Cynthia Alby, Artist Statement

What Are We Losing?

As an educator, I tend to be focused on progress: move forward, make things better, now. But I
am all too aware that much of our progress diminishes rather than enriches. Thankfully, my art
provides a means to engage others with a question I am obsessed with, In our unquestioning
sprint towards the future, what are we losing?

Nowhere is this loss more clearly embodied than through the industrialization of our food the
foundation of our human lives. We now produce fruits, vegetables, grains, and farm animals with
one, sad goal in mind bigger, cheaper, and better suited for travel. The result is uniform, bland,
and spotless fruits and vegetables that cant survive without copious quantities of pesticides,
herbicides, and chemical fertilizers and turkeys that must be artificially inseminated because they
can no longer reproduce naturally. Most sheep and goats we have manufactured cannot survive
without a ceaseless regimen of wormers, antibiotics, and other medical interventions. But while
many unique, hardy, and culturally significant plants and animals are already lost to us, there are
individuals around the world attempting to stem the tide.

Life and art merged for me when my husband and I created a farm, Shangri-Baa, to raise a
critically endangered breed of sheep (as well as a rare breed of livestock guardian dogs, heritage
breed chickens, and heirloom fruits and vegetables). The Gulf Coast Native Sheep is a unique
and hardy breed, descended from the flocks brought by the Spaniards in the 1500s. They
evolved to thrive in the heat of the southeast and once numbered in the hundreds of thousands
here. Through documentary photography and digital art portraiture of our sheep, I have the
opportunity to highlight a breed we are losing and draw attention not only to this one breed, but
to the 150 breeds of endangered livestock in the U.S. as well as edible plants whose unique
genetics will be lost forever if we don't take action. It is my goal as an artist to allow these sheep
to represent all the culturally important species who provided the foundation for a nation yet are
fast being replaced by industrialized species. What can we learn (or perhaps even remember on
some ancient, cellular level) by focusing on these animals as individuals and seeing them as
worthy of documentation and portraiture? What can they tell us about what we are losing?