This national touring gallery aims to combine the love of the national parks with the love of printmaking. // Courtesy of Fifty-Nine Parks.
Usually, when someone announces they’re going on tour, you’d assume that they’re touring with a band. That’s what JP Boneyard, Founder of Fifty-Nine Parks, thought before he transitioned from working solely in music promotion to starting a touring art gallery that has grown from passion project to life’s purpose.
Fifty-Nine Parks is a nationwide touring art gallery that brings screen-printed posters of the national parks to cities across the United States. It’s a celebration of not only the beautiful nature that we as a country are just insanely lucky to have but a celebration of the art of printmaking as well. Their next stop? Lawrence, Kansas.
The gallery has partnered with The White Schoolhouse—a beloved Lawrence venue—to bring Fifty-Nine Parks to LFK on May 6. The collection of posters on display includes work from artists Shepard Fairey, Aaron Draplin, Kim Smith, and Daniel Danger, as well as select gig posters and art prints from The National Poster Retrospecticus—an esteemed touring poster show.
Boneyard started out working in the music industry and began making commercial prints in 2005. “I grew up playing in bands and making screen-printed posters to promote the events that we would do,” Boneyard says. “Then, eventually that appreciation and connectedness to the poster-creating world led to a poster art show, which I think had a couple hundred posters in it. It was a ton of fun.”
“The idea was to tour with that show. You can’t have the same show in the same town more than once a year. So that was the idea of merging our background playing as touring bands. One of the things we would do on tour that was often accessible and affordable for us was visiting national parks… So what if we did something that sort of celebrates the artists, the parks, the medium of screen-printing, and printmaking?”
The more Fifty-Nine Parks toured, the more of a sensation it became. Before Boneyard knew it, his passion project had turned into his full time job. And he couldn’t be more excited, as his favorite part about the work is the constant collaboration with artists.
“It’s always been collaborative, and that’s something that’s really important to me. Part of the interest in this, for me, is bringing people together to celebrate art, music, and now nature in similar ways that you could see it in sports, where people from all different backgrounds can be sitting next to each other in the crowd or playing together on the team, and they may never even talk to each other if it wasn’t for being in that room to celebrate the same thing that they both love,” Boneyard says.
“I just think there’s something really great about that. When you put the other event or a music event, and that sort of dialog happens. So that’s the sort of philosophy behind all of this, for me, even on the creation side, I think it’s far more interesting when a group or a team of people make something together.”
Something unique to this stop of the touring gallery is its collaboration with Lawrence artist Mary Gage to display a collection of artwork from her Parks and Green Spaces series, which gives us the opportunity to see local art on display at a national event.
Alongside the mix of prints and posters, they’re debuting their new children’s book Animals of The National Parks.
“The debut will happen in Lawrence, and we have copies of the book with us,” Boneyard says. “That’s just one of the things that we’re most excited about at this time—the pivot towards a younger audience and leaning into elements of educational content. We’re really just hoping to inspire reverence for our nature, this time for a younger audience.”
A portion of each poster sale is donated to organizations such as The National Park Service and The National Parks Conservation Association. The series is currently archived by the Library of Congress.
Fifty-Nine Parks and collaborators will be on display at The White Schoolhouse in Lawrence, Kansas from 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on May 6. More information can be found on its website.
