Do you have something of a creative streak? Are you inspired by the rugged beauty of the far West Texas mountains? Then the National Park Service has a gig for you.
Applications are currently open for the Big Bend National Park artist-in-residence program, where artists have the opportunity to live and work in the park while helping with engagement and outreach efforts.
The program provides lodging and a supply stipend for artists and is funded in part by the National Park Service and the Big Bend Natural History Association. After a yearslong hiatus, the program returned to the park last year and is accepting applications for the next round of participants through Jan. 31, 2025.
Tom VandenBerg, chief of Interpretation & Visitor Services at Big Bend National Park, spoke with the Texas Standard about the program and how to apply.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: You know what? I’ll be honest. This feels like, if I clicked on it on the website, like, this is too good to be true; it must be signing me up for terrible emails or something. But this is a real thing, right?
Tom VandenBerg: Yeah, this is real. Artist-in-residence programs exist in quite a few national parks. I think probably over 50 of our national park areas host artist-in-residence programs of some sort, and they’re all a little different and as unique as the park itself.
It’s something that we’ve had at Big Bend in the past, and then I think we had maybe about seven to 10 years maybe where it just sort of didn’t happen. I’m not quite sure why. But we brought it back last summer and it was quite successful, and we’re really excited to do it again in the coming year.
Well, that is so exciting. So what are some of the roles and responsibilities of the artist in residence?
Well, you know, arts and national parks have always gone hand in hand from the beginning. Some of our earliest national parks, the public interest was stirred, their imagination, at these great huge Western landscapes. So think of like Thomas Moran’s paintings of the Grand Canyon or the Yellowstone, things like that.
National parks always attract artists, and artists are creative people that see public lands in creative and new ways. And so the purpose of the program, like you mentioned, is to allow artists of various mediums a chance to stay in a park, to be here for a while, to get to know park staff, to develop their practice and just explore the parks in a new way and then share that with the public.
We want it to benefit both the artists and the public that comes to the parks.
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Your artist from this past year, what did that look like in the end? Was it a project that needed to be on display? What were the goals?
Well, that’s another way that Big Bend is a little different than some other parks in that some will hire just one artist and will have one artist for maybe a month or a couple of weeks or a month and a half.
At Big Bend, what we wanted to do is try to explore a variety of mediums. So last year we had, I believe, five artists in residence, and they were here for two to four weeks at a time.
We had an amazing painter. We had a what I’ll say is an artistic cartographer. We had a photographer, we had an illustrator, and then we even had a musician composer. So we were able to explore a whole variety of mediums, which made it really exciting.
