Hitnes

The Image Hunter: On the Trail of John James Audubon

April 23-July 3

The Image Hunter: On the Trail of John James Audubon features work by the Italian artist Hitnes. The exhibition is a culmination of The Image Hunter project, in which Hitnes retraced Audubon’s travels in the United States and created work during a residency at the Halsey Institute at the College of Charleston in 2017 and 2018. The Coastal Discovery Museum is pleased to host the final stop on this national touring exhibition.

In the early half of the nineteenth century, John James Audubon spent decades tracking birds and drawing them, hoping to create a compendium of all of the birds in the United States. Nearly two hundred years later, the Italian painter and muralist Hitnes embarked on a twenty-city road trip to retrace and rediscover the America that Audubon traversed in the making of his opus The Birds of America (1827-39). Traveling along Audubon’s exploratory routes, Hitnes observed,sketched, and painted what he saw, creating an updated visual documentation of Audubon’s birds.

Hitnes’s exhibition documents his journey, elaborating on what it is that drives a person to dedicate multiple decades of their life to pursuing an obsession like Audubon did. The exhibition will feature a range of work informed by his own expedition and will include other objects and ephemera collected on his trek. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a feature-length documentary film on Hitnes’s trip, directed by filmmaker Giacomo Agnetti.


Reception and exhibition tour with the artist: April 28 from 4:30-7 pm Mural Painting at Honey Horn: April 19-29 call for details Birding at Pinckney Island: Every Wednesday at 7:30am, reservations required