An Austin Artist Collected 100,000 Cicada Shells
Diego Miró-Rivera has always been drawn to objects and spaces that others overlook. Cigarette butts, chunks of melting snow, and Texas mountain laurel seeds are among the materials the Austin artist has used. Miró-Rivera, 24, draws on the natural world to create works that are often massive in scale. For one piece, he simply stood in different places in a dry lake bed in rural Utah, using his feet to leave hundreds of precisely aligned footprints on the sand. To create another huge piece of land art , he trudged for more than five miles across three snow-covered soccer fields in Brooklyn; his looping path became a huge drawing that he then photographed from a helicopter. His latest work may be his most ambitious yet. "Cicada Paintings," on display at the Line hotel in Austin from November 9–21, is a collection of four collages made of the first 10,000 of the approximately 100,000 cicada shells Miró-Rivera painstakingly collected from tree trunks in Illinois and carefully mounted on burlap.
Miró-Rivera, who returned to his hometown last year after graduating from Yale University with degrees in art and cognitive science, has been interested in cicadas since the fall of 2023. That's when he decided to use their molted exoskeletons—or exuviae, in scientific terms—as vessels for Texas mountain laurel seeds. For a sculpture titled Cicada Lifecycle , he lined up the dried shells in a row on a branch, placing a red, orange, or yellow seed inside the back of each one. The effect is that of an insect on a journey—a fitting depiction of a creature that leads an unusual life.
For that piece, he collected the most common cicada species in Texas: the dog-day cicada, or heat bug. These insects live for about two to five years and spend most of their time underground, where they're focused on consuming nutrients from tree root sap and developing through various immature, nymphal stages. When they emerge annually as adults, they survive for only five to six weeks, during which time they climb up nearby vegetation, typically trees, and shed their nymphal skin to reveal their beady red eyes and translucent wings.
The dog-day cicada emerges every summer, but species in other regions of the United States spend many years underground before they surface. Illinois is home to two major groups, or broods, of these periodical cicadas. Cicadas of Brood XIII are farther north and emerge on a seventeen-year cycle, while cicadas in Brood XIX are farther south and emerge on a thirteen-year cycle. In early summer 2024, these emergences occurred simultaneously for the first time in 221 years—and north-central Illinois, which lies adjacent to both broods, was a draw for cicada seekers.
Last spring, after Miró-Rivera saw headlines about the massive "cicada apocalypse," he wanted to witness the rare event, even if it meant driving across the country. With the possibility of having thousands of cicada exoskeletons at his fingertips, he imagined several collages of various sizes, with cicada shells attached to fabric panels by the thousands. He hoped to cover approximately 450 square feet with the molts. To do that, according to his calculations, he'd need 100,000 exoskeletons. Miró-Rivera asked a photographer and longtime friend, Zane Giordano, to join him on a two-week road trip to the Midwest in late May. Leaving Austin on the evening of May 22, they drove through the night. "We didn't know what phase of the life cycle we would find them in, and we didn't even know where we were going," Miró-Rivera says. "We were just driving until we found cicadas."
On the last leg of their drive, from St. Louis to Chicago, the artists arranged a meeting with Joseph Yoon, a New York City–based chef and edible-insect ambassador who was also in Illinois for the cicada emergence. Yoon passed along his recipe for breaded and fried cicadas, which Miró-Rivera and Giordano tried after a long day of collection later that week. "We didn't have breadcrumbs, so we used tortilla chips," says Giordano. "You would expect the texture or the flavor to be weird, but it was almost like calamari."
Miró-Rivera and Giordano soon fell into a routine. Early each morning, they would head out in the white Subaru Outback they'd borrowed from Miró-Rivera's grandmother and find their first location. They quickly learned that the best locations were in the suburbs, where hundreds of cicadas often emerged from the roots of a single old-growth tree in a park or on someone's front lawn. Miró-Rivera would climb a tree in search of exuviae while Giordano, the logistical side of the operation, would scout the next location, looking for large fences or trees that might be crawling with cicadas.
They worked from sunrise to sunset, and as the summer days grew longer, the cicadas kept emerging by the thousands. Another friend, Lazo Gitchos, 22, drove from Connecticut to join the effort. On one particularly productive day, Miró-Rivera and Gitchos filled nearly fifty quart-size containers, each holding more than three hundred exuviae. The duo climbed century-old trees in residential areas, swiping the containers up the trunks and branches, gathering the molts one after another. Twelve-hour collection days ended in nights of delirious cicada counting. "What's so interesting is their relationship with order and disorder," Miró-Rivera says. "When they emerge, it's so chaotic, but it's also on this extremely precise biological clock."
The team spent two weeks in Chicago and filled more than three hundred quart-size containers with cicada exuviae from approximately seven hundred trees and fences. On the first day, the cicadas were nymphs, crawling aimlessly, which made them seem more approachable—almost endearing. On the last day of collection, there were fewer cicada shells and more flying critters. The insects were more aggressive in their flight and the intensity of their sounds. All 100,000 cicada exuviae eventually made their way back to Texas, either by car or plane. "We couldn't have collected during a better window of time," Miró-Rivera says. "There was just this incredible density."
Nearly five months later, I watched Miró-Rivera at work in his downtown studio at the Line Austin, where he is the artist in residence. He stood hunched over one of the hanging, burlap-covered panels, delicately placing carefully chosen cicada exuviae. The shells with intact feet were easiest to place, since instead of using glue or pins, Miró-Rivera allowed the molts to do what they do naturally and hook onto the surfaces. After placing each insect, he tapped on the panel a few times to see how well the legs had latched on to the burlap.
Some molts on the panels look healthier than others. There is a range of sizes, hues, and opacity levels, all qualities that naturally vary within a cicada brood. Miró-Rivera arranged the shells in a dense but precise pattern, leaving a circle of fabric blank in the middle. Other "paintings" will have different formations, with cicada molts displayed in circles or rows, staggered or aligned, in agreement or in opposition. The opening on each shell from which the insect crawled free is visible, suggesting that the animal may have just left moments earlier. Leaning in for a closer look, I marveled at how each exoskeleton was a perfect mold of the creature that previously inhabited it.
"I'm interested in the cicada as a metaphor for where humanity is now. We exist in massive numbers, and it's chaotic," said Miró-Rivera, "but when we find order, we are so powerful."
