “There have been a lot of conservation efforts to repopulate this amazing animal and I wanted to tell that story across the I-395 corridor which is the range of this animal’s habitat.”

Through her company, Ink Dwell, which was founded in 2012 along with her husband Thayer Walker, Kim’s migrating murals began with the Sierra Nevada big horn sheep before transitioning to monarch butterflies. The couple view the project as a “serial, never-ending opportunity to tell stories about migration and connection” which will eventually encompass animals representing the land, sky and sea.

Why the monarch?

“As an animal, its one we all have stories around or connections (to) as a kid, it’s the one we know, it’s the butterfly, it’s the poster butterfly,” Kim explains. “Also, the conservation activation is something that we can all do as an individual, to plant native wildflowers and milkweed, so it’s something that’s very empowering as a success story that we can all get involved in.”

Kim was also attracted to the monarch’s numerous migratory routes throughout the United States and Mexico and the corresponding opportunity they offered to reach a wide geography of people.

The drawing and imagery for each mural comes from Kim. Then, a production team of artists help produce the mural.

“I treat each wall like I would a canvas and think about how I would want the viewer to feel when they see the mural,” Kim said. “Each mural tells a unique story to the place.”

Kim makes each mural in her series site-specific. She considered native plant life for each location and researches conservation stories that are important to the places where her murals will call home. In her hometown of San Francisco, site of Ink Dwell’s ninth and most recent Monarch Migrating Mural, that meant expanding beyond the monarch.

“(My) focus (was) not only on the monarch butterfly, but all the various butterflies that are here in San Francisco,” Kim explains. “We have about 34 (species of butterflies), which is not a crazy high number–we used to have so many more–our city in particular has a lot of stories of diminishing butterflies and then extinct populations of butterflies so we don’t want to see that happen to the monarch once again in our city.”

Kim’s San Francisco mural on the side of an 11-story apartment building at 455 Hyde Street in the Tenderloin neighborhood was two days away from completion before the city received a “shelter in place” order, halting the work.

In addition to raising public awareness about these species, Kim proudly notes that in the case of the Monarch Migrating Murals, almost everyone she’s worked with on the commissions have planted native wildflowers and milkweed near the artwork.

“In Winter Park (Florida) at Full Sail University, they relandscaped the area in front of the building (where the mural was painted) to have butterfly habitat,” Kim said. “(At) Weber State in Ogden (Utah), they planted two acres of milkweed on campus because of the project.”

Ink Dwell partners with the Xerces Society, the largest invertebrate conservation group in the world, on its Western Monarch Call to Action, reinforcing how precarious survival of the western monarch population is. According to Xerces Society, the western population of monarch butterflies stands at less than one percent of what it was in the 1980s. That collapse has been the result of multitude factors from habitat loss through human development to continually more aggressive uses of pesticides. The monarch is, but one of dozens of species along the Pacific Coast facing rapidly declining numbers as a direct result of these, and other, man-made environmental calamities.

Veritas Investments, the developer of the 455 Hyde Street property, in addition to commissioning the Monarch Migrating Mural, is working with San Francisco Recreation & Parks as well as community and school groups to advance Xerces Society projects.

“We’ve done a number of murals on buildings as community art, but this project has the added benefit of extending awareness of nature within a dense, urban context,” Veritas Investments Chief Operating Officer Jeff Jerden said. “In these difficult days of sheltering at home, it’s rewarding to know there’s a moment of delight for people getting life’s essentials while afoot in their neighborhood.”

What can one person do to help these imperiled animals? While the problem can seem insurmountable, the best advice is to start small.

As Kim mentioned, in the case of the monarch, plant milkweed in your yard or planter boxes. Milkweed is used by monarchs to lay their eggs and then feed the caterpillars which become butterflies. If you have a yard, consider native plants and flowers instead of merely decorative options which have no benefit to native insects, birds and animals.

Simple behaviors such as not littering, cleaning up litter when you see it on beaches or in forests, driving less, using reusable grocery bags instead of plastic bags, limiting use of single-use plastics such as restaurant takeout utensils and setting your thermostat up in the summer, down in the winter, to conserve energy can make a real difference when undertaken by thousands of people. Conservation groups such as the Xerces Society are also always in need of monetary support; any donation amount you’re able to provide them helps continue their critical work.

“This is a country that loves monuments–we build monuments to social leaders, to politicians, we build monuments to wars, we build monuments to sports heroes, but when we think about our urban monuments, there aren’t many urban monuments to the natural world and that’s a shame because most of us live in cities, and because of that, are a lot less connected to the balance of the natural world,” Walker said. “We wanted to plant a flag and say, ‘this is really important,’ it’s easy to overlook and these are prominent monuments that make the natural world hard to ignore.”