Inspired by nineteenth-century painters and photographers, Congress passed legislation preserving America's spectacular natural resources for the enjoyment of all. Today, artists continue to play a significant role in interpreting these iconic panoramas, intimate corners, and diverse wildlife within our national parks. In Art of the National Parks, seventy painters and sculptors offer distinctive visions of eight of the nation's most beloved wild lands: Acadia, Everglades, Grand Canyon, Grand Tetons, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Zion. Susan Hallsten McGarry, well-known author and curator, guides readers on a lively journey through the artists' styles, techniques, and philosophies. Art historian/author Jean Stern, director of the Irvine Museum, discusses the historic artists who put into motion our nation's conservation consciousness. And Terry Lawson Dunn, biologist and educator, highlights the national parks' ecological successes and challenges. With more than 450 artworks, this glorious, large-format book is a must for anyone who has hiked the trails, watched a sunset, marveled at buffalo herds, or yearned to experience our nation's mythic and transformative vistas. It is also an indispensible compendium of artists who are at the forefront of twenty-first-century American landscape and wildlife art.

Art of the National Parks is available in seven different book jackets depicting the art and beauty from each national park featured in the book. Featured parks include: Acadia, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone/Tetons, Zion, Everglades, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountain. Special cover requests will be accommodated as stock allows based on cover availability. To ensure special handling, please order direct.

Such are the observations that filter through the galleries during Tom Palmore's exhibitions in which animals steal the show.

Born in Ada and living in Oklahoma, Palmore emerged from the 1970s Photorealist movement as a maverick. His career includes more than a decade on the East Coast, where he refined his skills at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited in New York's prominent contemporary galleries. Palmore used his technical virtuosity to explore his passion for the animal kingdom. Then as today, his monumental paintings received critical acclaim, and his incongruous juxtapositions of realistic primates in silk-and-velvet interiors earned him the nickname Gorilla Man.

Palmore's fidelity to an animal's visage is intended to make it proud. However, the contexts in which he places them are pure Palmore, infused with his penchant for wit and the unexpected. His portrait of Oscar, the famed rodeo bull, is set against Palmore-designed wallpaper of cowboys catapulted into the air. A rooster surveys its Grant Wood countryside, and an imposing lion is oblivious to the diminutive monarch butterfly that shares its epithet. In all cases, Palmore's paintings loom large not only in scale but also in raised consciousness of the "earthlings with whom we share this planet," as he says.

Jane Culp's muscular paintings and drawings make palpable the rush she feels when on location interacting with nature. From her modernist perspective she conveys a powerful sense of the moment using surface tension and movement. "I'm interested in the life and language of form", she explains. "How form talks as it goes into space, how light and distance swallow and selectively magnify the forms, how a rhythmic movement in space releases forms that change direction, split, bulge, and fall back into space". Working in harsh weather conditions that force her to strap her easel to her knees, Culp explores wilderness terrain along the spine of the Sierra Nevada, transporting viewers from her home base north of the Anza-Borrego Desert, through Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks, up to Tioga Pass, and into Yosemite Valley.