History of National Park Posters

HISTORY OF NATIONAL PARK POSTERS
By Victoria Chick

While gathering information on the founding of the National Park system for another article, I came across 1930’s posters for several National Parks that impressed me with their clean, simple designs of iconic park images.

I discovered that National Park posters were done only in the 1930s and early 1940s as part of the WPA Federal Art Project, which began as part of the effort to recover from the Great Depression. Thus, all the park posters reflect the art deco style of time. Although posters were made all over the country for many public entities, park posters were mainly designed by artists in Berkeley, California, who did posters representing fourteen parks. New York City artists did posters for two more parks. Due to the quality of paper, and the conditions in which the posters were placed, only a tiny fraction of the originals exist.

The resurgence today of the WPA era style posters is largely due to the interest and efforts of Doug Leen, who worked as a seasonal ranger and came across a Grand Teton National Park poster that was headed for the trash. This poster led him to National Park Service files where he found black and white photos of posters that had been printed. From these, he guessed what colors might have been used and produced a poster using the silk screen process as would have been done by the WPA artists.

In silk screening, each color is added to the poster separately. By forcing thick ink through a tautly stretched fine silk mesh screen that has been blocked where the artist does not want the ink to go through the mesh onto the paper under it, only the paper areas where the artist wants that particular color will receive the ink. This is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that includes not only designing, aligning each screen with previous screens, and printing, but allowing time for the ink to dry between adding colors. Generally, not more than 100 posters of a given design were made during the WPA period.

The history of these posters had been forgotten by many park administrations until Leen began to produce replica posters and sell them to the individual parks. From time to time, original posters would come to light at auctions so that the original colors could be seen. Leen, having formed Ranger Doug Enterprises, redid many of the posters he had previously seen only in black and white, so that some editions are black and a color and the same design in another edition is produced in many colors matched to the original posters.

As popularity and sales of the posters in park gift shops rose, other parks asked Leen to produce WPA style posters for them. Leen hired artists to use the style of original posters to develop new designs representing parks that did not exist before the 1940s. The posters are still done in the silk screen process. His goal is to have a poster for each park by the 2016 National Park Centennial. Look for these WPA style posters when you visit our National Parks and National Monuments. Leen’s interest led the Smithsonian Institution, who had no posters, to begin collecting them. Now Leen’s collection and the Smithsonian’s collection are the two largest collections of original National Park Posters.

Victoria Chick is a contemporary figurative artist and early 19th/20th century print collector based in Silver City, New Mexico.  She received a B.A. in Art from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and was awarded an M.F.A. in Painting from Kent State University in Ohio. Visit: https://victoriachick.com/

Victoria appears on Big Blend Radio every 3rd Saturday. Follow the podcast: https://worldofart-victoriachick.podbean.com/

PrintFriendly