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Spring may be the season of renewal, but winter is for re-creation
“Great Horned Owl and Eastern Gray Squirrel” will hang as part of George McLean’s The Living Landscape exhibit at the National Museum of Wildlife Art through April 22.
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Winter, with its metallic grip, laces this playground in tricks of light and the collective oeuvre of arts thirsting for a beholder. It’s a snowy interlude of sound and sense, cause and effect. No surprise that to recreate, or re-create, is to “create anew.” From fresh tracks to the trace of life springing to a painting, every line we choose is active in the making, and it takes all mediums to engage with this particular environment.
Even the National Museum of Wildlife Art adapts to the environment, with a new exterior through which to bring the wilds inside to wander along our imagination. The building perched on a hillside overlooking the National Elk Refuge houses the masters in American, western, and wildlife art, with more than five thousand works in permanent collection. This winter’s exhibits and programming have the potential to imprint tracks on the mind and soul.
Hanging through January 29, The Last Ocean: Antarctica’s Ross Sea Photographs by John Weller, takes us to Antarctica for a glimpse into a marine ecosystem filled with penguins, seals, whales, and a host of other wildlife varieties. And, for the rare chance to see birds on the brink of extinction, In the Spotlight: Mark Eberhard’s On the Edge brings species from the brown pelican to the ivory-billed woodpecker to the forefront through April 15.
Watch the process of strange and exotic creatures emerge through collaborative work inspired by Exquisite Corpse, a surrealists’ game of the early twentieth century, in Exquisite Animal: A Community Art Exhibit, showing through February 5. Also, George McLean: The Living Landscape considers the complex relationship between wildlife and its environment, taking into account forces that shape the space around the artist’s plot of land, on display through April 22.
Taking nature further, Change of Seasons: Wildlife in Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter interprets how wildlife respond to the change of seasons. From February 11 to April 29, this exhibition will highlight the breadth of the museum’s permanent collection as well as art’s ability to record the intricate rhythms of our natural spaces and the animals inhabiting them.
The museum also offers a chance to soak in culture after the sun goes down. See the online calendar at www.wild lifeart.org for events to fuse learning and visual entertainment. Evenings spotlight the collaborative, interactive, and cross-disciplinary nature of art through poetics, performance, sketch, painting, music, and film, all set against the backdrop of the collection.
The entire article can be read in the Winter 2012 issue of Jackson Hole Magazine.
