Camila Kerwin’s Swift

“I first came across Althea Sherman’s story a couple years ago,” says comics creator Camila Kerwin about discovering the trailblazing bird lover and ornithologist. “Althea captivated me immediately—her total devotion to the wonder in her own backyard, her willingness to start anew in midlife, her crankiness and big opinions.” It also helped that Kerwin, a journalist who creates comics and radio programming, had developed a pandemic-era interest in birding. For this month’s Drawn to MoMA, she tells Sherman’s story with uncommon specificity and empathy. “I leaned heavily into texts from ornithologists who knew her,” Kerwin says. “I incorporated almost no dialogue, deferring mostly to her own writings and correspondence to let Sherman ‘speak for herself.’ The resulting piece is, of course, an approximation of her, but it is rooted as much as possible in who she really was.”

Camila Kerwin is a journalist who makes comics and radio. Her visual and audio work has appeared in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, and on StoryCorps and NPR’s On Point and Marketplace. She is currently working on a nonfiction graphic novel about kids and gun violence in the US.

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