James Prosek is an American artist and writer whose work explores the relationship between the living world and the systems humans use to name, classify, and represent it. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, his practice draws on close observation, field experience, and the histories of art and natural science to examine the boundaries between nature and culture, presence and absence, and order and mystery.
Prosek's work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Drawing Center, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, among others.
In Art, Artifact, Artifice at the Yale University Art Gallery, Prosek brought together his own work with objects from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Peabody Museum, questioning the boundaries between art and artifact, and the systems through which we classify and assign meaning to objects. The accompanying catalog, published by Yale University Press, received the Gold Medal in the Fine Arts category of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Through sculpture, painting, and installation, Prosek considers the ways natural forms carry evidence of their histories and how images and objects can make visible what is no longer physically present. Questions of memory, absence, and the traces that living things leave behind were central to his exhibition Memory, Trees & Shadows at the Edward Hopper House Museum, an expanded version of which, titled James Prosek: Framing Nature, will open at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in fall 2027.
At nineteen, he published his first book, Trout: An Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), featuring seventy watercolor paintings of North American trout. His early travels to study and paint trout and other organisms from life established a way of working that continues to inform his art. He has since published more than a dozen books, including Trout of the World and Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish. The latter was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and inspired a documentary for the PBS series Nature in 2013.
Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic and has collaborated extensively with artists, art historians, ecologists, and individuals working across a wide range of disciplines. His work often grows out of encounters with particular landscapes and the people who study them, bringing close observation into conversation with questions of representation, imagination, and human relationships with the natural world.
He has held artist residencies at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. In 2003, he received a Peabody Award for his documentary following the travels of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler.
In 2004, Prosek co-founded World Trout with Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, to support the conservation of native trout and their habitats. The initiative has raised millions of dollars for grassroots conservation organizations working to protect freshwater ecosystems.
Prosek is a graduate of Yale University and has served as a curatorial affiliate and member of the Leadership Council of the Yale Peabody Museum, as well as on the advisory boards of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and the Connecticut chapter of The Nature Conservancy.
Conservation:
World Trout
World Trout, an on-going conservation effort to preserve native trout species worldwide, was founded by artist and naturalist James Prosek and Yvon Chouinard, avid fly fisherman, climber, and founder of Patagonia, Inc., the outdoor apparel company. Each year, World Trout highlights the efforts of various grassroots environmental organizations working to protect native trout populations and their habitats. A portion of the sales of Patagonia’s World Trout t-shirts featuring James Prosek’s artwork is designated for these organizations. Patagonia is encouraging other companies to join the World Trout campaign as well as 1% For the Planet, a non-profit consortium of businesses donating one percent of sales to environmental non-profits. Participating companies can pledge one percent of sales to World Trout beneficiary groups or other local, regional, or national environmental non-profits.
Chouinard and Prosek initially spawned the preservation effort while fishing Slough Creek in Yellowstone Park. Their shared passion for fly-fishing coupled with a drive to generate awareness around preserving our natural water resources led to the initiative. Patagonia and Prosek officially launched World Trout at the Fly Fishing Retailer Show in Denver, Colorado, September 15, 2004.
“Patagonia is deeply committed to supporting environmental conservation initiatives like World Trout,” said Chouinard. “With Prosek’s extensive knowledge and Patagonia’s global reach, we’ve created a program that will support local grassroots efforts focused on preserving native trout species.”
Prosek spent past eight years (1996-2003) documenting the physical diversity of the trout of Europe, Asia and North Africa through watercolor representations. His extensive research is recorded in Trout of the World, an illustrated history of the native trout he encountered during his travels abroad (updated in 2013). As an individual, he has worked to generate awareness of the threats to native trout species, such as dams, development, wars, pollution, overfishing, and irrigation.
“The existence of wild trout means clean water, arguably our most precious resource,” said Prosek. “Their disappearance would not only be a physical loss, but also a loss to the human imagination.”
The beneficiary groups of the World Trout campaign rotate each year, in order to increase the visibility of the broad range of grassroots organizations dedicated to trout protection and restoration. 2005 recipient groups were the Penobscot River Restoration Trust in Maine, the Greenback Recovery Program through Colorado Trout Unlimited, and the Obirame Restoration Group in Hokkaido, Japan, which is working to save the native sea-run Huchen. Each group received $13,000 in the initial year. 2006 tees raised raise money for the Yellowstone Park Foundation, the Balkan Trout Restoration Group and the Friends of Wild Salmon. Because of efforts of World Trout, the Balkan Trout Restoration Group was founded.
The World Trout Initiative funds only groups and efforts working to restore and protect wild, self-sustainable trout, salmon and other fish species within their native range. This includes both indigenous fresh and saltwater fish. We believe that the best way to accomplish this over the long term is by ensuring that populations have high-quality habitat and adequate stream flows, can migrate between habitats without human intervention, are not negatively impacted by hatchery and aquaculture operations, have protection from harmful non-native species and disease, and are not over-harvested.
We look for innovative groups that produce measurable results and work on long-term solutions to root causes of the problem. Efforts should be quantifiable, with specific goals, objectives and action plans, and should include measures for evaluating success. Because we are a privately held company, we have the freedom to fund groups off the beaten path that base solutions on sound science. Most grants are in the range of $5,000 to $15,000.
Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $2 million to over 200 fish conservation groups.