Manchester, Vermont - The American Museum of Fly Fishing announced today that it will honor influential wildlife artist and author James Prosek with its 2016 Izaak Walton Award. The celebration will take place on October 26 at a public reception in New York City and will be chaired by David Nichols. This event will be held at a private club in Midtown Manhattan, for more details about the event location and information please contact spitcher@amff.com.
The 2016 Izaak Walton Award event will begin with a Leadership Circle cocktail
reception at 5:30 in the evening and a general reception at 6:00. This will be
followed by dinner and an auction benefitting the American Museum of Fly Fishing.
Auction items will include an array of intriguing options from fly rods and reels to exclusive destination trips. To round out the evening, Nick Lyons (a literary legend and staple in the fly fishing community) will be present to conduct a live interview with James Prosek.
Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age with 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 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY, Gerald Peters Gallery, NY and Santa Fe; the Dumbo Arts Center, Brooklyn, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC among others. Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 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. 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. He is currently working on a book about how we name and order the natural world and an article for National Geographic on the Sargasso Sea.His latest book (Ocean Fishes, Rizzoli, 2012) is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fishes, all of which were painted life size based on individual specimens he traveled to see. In autumn of 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Prosek is a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the advisory board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.
The American Museum of Fly Fishing's Izaak Walton Award was established in 2014 to honor and celebrate individuals who live by the Compleat Angler philosophy. This is especially so in James's case as he has literally followed in Izaak Walton's footsteps in his journey across Europe. James Prosek's passion for the sport of fly fishing and involvement in its angling community provides inspiration for others, and promotes the legacy of leadership for future generations. "Fly fishing connects much more than man to fish. It is about enjoying our country's beautiful natural places in the company of family, friends or, sometimes, no one at all. James Prosek's love for this unique sport is evident in his art, capturing the beauty of the environment and fish in one graceful brushstroke. On behalf of the American Museum of Fly Fishing and its Board of Trustees, I am honored to announce James Prosek as our 2016 Izaak Walton Award recipient" – Karen Kaplan, President of the Board
To keep informed about the 2016 Izaak Walton Award Event please click here.
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