This five-minute video introduces Doug Leen, a national park ranger, who has spent years searching for a group of rare New Deal posters. A collection of advertising posters created in the 1930s and 40s through the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program, depicted heroic vistas of national parks and monuments, including Zion, Yosemite, Glacier and Grand Canyon. But few records were kept, and through the years, most of the posters were lost. The National Park service archive didn’t have a single original. A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.
The Case of the Missing Park Posters: An Ex-Ranger Hunts for New Deal-Era Art
A former park ranger is on the hunt to complete a collection of posters by artists commissioned by the government celebrating national parks.
A collection of advertising posters created in the 1930s and 40s through the Works Progress Administration depicted heroic vistas of national parks and monuments, including Zion, Yosemite, Glacier and Grand Canyon. But few records were kept, and through the years, most of the posters were lost.
In 1970, Doug Leen, a national park ranger working on a cleanup day at Grand Teton’s Jenny Lake ranger station uncovered a W.P.A. poster that read “Meet the Ranger Naturalist at Jenny Lake Museum.” He took it home and hung it up.
“Every time I walked by, it kinda talked to me,” Leen told Retro Report in this video, created with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “The more I looked at this poster, the more I realized there was a story to be told.”
The original poster was in fact a rare find. The National Park Service archive didn’t have a single original print. All it had were old negatives and black-and-white photographs.
Before long Leen’s discovery spiraled into an obsession. Now a retired dentist living in Alaska, he has dedicated the last 50 years to tracking down a complete set of the 14 original silkscreen prints in what he calls “a hobby run amok.”
Using the original W.P.A. designs, he started making reproductions and selling the posters. Of the original collection, Leen has located 12 posters. His quest continues to find the two that are still missing.
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- Lesson plan 1: The Case of the Missing Park Posters
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- Producer / Editor: Anne Checler
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Lesson Plan 1: The Case of the Missing Park Posters