IN FOCUS
National parks take center stage at Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts in Spring
Northwest Houston residents can get an up-close view of the U.S. national parks with The Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts’ summer exhibit of photos and paintings.
Photographer Mark Burns, a resident of The Woodlands, drove more than 160,000 miles for more than four years photographing the nation’s 59 national parks. He has chosen his favorite 28 images to display at The Pearl in the exhibit called “The National Parks-Select Images.”
The exhibit, which is on display through Sept. 3, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.
The Pearl has paired Burns’ black-and-white images next to original paintings of the national parks by artists Thomas Moran, Thomas Hill and Joseph Henry Sharp.
“That makes it a special exhibition for me,” Burns said. “The work of the early artists was very influential. That really led to a lot of the land becoming protected. Their art started a movement to protect the special places.”
To capture the landscape images, Burns often took photos from the roof of his Toyota FJ Cruiser. And he visited many of the parks several times.
He took many road trips, strategically planning his stops to hit all of the parks along the way. One route in-
cluded New Mexico, Arizona and then to California to visit parks including Joshua Tree, Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite. Then he would drive through northern California and up through the Pacific Northwest to the Olympic National Park and then east to Glacier and back down to Texas through Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
“I would plan quite thoroughly,” Burns said. “I took two to four weeklong trips. Sometimes I would drive 9,000 to 10,000 miles in four weeks.”
For ten months, Burns rented a house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, because it was a good central location for him to shoot several national parks within a sixhour drive.
Burns’ chose to shoot his photography in black and white both because of his love of the medium and because of the artistic element.
“I love black and white and also it’s a great bridge back to the past century,” he said.
The Pearl’s Curator Terry Capps said she was immediately moved by Burns’ photography the first time she saw his work.
“The first photograph I saw was of White Sands in New Mexico and I was instantly captured,” she said. “It brought back so many memories of my childhood; of my parents taking us every summer to a national park. The moment I walked up to that first photograph, all those memories came flooding back to me.”
The exhibit has been very well-received, Capps said.
“The exhibition seems to be pulling at the heartstrings of all that see it,” she said.
Burns’ exhibit was first unveiled at the Forsyth Galleries at Texas A&M in College Station in November 2015. In addition to The Pearl, the entire collection of Burns’ photographs is currently on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science through Sept. 28.
Prior to starting his project, Burns had visited about 20 national parks.
“I had been to quite a few,” he said. “But when you’re going to all 59, you see a lot of places. You spent a lot of time there. I went back to many multiple times to get the right weather and visit during different seasons. I wanted to be able to choose, especially some of the bigger parks I went to four or five times, or six times even.”
Burns has now become an advocate about the need to protect the national parks.
“Let’s look forward at the next 100 years,” he said. “How do we continue to protect them and keep them wild and free, so more people can share the same experience?”