The black body and experience has been appropriated and manipulated in various ways, and obvious or not it plays its heavy-handed part on culture and psyches. Contemporary American artist Nick Cave’s show, Property, at the Nelson Atkins Museum brings together various found objects that have metaphorical and psychological undertones of racial issues, and while this racial art piece literally spills out a cornucopia of items full of emotions and allegorical value, one icon favoured by the artist is historically full to the beak with symbolism: birds. Birds and black lives have been tightly woven together for a long time in black art, black literature, film and more. The bird is…