Summer 2025
A Growing Gallery
How one woman’s vision turned into a multi-year project that has brought thousands of student artworks to dozens of national park sites.
It all started when Jennifer Marsh drove by an abandoned Citgo station in upstate New York. An artist by training and habit, she looked at the eyesore and saw possibility. What if, she wondered, the structure was blanketed by a colorful quilt that was part public art installation and part oil-independence manifesto? After receiving approval from the local planning board in 2007, she appealed to friends and strangers for fiber art submissions. The response was overwhelming. Individuals representing 17 countries and 29 states mailed her over 2,500 quilted, crocheted and woven handiworks. Marsh painstakingly pieced together and waterproofed the exuberant squares. With the aid of scaffolding and cherry pickers, volunteers then affixed the panels to every cracked and faded surface of the station.
The success of that collaboration inspired Marsh to try her hand at other crowdsourced art, including a gigantic steel oak tree bearing around 14,000 handmade leaves that now greets the visitors of a children’s museum in Alabama. She eventually funneled her artistic vision into workshops and library exhibits before landing on a novel market: the National Park Service. “I discovered the parks were, like, a phenomenal partner,” she said.
Since 2013, Marsh’s nonprofit, International Fiber Collaborative — of which she is the sole employee — has partnered with more than 40 park sites on over 130 temporary exhibits. All the art is made by youth from around the country. To pull it off, she’s called every chief of interpretation she could track down and amassed an impressive index of interested educators. This year, Marsh expects to receive her 15,000th piece of student-created art.
“I kind of feel like it’s a calling,” she said.
Marsh, who earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Syracuse University, knows a thing or two about art as an outlet. “When I was a kid, I had a hard time learning, and so I really learned best about the world around me through art,” she said. The park exhibits not only give students that sort of hands-on education, but they also introduce them to some of the lesser-known national park sites, which Marsh — a lifelong park visitor — finds “really exciting.”
These days, the Ohio-based junior high art teacher coordinates about 10 exhibits a year, each with a ranger-selected theme that invites students, working individually or in groups, to explore a park’s past, its wildlife or a more abstract concept. The current exhibit at Cape Lookout National Seashore, for example, features 40-odd interpretations of “Under the Sea,” while the show opening in July at Salem Maritime National Historic Site will be a meditation on “Revolution and Reflection.” The medium is largely open to the whim of the artist. Whatever can be painted, sketched, printed, stamped, sewn, glued or otherwise attached to a 21-inch-by-21-inch canvas is fair game. “I just don’t like glitter,” Marsh said.
Through it all, she serves as the courier and curator. After lining up exhibits for the year, she mails canvases to the participating educators. Then when the teachers return the completed artworks, Marsh organizes them, combines individual pieces into vertical panels for display and ships the art to each park. Post-exhibit, the parks return the works, which she disassembles and distributes back to the teachers. (The parks pay Marsh a fee for her services, which she endeavors to keep low so that cost is not a barrier to participation.)
From Sea Scrap to Sculpture
Artists transform marine debris into art, educating national park visitors in the process.
See more ›Marsh said she never ceases to be impressed by the students’ range of work, from cozy campfires and squiggly stick figures to stirring representations of freedom. At Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York, the prompt in 2020 was “What does it mean to be equal?” Charlie Small, then a student at Montana’s Colstrip High School, where half the population is Cheyenne or Crow, painted a Native American woman with a blood-red handprint across her mouth. The portrait represents Selena Not Afraid, a 16-year-old Montanan who went missing on New Year’s Day in 2020 and was found dead 20 days later. “Murder is the third leading cause of death for Native American women ages 10-24,” the artist’s statement reads. “Living on a reservation shines a new light on equality.”
Karen Briggs, the art and business teacher at Colstrip, said exposure to the parks connects her students to the wider world. “We’re a rural school, and Montana is pretty isolated,” she said. “So it’s good for them to learn and do and participate in things outside of their own little box.” Briggs, who serves on the board of Marsh’s nonprofit, encourages her students to use collage techniques to give their compositions dimension and texture. Over the years, her classes’ eclectic designs have featured everything from “fossil” (aka chicken) bones to stalactites that sparkle (thanks to classroom-grown crystals). Morgan, a freshman involved with last fall’s crystal experiment, said she was pleased with her group’s submission to Mammoth Cave National Park and thrilled that her small town was represented in a park — and a state — she’d never visited.
While high schoolers often take the themes and run with them, Evelyn Abrams has found that her young students benefit from a little direction. “It’s like any artist,” the Maine educator and illustrator said. “When you’re looking at a blank canvas, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, what do I do?’” So she asks questions, prodding her students to think about what the rangers shared during their classroom Zoom session. Maybe, Abrams said, her second graders will start their drawing of Cape Lookout with a border of bright seashells and fish, or her fifth graders will add undulating mounds along the edge of their work about Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. Once they’ve overcome their blank-canvas block, “then they just go for it,” she said. “They’re able to express themselves and tell their story through their artwork.” (A few may even have found their future career: Two kids told Abrams they want to be rangers when they grow up.)
Though it’s rare for students to view their creations hanging in their final destination, occasionally geographies align. Such is the case for a group of Kentucky high schoolers whose art club teacher, Jennifer Sims, lives 8 miles from Mammoth Cave. This year, park rangers gave the teens an exclusive tour of the homestead of Floyd Collins, a spelunker who died 100 years ago in a cave that is now part of the park — and who served as the exhibit subject. “We got to go out in the backcountry to see parts that usually aren’t open to the public,” Sims said.
Ashley Banet, a Kentucky 10th grader, works on a portrait of ill-fated cave explorer Floyd Collins for Mammoth Cave National Park’s 2025 exhibit.
COURTESY OF JENNIFER SIMSHer students’ works have been a mainstay in Mammoth Cave’s annual exhibit since 2014. (At the time, Sims was teaching kindergarten through eighth grade.) “I was already connected to the themes and to the area,” she said. “It was really important to me that my kids get to take part in this.”
Aspiring animator Ashley Banet created two of the seven canvases allotted to Sims’ school this year. The 10th grader, who has been selling custom cartoons and portraits since she was 11, said she pored over available research before attempting to capture the explorer’s experience. She hopes viewers will identify with some element in her art. “I want them to find themselves in the colors, in the shapes I put in with all the brushstrokes,” she said.
Megan Urban, Big Thicket National Preserve’s chief of interpretation and education as well as its public information officer, said the park’s yearly student art exhibit has become a much-anticipated part of the calendar. Since 2018, students have riffed on park themes related to the site’s waterways, peoples, colors and creatures. “We love taking part, because no matter the theme, there is just this huge variety of artwork,” she said. Last year’s exhibit, which was a celebration of the preserve’s 50th anniversary, was Urban’s favorite. “That was the one that really hit it out of the park,” she said.
TOUR THE ARTWORK
Each January, she and her team receive boxes of multi-hued canvases from Marsh, and they spend the next few days hanging about 70 original works — from whimsical depictions of bears paddleboarding to impressionistic swamp scenes — throughout the visitor center.
Sometimes Marsh, now a dozen years into a project with no set expiration, wonders whether she’ll still be at it years from now. “I’m tired,” she said. “And every year I’m like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to do this.’” She’s racked up thousands of miles on her sewing machine while stitching artwork together and has squirreled away canvases in basements, spare rooms and garages over the lifespan of these exhibits. Yet somehow, each summer, she finds herself picking up the phone to call her park contacts. “I just keep on,” she said, “while there are parks who find that we’re a good fit for them and we can help serve their mission of outreach.”
“Swampy Memories” by Shiloh, a student at Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences in Florida, for Big Thicket National Preserve’s 2024 exhibit.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
Artwork by Evelyn Abrams’ elementary students, featured at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
“An Everlasting Song” was created by Jaquelin, a student at Oxford Preparatory School in North Carolina, for an exhibit at Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
An artwork created for Mammoth Cave National Park’s 2021 exhibit related to women in the National Park Service.
COURTESY OF KAREN BRIGGS
“Brother Bear” was a collaboration between Makayla and Max, students at Adena Local Schools in Ohio, for an exhibit at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
A trio of students at the Sarasota School of Arts and Sciences contributed this painting, entitled “Animal Takeover,” for an exhibit at Big Thicket National Preserve.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
An acrylic painting submitted by Rachel from Hobbton High School in North Carolina for an exhibit at Cape Lookout National Seashore.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.
An artwork created by Madison, a student at Sam Houston High School in Louisiana, for an exhibit at Big Thicket National Preserve.
COURTESY OF INTERNATIONAL FIBER COLLABORATIVE, INC.About the author
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Katherine DeGroff Associate and Online EditorKatherine is the associate editor of National Parks magazine. Before joining NPCA, Katherine monitored easements at land trusts in Virginia and New Mexico, encouraged bear-aware behavior at Grand Teton National Park, and served as a naturalist for a small environmental education organization in the heart of the Colorado Rockies.
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