It's such a special and beautiful creature. It's like a flying jewel.

The hope we can get from seeing these 
flying jewels and the beauty of it 

and the things that we take for granted, you know, 
things that we don't even bother to see.

My name is María Berrío and I am an artist. 
I live and work in Brooklyn, New York. 

I come from South America. I was born in 
Colombia and I grew up in Bogota, but we

had a farm outside of the city and I started to work on this series of hummingbirds during the pandemic. It started with this idea of the 
Mojave people who believed that the humans 

were underground and then a hummingbird 
came and brought humans into the light.

So in having in mind what we were going through 
during the pandemic I thought it was very 

meaningful subject to start this series of crafting 
100 hummingbirds made out of paper. 

So that's how the series emerged with that idea.
 And then I started to research more 

about hummingbirds and I started to research 
what they signify in different cultures.

The Aztecs thought of hummingbirds as warriors
so it all started to resonate with what 

humans were going through, 
and what we were all living.

With the hummingbirds, I find such magic when 
you make one because it's like you are 

kind of starting out with nothing and then you 
glue all these pieces of paper and

you do like watercolor paint and then suddenly
you see a creature and it brings

so much fantasy and it brings so much mystery.
The main intention when 

I started this series was this idea of coming into
the light so this very hopeful idea of seeing all.

these birds flying around you but also 
in a sense I also wanted to create some

sort of awareness of how disconnected 
we feel with nature and how we are nature.

There's the bittersweetness. 
There is hope, but there's also

the reality so a lot of my work has that. 
I kind of take … snippets of what we're

going through but then I put them through
a fantastical lens … So I think this 

piece is going to have both. It's going to have
birds that are alive and birds that are dead.

Birds have always been in my work and have 
always had some sort of symbolism. In this

particular series it's just this idea of this 
magical being that exists but that

may not exist … because of us.  They started to become a little diary, during the pandemic, after the pandemic, and like this path of us coming out of this, 

or staying in it or falling down a bit. 
I feel like art has always been like a diary, in a sense.

I usually create bodies of work that narrate a story, but there's always 

a hopeful piece. To me, beauty and hope in the work is very important.