Mr. Weinberg has three cartons of eggs on a shelf in his office, next to a piece by John Baldessari, a box of M&M’s with a sign that reads “No More Boring Art.”

“I have yet to discuss either with our conservator or our registrar as to what to do with them,” he said this week. “I like the idea of Hope making art about and from the chickens. If you eat the eggs, they become part of you. If you choose to save them, they are a kind of memento mori.” (No, they don’t smell, he said. Eggshells are porous, and their contents will eventually evaporate.)

Malcolm Daniel, curator of the photography department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said he’s in the former category: a confirmed Sandrow egg eater. “And they are tasty,” Mr. Daniel wrote in an e-mail message. “I don’t think that having a collection of aging eggs in my museum office would be the best thing, but on the other hand, I’d love to have a collection of her pictures in my office.

“Hope’s chickens are just about the wackiest looking birds I’ve seen, and she’s managed to make some wonderfully expressive and fun pictures of Shinnecock and family,” he continued. “Every now and then I open up her Web cam and take a peek at what the birds are doing, then move on to other work, forgetting about them until, all of a sudden, I hear a cock-a-doodle-doo coming out of my computer speakers!”

For the last three decades, Ms. Sandrow, whose career began in the early-’80s East Village, has made art, mostly photographs, that has tackled science, myth-making and all manner of identity issues, and has been shown everywhere from Gracie Mansion, the East Village gallery, to the Whitney. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Met. But Ms. Sandrow’s chicken portraits were the first portraits she had composed since the 1980s, when so many of the friends she had photographed died of AIDS, artists like Peter Hujar, Greer Lankton and Jimmy De Sana.

She didn’t tell anyone about her portrait project, she said. “I was afraid people would laugh at me.” And then Ms. Gund phoned with her commission. “I just about fell off my chair,” Ms. Sandrow said.

Image Ms. Sandrow has turned her home, her garden and her chickens into an ever-evolving art installation. Credit... Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

As Ms. Gund explained, “I was so excited by the breadth of these photographs, and so taken with the backstory of each chicken, which Hope provides, and the narrative that she pursues. You wouldn’t think somebody could be so involved with chickens.”