Critique and Engagement in America’s National Parks

America’s national parks play major roles in shaping widely shared beliefs about nature, public space, national identity, and national values. Yet those beliefs, like the parks themselves, are plagued by contradictions. Touted as America’s “best idea,” the parks originated in the dispossession of indigenous lands. Visited by more than 300 million people a year, the parks are underfunded and under threat. Invented to preserve and protect American wilderness, some see them today as federal overreach. Founded as parks for the people, visitation remains largely White.The articles featured in this special issue of Art Journal consider how visual representations including paintings, photographs, posters, films, and printed fabrics, as well as memorials, installations, and performances, have contributed to and critiqued the problematic nature of America’s national parks. Over the past century, multiple American artists have recognized and reckoned with conflicting views of the parks. Most recently, Amber Share’s Subpar Parks (2021), a snarky series of National Park posters based on dismal, one-star reviews from disappointed visitors—“looks nothing like the license plate,” “a bunch of rocks,” “miles and miles of nothing”—captures the disconnect between how the parks are imagined, or how they are unrealistically represented in landscape paintings and movies, and how some people experience them in real life. This afterword considers when and why those unrealistic views emerged, and how today’s National Park Service (NPS) challenges them by supporting artists and art projects that prompt new, and more nuanced, understandings of America’s “best idea.”

Art · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · American Environmental and Regional History