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.
Conservation:
World Trout
World Trout, an on-going conservation effort to preserve native trout species worldwide, was founded by artist and naturalist James Prosek and Yvon Chouinard, avid fly fisherman, climber, and founder of Patagonia, Inc., the outdoor apparel company. Each year, World Trout highlights the efforts of various grassroots environmental organizations working to protect native trout populations and their habitats. A portion of the sales of Patagonia’s World Trout t-shirts featuring James Prosek’s artwork is designated for these organizations. Patagonia is encouraging other companies to join the World Trout campaign as well as 1% For the Planet, a non-profit consortium of businesses donating one percent of sales to environmental non-profits. Participating companies can pledge one percent of sales to World Trout beneficiary groups or other local, regional, or national environmental non-profits.
Chouinard and Prosek initially spawned the preservation effort while fishing Slough Creek in Yellowstone Park. Their shared passion for fly-fishing coupled with a drive to generate awareness around preserving our natural water resources led to the initiative. Patagonia and Prosek officially launched World Trout at the Fly Fishing Retailer Show in Denver, Colorado, September 15, 2004.
“Patagonia is deeply committed to supporting environmental conservation initiatives like World Trout,” said Chouinard. “With Prosek’s extensive knowledge and Patagonia’s global reach, we’ve created a program that will support local grassroots efforts focused on preserving native trout species.”
Prosek spent past eight years (1996-2003) documenting the physical diversity of the trout of Europe, Asia and North Africa through watercolor representations. His extensive research is recorded in Trout of the World, an illustrated history of the native trout he encountered during his travels abroad (updated in 2013). As an individual, he has worked to generate awareness of the threats to native trout species, such as dams, development, wars, pollution, overfishing, and irrigation.
“The existence of wild trout means clean water, arguably our most precious resource,” said Prosek. “Their disappearance would not only be a physical loss, but also a loss to the human imagination.”
The beneficiary groups of the World Trout campaign rotate each year, in order to increase the visibility of the broad range of grassroots organizations dedicated to trout protection and restoration. 2005 recipient groups were the Penobscot River Restoration Trust in Maine, the Greenback Recovery Program through Colorado Trout Unlimited, and the Obirame Restoration Group in Hokkaido, Japan, which is working to save the native sea-run Huchen. Each group received $13,000 in the initial year. 2006 tees raised raise money for the Yellowstone Park Foundation, the Balkan Trout Restoration Group and the Friends of Wild Salmon. Because of efforts of World Trout, the Balkan Trout Restoration Group was founded.
The World Trout Initiative funds only groups and efforts working to restore and protect wild, self-sustainable trout, salmon and other fish species within their native range. This includes both indigenous fresh and saltwater fish. We believe that the best way to accomplish this over the long term is by ensuring that populations have high-quality habitat and adequate stream flows, can migrate between habitats without human intervention, are not negatively impacted by hatchery and aquaculture operations, have protection from harmful non-native species and disease, and are not over-harvested.
We look for innovative groups that produce measurable results and work on long-term solutions to root causes of the problem. Efforts should be quantifiable, with specific goals, objectives and action plans, and should include measures for evaluating success. Because we are a privately held company, we have the freedom to fund groups off the beaten path that base solutions on sound science. Most grants are in the range of $5,000 to $15,000.
Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $2 million to over 200 fish conservation groups.