James Prosek

Courtesy of the Artist

Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America.

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.

Prosek is the author of over a dozen books and has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine. In 2003 he won a Peabody Award for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 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 (Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $4 million to over 200 fish conservation groups). In 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

His book Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, published in September 2010 was a New York Times Book Review editor's choice, and is the subject of a documentary for PBS series "Nature" that aired in 2013.

The catalog from his exhibition “James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice,” at the Yale University Art Gallery published by Yale University Press was awarded the Gold Medal in the Fine Arts category of the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Prosek is a curatorial affiliate, as well as on the board (Leadership Council), of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, a member of the advisory board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, and the board of the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy.