Will Rogue Taxidermy Come to Michigan – Or Has It Already?

For most of us in Mid-Michigan, an animal mounted on the wall is a source of pride and the end of a story about a successful hunt.

In Southern California, a group of female artists have made what they call "rogue taxidermy", the hottest thing on the art scene .

According to the L.A. Times, the "rogue taxidermy" movement has been around for the past ten years or so. One of the artists, Brooke Weston, says her art can be described as “if Disneyland and a natural history museum got together”. Some of the artists prepare the dead animals themselves, while Brooke takes old taxidermy mounts and remakes them. Some artists tell a story with the mounted animals, but some of Brooke's end up hollowed out and re-imagined as... doll houses.

(This reminds me of Lansing's Nick Saade, who posed stuffed chipmunks in a Michigan/Michigan State football game - uniforms and all. So, Nick may have been way ahead of the West Coast on this.)

And, rogue taxidermy is being called "female-empowering". Allis Markham owns Prey Taxidermy in L.A. and says the workshops she holds are filled with women. In her words, “(About) 20,000 years ago, women were doing the cooking and the slaughtering and the storing. … We’re very comfortable with what people would consider gross jobs”.

Makes sense. Here's the story. (With photos of a deer dollhouse)

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