There’s a new landmark in Fort Worth, and it’s not made of glass or steel. Artist, naturalist, and author James Prosek, whose trout paintings first appeared in Trout: An Illustrated History and later in the Amon G. Carter Museum of American Art, has unveiled what may be the world’s largest prairie mural atop The Westbrook in Sundance Square.
Stretching 300 feet long and 15 feet high, over 5,000 square feet of hand-painted flora transform rooftop infrastructure seven stories above downtown into a monumental reflection on the native prairie that once stretched across North Texas. The work is bold and unexpected, inviting residents to look up and consider the natural history beneath the city. It’s the kind of project only someone who has spent decades studying the natural world could envision on such a scale.
Prosek has been obsessed with the natural world since he was a teenager. Yale-educated, he published his first book at nineteen, a watercolor compendium of North American trout, setting the tone for a life spent exploring the intersections of art, science, and storytelling. His fascination with life beneath the surface of rivers and landscapes would eventually extend beyond the page. His work has appeared in institutions from The Royal Academy of Arts in London to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and he has held residencies at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery.
That combination of artistry and environmental curiosity is exactly what informs the Westbrook mural. Prosek isn’t just recreating prairie plants; he is translating an entire ecosystem into a visual language, reminding viewers that the wild landscapes of North Texas once stretched uninterrupted under their feet. Beyond painting, he has authored more than a dozen books, written for The New York Times and National Geographic, and earned a Peabody Award for a documentary tracing Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler across England. In 2004, he co-founded the World Trout Initiative with Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, using art to fund coldwater habitat conservation.
His accolades are as wide-ranging as his subjects. He received the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences, a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice for Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, and a Gold Medal in Fine Arts from the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards for the Yale University Art Gallery catalog James Prosek: Art, Artifact, Artifice. He serves on the boards of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, and the advisory board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.
The mural on The Westbrook is more than a public artwork. It is a love letter to the natural world and a reminder that beneath the concrete of Fort Worth, the wild still whispers. Thanks to Prosek, the city finally has a reason to look up.
"I have come to love these grassland spaces after working on the show about Texas grasslands at the Amon Carter a few years ago," Prosek says. "My work in Texas has taught me so much about my own backyard and how the land was managed here on our continent for thousands of years by native people, particularly through burning the land."
