Biography

Artist, writer, activist, and naturalist James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek has shown his paintings of trout and other natural history subjects with the Gerald Peters Gallery, New York and Santa Fe; Meredith Long Gallery, Houston; as well as with Wajahat/Ingrao, New York, and the DUMBO Arts Center, Brooklyn. His first solo museum showing was at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2007-2008. Prosek is a regular contributor to The New York Times and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. In 2004 he co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings. As of 2009, World Trout has raised over 350,000 for coldwater conservation.

Prosek’s current work is concerned with man’s changing relationship to Nature. In his writing and painting he is examining the human compulsion to order nature through naming. Prosek’s next book, about eels, is due out in summer/fall 2010 with HarperCollins Publishers. The book explores the life history, mystery and world cultural associations concerning the freshwater eel. His story about freshwater eels is scheduled to run in National Geographic Magazine in 2010.

Prosek is a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.

Biography
Fact Sheet
In the Field & Upcoming Projects
Conservation