James Prosek ’97 B.A., an artist, writer, and naturalist, opens his new exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) with a mural in the museum’s lobby depicting a flock of passenger pigeons in silhouette flying through a forest of American chestnut trees.
Passenger pigeons once constituted up to 25% of North America’s bird biomass. They darkened the skies in great flocks until humans had hunted them into extinction by the early 20th century. The American chestnut tree was a common forest tree in the eastern United States until a blight imported from Asia rendered it functionally extinct — shoots from surviving root stock die before maturity.
Numerals dot the mural, a reference to field guides, which typically feature keys to match the numbers to the names of the plants and animals — but Prosek’s mural has no key.
“A lot of this show is about the tension between the named world and the world as it was before we put names on it,” said Prosek, the 2018 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at YUAG, who organized the exhibition. “I paint these murals with the numbers absent a key, so people can’t satisfy their desire to verify the names. I want them to enjoy nature without the need to see it through the lens of language.”
The exhibition, “James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice,” explores humans’ attempts to define, categorize, and impose order onto nature. Prosek, whose work has been exhibited in museums worldwide, developed a fascination for nature while trout fishing as child.
“Nature is an interconnected, constantly changing system,” said Prosek, who lives in Easton, Connecticut. “When we communicate that continuum, we have to draw lines between things and label pieces because our brains are order-making and pattern-seeking machines. Then we lose sight of nature’s messiness and what the planet requires to be healthy, which is an integrated, interconnected whole. Essentially, we come to live in the map we’ve made instead of the actual territory, the land.”
The exhibition, on view through June 7, combines Prosek’s artwork — watercolors of fanciful fauna, like a self-portrait that shows the artist’s head on the body of a red-tailed hawk; abstract pieces, including a work composed of slithery, overlapping ink impressions of an eel; and playful sculptures, such as a mounted duck with a drill-bit for a bill — with objects from YUAG, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Paintings by Paul Gauguin, John Constable, and Mark Rothko are displayed alongside natural history artifacts and specimens.
“James is a natural collaborator, an artist whose infectious enthusiasm and passion for nature has helped us marvel anew at the complexity of the world around us,” said Stephanie Wiles, the Henry J Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery. “His choices of natural objects and artworks from the Peabody, YCBA, and art gallery challenged us to question the separations between nature and art.”
The exhibition’s centerpiece, “Bird Spectrum,” is a color spectrum made from more than 200 bird specimens from the Peabody’s collection. The spectrum, whose brilliant colors stretch across a wall in the show’s fourth-floor exhibition space, is a commentary on people’s compulsion to forge boundaries that don’t naturally exist.
“There are no clear lines in nature,” Prosek said. “On the color spectrum, there is no one place where red ends and orange begins.”
To create the spectrum, Prosek first photographed each individual specimen and then mapped out the piece digitally. Each specimen was pinned to the gallery wall using a printout of the digital map as a guide.
“Besides being an illustration of the interconnectedness of nature, the gradations between colors are intended to be slightly messy to reflect the fuzziness of boundaries,” said Prosek, who collected two of the spectrum’s specimens during a 2010 Peabody expedition to the tropical forests of Suriname. “The piece is intended to memorialize these creatures that lost their lives for the advancement of our knowledge. It’s also a testament to the singular beauty of birds.”
Prosek published his first book, “Trout: An Illustrated History,” in 1996 while a Yale undergraduate. The exhibition includes a selection of 14 of his watercolors of trout species. In 2010, he saw a swordfish get harpooned off of Nova Scotia. His life-size painting of the fish is on view.
“Once a fish is harpooned, the fishermen let it drift until it dies because it’s dangerous to haul them on board alive,” he said. “Usually they come on board brown. Occasionally one will flicker back to its living colors right before it dies. Luckily, I got to see that.”
Prosek noted that the border between the blue of its back and silvery gray of its belly is fuzzy, not a sharp line as one might see in a field-guide rendering. The artist’s silhouetted reflection is visible in the fish’s eye.
“I don’t want to ignore the fact that I’m there,” he said. “It’s not just a portrait of an individual fish. It’s a portrait of my experience with that fish.”
Can’t get to New Haven? Tour the exhibition via the art gallery’s mobile app.
