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"View Slideshow\n\nMany years ago I attended an exhibition of a local artist's paintings. The pieces featured great swipes of black upon white backgrounds. My husband and I were at the show with a friend who had an art-history background and worked for a gallery; her knowledge was both deeper and broader than mine. I turned to her and asked if she liked the paintings. \"They are very livable,\" she replied.\n\nThis precisely delivered opinion introduced me to a whole new level of discernment. I was long past matching a work to my sofa, but until then I hadn't spent much time contemplating the division between art that is easy to live with and art that may not be.\n\nThen last year my husband and I were invited to a New Year's open house at the residence of Elizabeth and Marc Wilson. (Mr. Wilson was at the time the director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.) Their modern home (AD, June 2002) sits up on a hill in the countryside of northeastern Missouri and it is an engaging marriage of steel and prairie. Allowed to wander alone through the house, we came upon a photograph in the master bedroom. I still have not shaken its impression, perhaps because it made me confront this issue head-on.\n\nThe photograph is by Terry Evans and captures a trumpeter swan specimen, preserved for more than a hundred years at the Chicago Field Museum. The swan, its neck curved back upon its body, is bound with a wide swath of coarse cotton, which is unevenly secured by random stitches. An aged tag attached to the bird's foot with a thin, twisted wire is the only touch of color in the otherwise black-and-white composition.\n\nEvans photographed hundreds of specimens from the drawers of the Chicago Field Museum. In a quest to understand the wildlife of the prairie, scientists gathered plants, insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Turning her lens on the subjects sometimes unsettled Evans, whose parents were dying as she worked on this project. When I asked her about the image of the swan, she told me, \"It is hanging in my living room. Its beauty and sadness sum up everything I thought about the specimens that I photographed. I found it extremely sad to realize that the swan had to be killed in order to study it, but I also was moved by the care in the way it was prepared. I think of that muslin that wraps it as a shroud.\"\n\nThere is so much that I react to when I view Evans's swan: the physical beauty of the creature, the curve of its neck, the detail of its feathers. The fabric wrapping the bird makes me remember winding the satin ribbons around the toe shoes I wore as a girl.\n\nI perceive that violence in the swan, but I also see peace. My husband appreciates the photograph as well. My children, on the other hand, see it differently. I was surprised to discover that my middle son (I have three children, ages 8, 11, and 14) finds it quite disturbing. He is an outdoorsman like my husband and often reminds me of the necessity of the life cycle. \"It's not beautiful, it's dead. I don't want that in our house,\" he tells me, looking at the piece in a catalogue. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are questioning.\n\nI understand his discomfort. When I see rooms containing the artwork of Francis Bacon, I marvel at the owners' selections. Bacon's ouevre reflects a pain that is so real, so raw, so recognizable that I could not face it every day.\n\nYet I yearn for Evans's trumpeter swan. When I walk through my living room, I imagine it above my mantel. The photo is not a stretch for me; it is still within my comfort zone. But I realize it will unnerve others, and I wonder if there is merit in making them stretch. \"I do think there is value in bringing ourselves to art that makes us uncomfortable,\" says Evans, \"because if we explore that discomfort, we come to understand ourselves better.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/terry-evans-field-museum-swan-patricia-shackelford>