To mark its 100th anniversary, the National Park Service is opening all of its preserves to the public for free from Thursday through Sunday, 25 to 29 September. If you can’t get to one of the more than 100 national parks around the US this weekend, museums and galleries are celebrating the centennial with a string of exhibitions that profile artists who have been inspired by America’s natural wonders.
Trailblazing: 100 Years of Our National Parks at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum in Washington, DC (until 25 March 2018) features various objects that relate to the United States Postal Service and the NPS, including vintage marketing sculptures and postage tags.
The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York has organised Ansel Adams: Early Works (until 18 September), an exhibition of photographs shot from the 1920s to the 1950s that captures natural monuments like the sand dunes in Death Valley National Park in California and the esplanades in Yosemite Valley National Park in the western Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California.
The Miller Art Museum in Kansas is showing Paint the Parks (until 13 September), a juried exhibition of 73 landscapes by nearly 50 artists. The top prize has been awarded to David Drummond from Albuquerque, New Mexico for his watercolour painting Canyon Ripples (around 2014) that depicts the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Utah.
At the University of Colorado in Boulder, Mapping the Majestic: 100 Years of the National Park Service (until 16 December) shows maps and sketches of the parks created by surveyors and early settlers, including some that pre-date the founding of the agency in 1916.
For anyone pining to get out and join in the footsteps of the many artists who sought to capture the beauty of these unspoiled landscapes, the National Parks Arts Foundation, which offers more than 50 artist-in-residency programmes in national parks throughout America, is currently accepting submissions for residencies in Big Bend National Park in Texas and Death Valley National Park in California.
