On a warm May afternoon in Mount Washington, Kentucky, artist Diego Miró-Rivera and his pal Zane Giordano arrived from Austin, Texas. They drove around looking for what they call “juiced up” trees.
“Juiced up is, that on one side of the tree, you can see more than 100 cicadas on it,” Miró-Rivera explained.
Miró-Rivera makes art that’s huge and composed of thousands of cicada shells. The shells are hung on burlap canvas and arranged in dense patterns, so he needs lots of them.
Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are prime hunting grounds right now as Brood XIV emerges from a 17-year underground rest.
Eventually, Miró-Rivera and Giordano found a “juiced up” tree in someone’s front yard and asked a man outside, working on his car, for permission to take a closer look. As one might imagine, it’s hard for some folks to believe others find value in these leftover husks.
After a bit of explaining to the bemused homeowner, he laughed and gave the go-ahead.
They started carefully collecting shells, trying not to break them.
“Here we pinch the body and it unlatches it, and then we pull back,” Miró-Rivera said, demonstrating the careful way they remove cicada shells without breaking off the hook-like arms.
The goal is to get 100,000 shells, which means they’ll do this over and over and over.
Jonathan Larson, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, said the 17-year cicada cycle is all about sex. It’s not hard to understand cicadas, he joked. Just imagine a college party with boy bands.
“They’re all hanging out, they’re like, ‘Bro, you are amazing! Bro, you are a great singer! Let’s all sing together!’ and then they start to make a chorus,” he said. “The chorus starts to attract the females to the tree, they pair off then, and they sing a courtship song to an individual female – kind of like a guitar guy at a college party.”
But cicadas have a short life. Once they mate, they’re pretty much done.
“They put a lot of energy into singing, a lot of energy into mating and then – dead,” Larson said.
With most of the sightings reported in central Kentucky, Larson likes to call this the “Bourbon Brood.” But he said they are the descendants of the same cicadas the Pilgrims saw in 1634.
Larson said the bugs connect us to history and serve as milestones in his own life. He remembers seeing them as a kid. Now, he hunts for them in the backyard with his daughter.
“My daughter is 8 right now and this will come back out in 17 years, so she’ll be 25 [next time], and it’ll be a very different relationship between us by then,” he said. “I think it puts things in perspective, they’re a very helpful insect for that.”
Back in Mount Washington, Giordano agreed with Larson’s feelings on perspective. He said they’ve been working on cicada art for about a year, and its meaning is still evolving for them.
“Something we constantly say to each other is like, there’s something about cicadas, there’s something about it,” he said.
Miró-Rivera said, lately, cicada cycles have even taught him something about political cycles. He created one piece entirely during the November election, from when polls opened to when they closed.
“It’s almost the same way that these cicadas, if you’re not part of a brood and you’re not emerging in cycle with other cicadas, it’s like you get lost in a different kind of chaos,” he said.
Miró-Rivera knows other people may find different lessons in his work. He just hopes they’ll take away some appreciation for the humble cicada.
He said anyone who wants to contribute cicada shells to the art project can contact him via his website or on Instagram for more instructions.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU in Kentucky and NPR.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM