March 1, 2017

Scientific Surrealism: Alaskan Artist Ray Troll to Speak at Lafayette

Artist, illustrator Ray Troll will present the next Presidential Entrepreneurship Lecture: The Scientific Surrealism of Ray Troll at Lafayette College, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 8 in the Landis Cinema of Buck Hall, Williams Arts Campus, 219 N. Third St., Easton. It is free and open to the public.

Troll will share “All the Things I Didn’t Learn in Art School but Really Should Have” as he discusses his unique fish-inspired, art-and-science career and the practical realities of copyrights, royalties, licensing artwork, contracts, museum exhibits, public art commissions and book publishing. He will also meet and engage with students in film and media studies, art, and geology classes during his visit to campus.

Troll, of Ketchikan, Alaska, began producing offbeat fish-filled T-shirts that soon gained him an audience with cannery works, anglers, commercial fishers and scientists. His art has toured in exhibitions at major museums across the United States and overseas.

He has coauthored and illustrated nine books, including the popular Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, a fun filled romp through the American West with paleontologist Kirk Johnson. He also wrote and illustrated a unique alphabetical children’s book of living and prehistoric sharks called Sharkabet, and an overview of his career, Rapture of the Deep, with an introduction by biographer Brad Matsen.

In 2011 he and paleontologist Kirk Johnson were awarded Guggenheim fellowships to support their collaborative book project Cruisin’ the Eternal Coastline: the Best of the Fossil West from Baja to Barrow, which is the basis for a traveling show.

Troll served as the art director for the Miami Museum of Science’s major traveling exhibit, Amazon Voyage: Vicious Fishes and Other Riches. In 2007, Troll was awarded a gold medal for distinction in the natural history arts by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and has received the Alaska Governor’s award for the arts (2006).

Troll has appeared on the Discovery Channel and his work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, and in galleries and museums such as the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the California Academy of Sciences, and at the Smithsonian.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bethany College and an MFA in studio arts from Washington State University. In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Alaska Southeast.

He has been honored by the naming of a species of ratfish, Hydrolagus trolli, and a genus of extinct herring, Trollichthys.

An avid music fan, Troll has played with and published CDs with the Rayfish Wranglers.

For more information, contact Prof. David Sunderlin, associate professor of geology and environmental geosciences, 610-330-5198, sunderld@lafayette.edu.

The Presidential Entrepreneurship Lecture Series is sponsored and supported by the offices of the president, the provost, career services, advising and co-curricular programs and the IDEAL Center for Innovation at Lafayette.

Troll’s visit is supported by Lafayette’s Arts Infusion Initiative, CaPA, art department and geology and environmental geosciences department.

Photos courtesy of Lafayette College.
View more images on artist’s website, www.trollart.com.

Media inquiries welcome.

Kristine Y. Todaro
Director/Special Projects & Media Relations
Lafayette College
610-330-5119
LafColnews@lafayette.edu
todarok@lafayette.edu
www.lafayette.edu