Alaska man searching for long-lost national park art

He calls himself the “Ranger of the Lost Art.” Like Indiana Jones, the adventurous archaeologist who partially inspired the moniker, 69-year-old Doug Leen, of Kupreanof, Alaska, has an all-consuming passion for recovering lost history for the public.

For the next 14 months the veteran national park ranger and amateur historian will travel the country on a mission to stir up interest in an 80-year-old public art project designed to promote America’s National Parks as part of the park system’s 2016 centennial celebration.

The story starts in post-Great Depression America. Franklin D. Roosevelt established The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, in 1935 as part of the New Deal. In a largely successful effort to curtail unemployment the WPA put more than 8 million American citizens to work on government projects from 1935 to 1943. This included the construction of more than 115,000 buildings, some 78,000 bridges, and roughly 650,000 miles of roads.

But the WPA took on much more than construction. About 7 percent of the administration’s budget went to art initiatives. One could argue the silk-screened posters of the Federal Art Project defined American pop art in the 20th century, producing more than 2 million posters from 35,000 unique designs.

It was the travel posters that stuck in the American collective consciousness across time, especially an iconic series promoting U.S. National Parks. Posters from this campaign remain instantly recognizable to this day thanks largely to none other than the Ranger of the Lost Art.

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