Art, Artifact, Artifice
Award-winning artist, naturalist, and writer James Prosek (b. 1975, B.A. 1997) brings his love of the natural world and his lifelong fascination with the naming and classification of nature to the Yale University Art Gallery in James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice. The exhibition brings together objects from the collections of the Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art. It places Prosek’s work in dialogue with a wide range of both man-made objects and those produced by billions of years of evolution, or what naturalist Charles Darwin described as “endless forms most beautiful.” By challenging traditional separations of museum collections into “art” and “artifact,” or “natural” and “man-made,” the artist asks us to explore to what extent these distinctions matter. Is it helpful for us to draw such boundaries? Or do they limit what we are able to see, substituting categories and classifications for experience? “What would happen,” Prosek said, “if we stop putting things into neat categories and simply marvel at the wondrous and complex world of which we are a part?”
The catalog for the exhibition won the 2021 Gold Medal, Fine Art Books, Independent Publisher Book Awards
Exhibition made possible by Donna and Marvin Schwartz, with additional support provided by Susan and Stephen Mandel, Jr., the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Richard P. Garmany Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund, and the Robert Lehman, B.A. 1913, Endowment Fund. Organized by James Prosek with Laurence Kanter, Chief Curator and the Lionel Goldfrank III Curator of European Art.
February 14, 2020–February 28, 2021
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel St
New Haven, CT 06510
