Artists-in-Residence Program Rises From the Ashes of Yellowstone National Park Fire

It was as if the flames that crackled across a million acres of Yellowstone National Park were calling to her. Lucy Blake-Elahi was a city girl who had never been to Wyoming, but she abruptly went there.

White steam from geysers swirled with black smoke in the sky, she said. She saw both the burning trees and evidence of fire beneath the Earth’s surface.

“Two mornings after I came back, I woke up in a sweat and felt like I’d fallen in love,” said Blake-Elahi, who is a painter and sculptor.

That was the summer of 1988. Blake-Elahi’s visit was the start of an impassioned project with another Los Angeles artist, Katya Williamson, that has resulted in the women being named the first artists-in-residence in Yellowstone’s 119-year history.

Beginning next week, as part of celebrations surrounding the National Park Service’s 75th anniversary, they will spend a month at Yellowstone’s Madison Museum. Blake-Elahi will paint and sculpt. Williamson will collect material for an environmental book. They will offer tourists a series of campfire chats and trail walks that will be a lot different than those given by park rangers.

“The rangers talk to people about what’s out there. The artist can help them see it more personally,” Blake-Elahi said. “I’ll have people sketch a geyser and ask them, ‘What do you see when you look at the geyser? What does it symbolize in your life?’ ”

Said Williamson: “The tourists, many of them, don’t realize that they are actually coming to do more than see Old Faithful go up and down every 90 minutes. They’re paying homage to the Earth.”

Having a painter or writer work with tourists in the park system is not a new idea. Other national parks, such as Yosemite, have resident artists. But Yellowstone, being the country’s oldest and probably most traditional national park, had been somewhat resistant to the idea that its visitors might learn about nature through the individualized view of abstract expression.

“Tradition has been a very real albatross here at times,” said George Robinson, the park’s chief naturalist. He said that park officials have, over the last decade, “decided that we must honor tradition but not allow it to encumber us.”

And the urgently environmentalist message of Blake-Elahi and Williamson could be especially well-received during what national parks officials are calling the summer of “ecotourism,” when campers seem to be more open to learning about the environment than ever before.

“We thought it would be good to have a writer-artist team to share their work with visitors,” said David Cowan, a park ranger and naturalist. “Their role is to provide an artistic vision of the park.”

That vision took seed immediately after Blake-Elahi returned to Los Angeles from her 1988 visit. She decided to mount an exhibit based on the forest fire and was referred to Williamson, who had curated several environmental art shows in Los Angeles. Together they culled works from 15 artists around the country for “Of Nature and Nations: Yellowstone, Summer of Fire,” which showed at Security Pacific Plaza downtown last summer.

Many of the pieces used charred or weathered materials to evoke damage done by the blaze. There were also romantic oil paintings, performance art and traditional black-and-white landscape photographs. Blake-Elahi included one of her sculptures.

“Taking a highly poetic view of the loss suffered at Yellowstone, the show espouses the reassuring Zen idea that death is but a phase of life,” Times reviewer Kristine McKenna wrote, adding that “it’s a welcome and much needed reminder.”

After the exhibition closed, Blake-Elahi and Williamson set their sights on taking it to one of the towns near the park. They traveled to Wyoming looking for support.

“We went up there expecting a lot of welcome, but everybody was still in shock over the fire,” Blake-Elahi recalled. “Also, we were accused of being carpetbaggers, as in ‘Oh, you big L.A. artists are coming here to tell us about Yellowstone.’ ”

By chance, while camping at the park, they called the superintendent’s office and wangled an appointment. The artists were worried that park officials, still wrestling with claims that they mishandled the fire, might dismiss the work outright.

“Their exhibit was very well-received,” Robinson said. “We were impressed with the dedication of Lucy and Katya, their missionary zeal about how the arts can be partners with the parks in an effort to communicate to the American public.”

But because of the planned anniversary celebrations, the park’s large galleries were already booked for the summer and officials had no place to house the artworks. Instead, they offered Blake-Elahi and Williamson a residency from July 28 to Aug. 26.

“We’ll be talking to many, many tourists from the point of view of a gentle education,” said Williamson, who will collect interviews and observations for her nonfiction book. “We feel we’re part of a major groundbreaking moment.”

In fact, they will be continuing a Yellowstone heritage that is subtly entwined with the arts.

In 1872, when Congress was asked to designate Yellowstone as the first national park, most legislators knew little or nothing about the 2.2-million-acre territory on the Western frontier. They relied on Thomas Moran paintings and William Henry Jackson photographs of Yellowstone’s forests and saw-toothed mountains.

“In that way,” Robinson said, “art has been associated with the national parks from the very beginning.”