Artist James Prosek to Speak at MCC on April 8

Here is a Manchester Community College lecture with a built-in “hook”: James Prosek, well known for his brilliant fish illustrations, will speak about his work at MCC in the Great Path Community Commons on April 8 at 3 p.m. 

The free event is sponsored by the Adolf and Virginia Dehn Foundation as part of its Visiting Artist Series. The Dehn Foundation was established by Virginia Dehn to promote the arts, and it is now administered by Virginia’s niece and nephews whose father, Frederick Lowe, Jr., served as Manchester Community College’s first president.

For more information on the event, contact: Dan Long at dlong@manchestercc.edu or 860-512-2697. Or visit Monthly Events.

A celebrated artist, writer, naturalist and angler, Prosek’s work is currently on exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art through June 8.His most recent book, Ocean Fishes (Rizzoli, 2012), is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fish, all of which were painted life size. 

He made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age while an undergraduate at Yale University with Trout: An Illustrated History (Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings. He is also the author of Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso (Harper Perennial, 2010), a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice, and the subject of a documentary for the PBS series “Nature” that aired in 2013. 

Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the 17th century author of The Complete Angler

In 2004, he co-founded  with Yvon Chouinard — the owner of Patagonia clothing company — a conservation initiative called World Trout, which raises money for cold-water habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings.  He has also written a novel and recorded three CDs with his group, The Troutband. 

For more information on Prosek, visit James Prosek.

About MCC

Students of any age who possess the desire to pursue higher education are welcome at Manchester Community College. MCC is proud of its academic excellence, new facilities, flexible schedules, small classes, low tuition and faculty with both academic and “real world” credentials. The college offers over 60 programs, transfer options, financial aid and scholarships, as well as access to baccalaureate degrees through guaranteed admissions programs with several universities. The main, park-like campus, which is easily accessible from I-84, is also the home of Great Path Academy, a middle college high school, serving grades 9-12. The college’s second location, the Manchester Community College Arts and Education Center, opened in downtown Manchester in 2012. In January 2014, MCC was named as one of the nation’s top 150 community colleges, eligible to compete for the 2015 Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence and $1 million dollars in prize funds by the Aspen Institute College Excellence Program.