Morristown, NJ - James Prosek: At Work celebrates the significant projects that define the artist’s first 30 years of artmaking and is the first opportunity for New Jersey audiences to connect with his remarkable creative trajectory. This survey presents the stunning breadth of Prosek’s work, from on-the-spot studies made in the field to studio work realized in paintings, drawings, murals, and sculptures. From plein air studies of the birds of Suriname to life-size portraits of ocean fishes of the Atlantic, migratory animals of the Great Plains and Rockies to prairie plants and their shadows, Prosek chronicles subjects with striking realism from nature and his experiences with them. His work extends to insightful narratives revealed by the changing seasons in his native New England; nearly encyclopedic, world-spanning investigations of eels and trout; and fantastical paintings and taxidermy works that blend realism with imagination. The exhibition will be on view at the Morris Museum starting February 28, 2025.

“Prosek’s discerning eye and meticulous approach results in a complex and sophisticated body of work that spans his voracious interests in our human relationship to the natural world,” said President and CEO Thomas J. Loughman. “We are thrilled to share this look into James’s creative accomplishments with audiences in Northern New Jersey and beyond.”

Early explorations in his bucolic neighborhood led James Prosek (b. 1975), a native of Easton, CT, to a fascination with trout and a drive to depict the diversity of their colors and forms. These early watercolors, painted mostly when the artist was 18 years old, are captured in his first major book, Trout: An Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), published while he was still an undergraduate at Yale University. Prosek set a model for his practice and groundwork for inquiries that endure in his projects to the present day-particularly his interest in naming and ordering nature; in his words, “What happens when we join words to a world that doesn’t have words on it.” He systematically observed, caught, and painted 70 species and subspecies, documenting their vibrant colors and diverse traits. The project continued globally, fishing the 41st Parallel from the Kamchatka Peninsula to France and Spain, from Japan to the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Eastern Turkey, painting another 130 individual trout from all over the Northern Hemisphere.

In his 2012 series Ocean Fishes, Prosek made life-size paintings of 35 individual popular game and food fishes he saw on trips around the Atlantic, including pelagic behemoths like a Swordfish he saw harpooned off Nova Scotia, a Blue Marlin from Cape Verde Islands off West Africa, a Mako Shark caught off Montauk Point, Long Island, and a White Marlin caught off the New Jersey shore. On view in this project is a 16-foot painting of a Great White Shark from Cape Cod, a small oyster set beside it providing almost a humorous scale and color comparison. His global campaign studying eels delves into the cultural connections between current and historic eel fisheries and visually celebrates this most peculiar and amazing fish.

A recent body of work captures the flora and fauna of America’s grasslands-current and historic spaces stretching from Connecticut to Texas. This series debuted at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, Texas; Trespassers, 2023-2024).

Parallel to his artmaking has been a steady output of non-fiction writing for publications like The New York Times and National Geographic, filmmaking, exhibitions, and other public collaborations. A variety of books on his art and his own titles will be available in the Museum’s shop including-Grasslands: Painting the American Prairie (Rizzoli, 2024), Ocean Fishes (Rizzoli, 2012), as well as his illustrated children’s books, Bird, Butterfly, Eel (Simon & Schuster, 2009) and A Good Day’s Fishing (Simon & Schuster, 2004).

James Prosek: At Work will also screen his 2003 Peabody Award-winning documentary, The Compleat Angler. In it, he documents his journey through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of the eponymous book.

A digital press kit is available at this link: James Prosek Digital Press Kit

Support for this exhibition is provided by Barry & Jennifer Jaruzelski and the Martin Guitar Charitable Foundation.

Installation support for this exhibition is provided by Novartis Pharmaceuticals and Melanie and Alan Levitan .

About the Artist

Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek has published over a dozen books and has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine. Prosek's work has been shown at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Yale Center for British Art, The Asia Society Hong Kong Center, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other institutions. He has been an artist-in-residence the Yale University Art Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.