What is it?
Cicada Parade-a is a large-scale collaborative art project organized by The Insect Asylum and Formstone Castle Collective that will be on display in and around Chicago starting in May and running through the end of summer 2024. This project celebrates once-in-221-year re-emergence of Broods XIII and XIX, Illinois’ 17-year and 13-year cicada broods. The periodic cicadas returned by the trillions to Illinois during spring and summer 2024 to re-emerge, sing, and meet others. We will be placing sculptures to increase traffic to places of interest around town from the streets to the parks, inspiring people to explore and find other cicada sculptures, creating joyful encounters that can spark transformative conversations and promote social change. If you’d like to host a Cicada to be on the Cicada Parade-a “route” and drive traffic to your business, fill out the interest form below.
Adopt a Cicada!
Artists get sculptures for FREE if they agree to display them publicly! The number of cicadas available for artists is based on donations and sculpture sales. If you’d like to help support the project, buying a cicada sculpture directly pays for materials and expenses which allows us to give away more sculptures to artists. Sponsorship is another way to help provide more sculptures to artists. Sponsorship comes with perks such as cicadas being displayed at your location for everyone to enjoy. Check out the sponsorship page for more details.
Fill out the Interest Form to let us know how you’d like to get involved.
As we wait for the first 2024 Chicago sculptures to emerge, here are some photos from several of our 600 Cicada Parade-a Baltimore (2021) sculptures.
Emerging from the Dark
The last time Brood XIX emerged was in 2007—what feels like a lifetime ago by now. The Cicada Parade-a represents an emergence from a long period of darkness to sing, make noise and fall in love with the world again. This theme of transformative change will be explored in each piece, not just in the sculptures, but in a collection of stories about looking back and acknowledging the changes and transformations that occur in and around us over long cycles as well as exploring deep cycles on different scales—cycles that repeat over and over in the rhythms of life, from the orbit of an electron around an atom, the cycle of blood around the body, the earth around the sun, the cycle of the tides, election cycles, and even greater to cycles longer than a human lifetime.
The Original Cicada Parade-a Story
Cicada Parade-a was conceived by artists in Baltimore, Maryland during the darkest parts of the Covid-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. We were all stuck inside with scant knowledge about what was happening around us and what was to come. The only sure things were that it wouldn’t last forever, and in a year the 2021 cicadas would return. A small grant was funded by a Maryland State Arts Council giving us just enough money to develop prototype sculptures, but sadly, not enough to realize our initial goals… or so we thought. Somehow, the themes of the project resonated with the local community. Within a few days sponsorship from DAP Products as well as many individual donations funded the first round of sculptures. First 50, then 150 and by the end 600 sculptures.