Installation view, James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice
Past exhibition

Exhibition: James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice

Award-winning artist, naturalist, and writer James Prosek (b. 1975, B.A. 1997) brings his love of the natural world and his lifelong fascination with the naming and classification of nature to the Yale University Art Gallery in James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice. The exhibition brings together objects from the collections of the Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art. It places Prosek’s work in dialogue with a wide range of both man-made objects and those produced by billions of years of evolution, or what naturalist Charles Darwin described as “endless forms most beautiful.” By challenging traditional separations of museum collections into “art” and “artifact,” or “natural” and “man-made,” the artist asks us to explore to what extent these distinctions matter. Is it helpful for us to draw such boundaries? Or do they limit what we are able to see, substituting categories and classifications for experience? “What would happen,” Prosek said, “if we stop putting things into neat categories and simply marvel at the wondrous and complex world of which we are a part?”

James Prosek, Bird Spectrum (detail), 2019

James Prosek, Bird Spectrum (detail), 2019. Bird specimens. Courtesy the artist; specimens provided by the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. © James Prosek

James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice

James Prosek, Study for Paradise Lost, Ponape, 2019. Watercolor, gouache, colored pencil, and graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist and Waqas Wajahat, New York. © James Prosek

James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice

James Prosek, Paradise Lost 1 (Burmese Python and Blue and Yellow Macaw, Everglades), 2019. Oil and acrylic on panel. Courtesy the artist and Waqas Wajahat, New York. © James Prosek

Views of the Exhibition

Exhibition made possible by Donna and Marvin Schwartz, with additional support provided by Susan and Stephen Mandel, Jr., the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, and the Robert Lehman, B.A. 1913, Endowment Fund. Organized by James Prosek with Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art.

Related Publication

Publication
James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice

James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice

James Prosek

With an essay by Edith Devaney