OUR PICK: National Museum of Wildlife Art

Do any of your upcoming travel plans include a trip to Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Besides enjoying Jackson Hole’s fabled scenery firsthand, this winter you can explore America’s vast prairie heartland while warming up indoors at the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

A new exhibition, “Great Plains — America’s Lingering Wild,” contains remarkable photographs — and an urgent eco-message — from internationally known conservation photographer Michael Forsberg, on display through Jan. 30.

It features wildlife portraits and expansive plains images from the embattled grassland ecosystem. Deceptively barren, the Great Plains stretch nearly treeless for some 2,500 miles from southern Canada to the Texas panhandle. Once perhaps the greatest grassland ecosystem on Earth and now forever altered by humans, the vast landscape has become a personal mission for Nebraska native Forsberg, who crisscrossed the region, capturing wildlife, habitats and a complex conservation message over three years to create the 60 photographs on display.

“When I am photographing wildlife, I often feel that I’m chasing ghosts, capturing surviving wild spirits of species whose numbers have been decimated or all but eliminated from these wide-open spaces,” writes Forsberg, whose photos sometimes required him to lie for hours in a cramped blind peering through a tiny hole. Others, like his close-up of a bobcat, were captured with an unmanned “camera trap” triggered via an infrared beam.

The oversize giclée prints on display are drawn from Forsberg’s coffee table book of the same title. Forsberg’s work has appeared in publications including Audubon, National Geographic and National Wildlife. His image of a Nebraska tallgrass prairie was selected for a 2001 International Postage Stamp, and he is the recipient of the 2009 North American Nature Photographers Association Mission Award, among other honors.

In addition to being remarkable works of art in their own right, Forsberg’s images address our relationship with and our responsibility to our wild lands — a message closely attuned to the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s own mission of exploring humanity’s relationship with nature through fine art.

IF YOU GO

A complete schedule of museum exhibitions and events is available online at
www.wildlifeart.org. The museum is also active on Facebook at wildlifeartjh and on Twitter at @wildlifeartjh.

The museum is at 2820 Rungius Road. Hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors (ages 60 and older), $6 for ages 5-18 and free for ages 4 and younger. Download a coupon for $1 off on the website, or call 1-800-313-9553. Get travel-planning help and lodging-package information by visiting www.jacksonholechamber.com, or call 1-307-733-3316.

Joy harper, The Gazette