Cooper Lobby Artist Feature: Andrea Bersaglieri, Flags for the Fleeting
What do you do with a dead bird you find on the sidewalk? Most of us step around it and keep moving. Andrea Bersaglieri stopped — and kept stopping, again and again, until something shifted.
It was spring 2020. The world had gone quiet in ways it never had before. And in that stillness, Bersaglieri began noticing small bodies on the ground: sparrows, finches, the occasional pigeon. Not unusual for the season — but now impossible to ignore. In a moment defined by collective fragility and the sudden awareness of how quickly ordinary life can end, these creatures carried a weight they'd never carried before.
She began painting them.
The works now installed in the Cooper Design Space lobby grew from that practice — from a painter's instinct to look closely at what others pass over. Rendered with the exacting precision that defines Bersaglieri's three-decade career, the birds are neither morbid trophies nor sentimental elegies. They are witnesses. Their small, still forms ask the same questions the pandemic did: What is fragile? What is fleeting? What are we part of, whether we acknowledge it or not?
Over time, the imagery opened into something larger. Bersaglieri recognized in these birds the figure of the canary in the coal mine — a creature whose death is a message, a warning embedded in the natural world that we've grown too distracted to read. Her flags don't shout that message. They hold it quietly, the way grief does, the way a feather on the ground does: small, easy to miss, impossible to forget once you've really seen it.
This is the territory Bersaglieri has been mapping for years. Trained in drawing and painting at California State University Long Beach, with time spent studying in Florence, Rome, and Philadelphia, she has increasingly turned her analytical eye toward what lies beneath the surface — literally. Roots, fungi, decomposing matter, the microscopic systems that make life possible and break it back down again. She brought this lens to the International Union of Soil Scientists Centennial Conference in Florence, and to Mexico City Art Week through Casa Lu, finding unlikely audiences for work that insists on the interconnectedness of everything.
Her flags do not demand your attention. They wait for it.
In the flow of a workday — coffee in hand, phone in pocket, mind already three steps ahead — these images offer a different kind of interruption. Not a disruption, but an invitation to pause. To notice. To remember that the systems sustaining us are ancient, intricate, and not invulnerable.
The birds Bersaglieri paints lived briefly, fully, and without pretense. Her flags are memorials to that — and a quiet argument that paying attention is itself a form of care.