Before Western settlement, grasslands and prairies stretched over much of Texas and the broader continent of North America—ecosystems shaped by Native American activity, cleansing fire, and grazing megafauna like bison. “But they’ve been lost—overgrazed, plowed, developed—and forgotten, and only little patches of ‘remnant prairies’ remain,” says the artist and writer James Prosek. He’s on a mission to rekindle interest in these complex and once-mighty landscapes, and his most recent project, which follows an exhibition of native plants in watercolor at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, makes use of an unlikely canvas: plaster-faced panels that hide machinery atop the Westbrook, a Deco Revivalist building in Fort Worth’s Sundance Square.
It is the world’s largest prairie mural, and it transforms a normally unused space into art at the request of Ed and Sasha Bass, the real estate moguls, philanthropists, and environmentalists who own Sundance Square. The couple plans to make use of more mechanical shrouds for murals in order to highlight different aspects of Texas’s history, culture, and environment; French muralist Youri Cansell created his own ode to butterflies that migrate through Texas atop the Commerce Building.
Fort Worth sits on what is called the Grand Prairie, a tallgrass prairie dominated by species like little bluestem, sideoats grama, and Indian grass. “This city was built on ranching, and ranching was built on prairies, making grasses pivotal to Texas history,” says Prosek, who hopes his mural will raise awareness for the ancient and underappreciated ecosystem and the need to restore it.
To create the mural, Prosek worked with a team of eight other artists. They transferred Prosek’s designs from his watercolors of the selected plants—all members of the Grand Prairie ecosystem—onto the surface using an Italian Renaissance method called pouncing, in which the artist pricks holes in the outline and passes charcoal over the perforations. Then they replaced the charcoal with graphite and, finally, spent two weeks adding color and detail with a weather-resistant enamel paint. The final product features over one hundred species of native grasses and wildflowers, from Indian blanket to wine cup to four kinds of milkweed, and stretches three hundred feet long and fifteen feet tall, so it can be easily seen from the ground.
“I think about the mural as a clearing for nature in this urban space, which hopefully starts a conservation,” Prosek says. One of his favorite moments during the project came when a friend working at a neighboring building sent him a picture of a Cooper’s hawk perched on the edge of the mural, above his painted versions of the grasses it historically would have soared over. “I took it as a sign, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s incredible how nature finds ways to survive, even in the built environment.”…