Art in the South Florida Parks

By Michael Lorusso, Museum Specialist at the South Florida Collections Management Center, written for the Department of the Interior's World Art Day.

American artists were painting landscapes and showing them to the public long before there was a National Park Service — and painting and photography helped bring the Service into being. Pictures of the country's great landscapes showed people what was there and built support for protecting it. The very idea of a "national park" goes back to the painter George Catlin, who in 1832, travelling the country to paint its landscapes and peoples, wrote of preserving land "by some great protecting policy of government... a magnificent park... a nation's park, containing man and beast, in all the wild (ness) and freshness of their nature's beauty!"

Five parks, one collections centre

The Park Service now looks after natural and cultural resources alike, unimpaired, so that future generations can enjoy them. The South Florida Collections Management Center (SFCMC) cares for both kinds on behalf of Florida's five national park units:

• Big Cypress National Preserve
• Biscayne National Park
• De Soto National Memorial
• Dry Tortugas National Park
• Everglades National Park

Most of them are known for their natural beauty, but their human story is becoming better known too: more than 5,000 years of it, from ancient archaeological sites to historic shipwrecks.

Works of art are among the cultural resources the centre cares for — paintings, sculpture, drawings, photographs and many kinds of print. Every park keeps an art collection; Big Cypress and Everglades together hold almost 200 unique pieces that help tell the story of the South Florida parks. Two of the ways a park's collection grows are donations and artist-in-residence programmes.

Caring for the collection

Museum staff do many kinds of work on these collections. In summer 2021 professional conservators treated a bronze sculpture at Everglades, and staff reframed a print from the Big Cypress collection; more projects are planned for the years ahead.

Staff also handle the works during the yearly inventory of the museum collections. It is a painstaking process: for each object in storage they confirm that it is there and where, record its condition, and check the information that goes with it. During the last inventory, three works caught the author's attention, and between them they show how varied the collections are.

Everglades Journal — Big Cypress National Preserve

Mollie Doctrow's Everglades Journal (2006, woodcut print, BICY 14607) is a triptych: three separate panels meant to hang side by side. Together they show the variety of plants and animals in the Big Cypress swamp, which covers more than 700,000 acres. Doctrow made it during her residency at Big Cypress National Preserve.

De Soto's Army on the March — De Soto National Memorial

When Dan Feaser finished this mural around 1969 (mixed paints on wood, DESO 77), he set out to show accurately the arms and armour of Hernando de Soto's expedition into La Florida around 1539. It depicts many kinds of Spanish armour, with several styles of helmet, and weapons and armour for both soldiers and horses. His detail and shading are especially intricate. The mural hung in the park's visitor centre for decades; it has since been conserved and now rests, protected, in storage.

An untitled watercolour — Everglades National Park

Sam Vinikoff, known as the "Artist of the Everglades," spent his career painting the landscapes, plants and animals of Big Cypress and the Everglades. Because he is best known for nature, this portrait of a person (untitled, undated, watercolour on paper, EVER 62326) stood out. Nobody knows whom it shows, but the clothing points to the patchwork garments worn by members of the Seminole and/or Miccosukee Tribes of Indians of Florida.

What the art teaches

Studying art in the Park Service's collections teaches something about the natural and cultural history the parks exist to protect. These three works speak of the plants of the Big Cypress swamp, the armour de Soto's men wore when they reached Florida, and traditional and cultural ties to this land.

Art has been part of telling the parks' story since the late 1800s, and it still thrives across the park system, with more than fifty artist residency programmes nationwide. Three are in Florida: at Big Cypress, Everglades and Dry Tortugas.

More of the Florida parks' art can be seen in an online exhibit of their collections, and the Park Service gathers stories about art across the parks.

Corrected: the article spells the printmaker's first name three ways (Mollie, Molly, Millie); its photo credit's Mollie is used here.

Sources

• National Park Service, Art in the South Florida Parks, by Michael Lorusso. The article's photographs of the three works are not reproduced here: a photograph of a painting or print reproduces the artist's own copyright.
• National Park Service, "Origin of the National Park Idea", the source of the Catlin quotation.