Extended At Bellarmine Museum

FAIRFIELD — Due to popular demand, Fairfield University’s  Bellarmine Museum of Art has extended its current exhibition, “James Prosek: Un-Natural History.” Scheduled to close December 21, the exhibition will now remain on view through Friday, January 27.

The exhibition is the most-visited show ever mounted by the museum, as it has been drawing record-breaking crowds since it opened in the fall. The exhibition features many new works by Mr Prosek, a resident of Easton, including some he executed specifically for the Bellarmine presentation.

The majority of the nearly 20 paintings on view are watercolors. Complementing these paintings are several taxidermied specimens, mediated by the artist, that “speak” to their two-dimensional counterparts, installed in close proximity. Exhibition catalogs with contributed essays by Dr Jill Deupi, Bellarmine Museum director and assistant professor of art history; Dr Brian Walker, associate professor of biology; and Dr Scott Lacy, assistant professor of sociology & anthropology, are available at the museum and the Fairfield University Bookstore, 1499 Post Road in Fairfield.

“James Prosek: Un-Natural History” features a number of works never before displayed publicly, such as the artist’s monumental watercolor of a sailfish, painted to scale at more than eight feet in length. The exhibition also debuts several new pieces Prosek created specifically for this show, including a taxidermied fox, complete with bird wings and custom-made wax flowers, and a meticulously rendered cockatiel, whose extravagant rose-hued plumage is replaced in areas in with tools from a Swiss Army knife.

“In Un-Natural History, James Prosek questions the accepted norms by proposing new and unusual ways for considering the world around us,” said Dr Deupi. “Through his renderings of specimens, both real and imagined, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on the ways Western man has chosen to organize the natural world and to question what these systems say about our culture, our priorities and our values.

“He encourages us,” she continued, “with subtle persistence, to think about what it means to impose a name on an object or, indeed, a living creature, and how such actions create powerful hierarchies in the inter-connected realms of society, politics and economics.”

James Prosek’s proficiency as an artist and an intellectual is matched by his talent as an author and wordsmith. His first book, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), featured 70 of his own watercolor paintings of the trout of North America and established his reputation as a naturalist and a remarkably gifted artist.

His most recent book, Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish (HarperCollins, 2010), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, explores both the biological complexities and the prominent role this remarkable fish continues to play in native lore and creation myths amongst traditional peoples such as New Zealand’s Maori.

He has also authored several books for young children and adolescents, including Bird, Butterfly, Eel (Simon & Schuster, 2009) and The Day My Mother Left (Simon & Schuster, 2007), and has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine.

James Prosek’s works have been featured in a number of museums and galleries both in the US and abroad, including the d.u.m.b.o. arts center (Brooklyn, NY), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center in New Haven, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

The Bellarmine Museum of Art is within Bellarmine Hall on the campus of Fairfield University, 1073 North Benson Road in Fairfield.

The museum is open Monday through Friday from 10 am to 3 pm (it will be closed December 22-January 4), and admission is free.

Visit www.fairfield.edu/museum or call (203) 254-4000, extension 4046 for additional information.