Parks

2020 has undeniably become the year of the road trip.

To honour this last bastion of summertime in America, we’ve dug up one of the most prized books in our library, Parks by Brian Kelley. It’s a meticulous documentation of US National Parks maps, guides and brochures from the past hundred years or so, though we’ve chosen to focus on our favourites from the sixties. This group of ephemera when bound together form a really beautiful record of the sort of publicly available art we risk overlooking. Each is bold and thoughtful in its aesthetic but remains utilitarian at the core. To acknowledge how clever they are as artworks feels like being in on a secret, and perhaps adds to why we find them so compelling. Here’s to more of that. To finding the beauty in the everyday, to celebrating the democratic places we can all share and to spending our time exploring. 

Drive safely, America. 

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No claim to original U.S. Government works. All of the material shown in this book are property of the United States National Park Service, unless otherwise indicated. © National Park Service U.S. Department of the interior.

Photographs and scans © 2019 Brian Kelley