How Art Is Saving the West

JKM COLLECTION, NATL MUS. WILDLIFE ART/ESTATE OF CARL RUNGIUS MUS. WILDLIFE ART/ESTATE NATL JKM COLLECTION, Caribou on the move as a storm rolls across the Rocky Mountains, by wildlife painter Carl Rungius (Fall Storm, 1935).

CONSERVATION How art is saving the West Anthony King delights in a Wyoming exhibition focusing on the landscapes and wildlife in the migratory corridor between Yellowstone and Yukon.

rt has played a prominent part in Yellowstone with the building of a bears. Barriers are springing up across the conservation in North America. to Yukon: The dam; and Great Falls wildlife corridor, notably along Highway 3, The paintings of Thomas Moran Journey of Wildlife of the Yellowstone, which cuts across the Rockies near the US– and Art Ahelped to inspire the US Congress to cre- painted around 1884 Canada border. Increased traffic and hous- National Museum of ate Yellowstone, the world’s first national Wildlife Art, Jackson by Thomas Hill, one ing developments are steadily impeding park, in 1872. The exhibition Yellowstone Hole, Wyoming, USA. of the most promi- migrations and isolating US wildlife popula- to Yukon, now showing at the US National Until 14 August. nent artists to follow tions from larger groups to the north. Y2Y is Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Moran. All the big working to secure adjacent lands to maintain Wyoming, revisits this artistic tradition and names are here. German-born Carl Rungius wildlife connectivity. Harty’s artworks Duck engages visitors with the conservation issues (1869–1959) is for many the Michelangelo Pond Lake and Pileated Woodpecker depict surrounding one of the largest intact wildlife of wildlife art. His impressionist canvasses vital areas that remain intact. corridors on Earth. depict wild bison (The Last of the Buffalo, When Harty revisited the scenes of some The exhibition emphasizes how artists, well 1900), moose and caribou (Moose, Upper of Rungius’ paintings, the vistas had changed before conservationists, anticipated the idea Ram River Valley and Fall Storm, 1935), little. Bighorn sheep are still grazing the of an ecosystem without borders running sheep (In the Ogilvie Rockies, around 1940) meadows of Wilcox Pass, as they did 100 years from Yellowstone to Yukon — a distance of and landscapes (Lake McArthur, 1925). ago. Harty painted mature rams close to some 3,200 kilometres. Harvey Locke, one Today, the region’s riches are chronicled by a road in Jasper National Park, which was of the founders of the Yellowstone to Yukon contemporary painter Dwayne Harty, whom created in 1907 and is almost 2,000 square Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), is the driving Locke asked to retrace Rungius’s footsteps, kilometres larger than Yellowstone. force behind the show. He brought together and to document areas where the master had A watercolour from the Whyte collection art from the Wyoming museum and the never set his easel. Harty travelled by four- shows a deer stepping out in front of cars Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in wheel-drive vehicle across Yukon, rafted and cafes on an avenue in Banff, painted by Banff, Alberta, where the collection will move down the Nahanni River, flew to the isolated Walter Joseph Phillips in 1947. Bronwyn in 2012, to illustrate how artists at the end of Ram Plateau by helicopter and rode on horse- Minton, a curator at the Wyoming museum, the nineteenth century helped to establish the back for a month in the wilds of Muskwa- says that wildlife runs all over Jackson; idea of wilderness and wildlife as valuable. Kechika in British Columbia to paint animals moose show up wherever there is good wil- Sublime scenes on display include Albert large and small. low. The view from the museum can include Bierstadt’s Elk Grazing in the Wind River Locke is particularly NATURE.COM elk, bison, pronghorn and bald eagles. ■ Country (1861); John Fery’s Jackson Lake concerned about the For more on US and the Tetons (painted around 1900), survival of large carni- environmentalism: Anthony King is a writer based in Dublin. depicting a scene that has since disappeared vores, especially grizzly go.nature.com/npprrv e-mail: [email protected]