Our annual publication is dedicated to the natural world and the people who pay attention to it. Each issue gathers around a theme, and is open to anyone willing to look carefully enough. It is print-only, because we believe in permanence and craft. The publication is also a living record of this moment, this landscape, and this particular quality of attention that the world requires of us if we are going to attempt to understand it.
When Rex set out to paint every bird of North America, it was the discomfort of a simple truth that moved him. His country had no true record of its own birds, and that absence embarrassed him. Paintings existed, of course, and so did field guides. But not really, not to Rex. At the time, most of what passed for ornithological illustration came from shot specimens or skins pinned flat in museum drawers. He looked at them and found the birds absent, because the life was missing. There’s no painting life back into an eye that no longer has it. Rex knew this because he started the same way as everyone else, until he realized everyone else had it wrong, and that he did too. So he put the gun down, took up pencil and paper, and gave the next forty years to wet brush and long waits and a warbler’s convenience. He knew the paintings would be more accessible if they were printed in books, so he hand-colored 85,900 prints with exacting color. He did all of this so that a student somewhere, someone he would never meet, would have a reference that held.
Birds and Trees of North America unfolds across twelve volumes and 2,592 pages, containing 1,096 bird species and subspecies and more than 350 species of trees and shrubs. Its 859 watercolors were reproduced as black-and-white prints across 100 copies of each volume, hand-painted by Rex and accompanied by his own writing. The scale of the work is extraordinary, but its significance extends beyond the paintings. Every page is a distinct moment in the history of natural science — names that have since changed, classifications that have been redrawn, disputes over who got to claim a discovery. Rex had opinions about all of it. He objected to naming birds after people, to shooting them, to robbing their nests, and to wearing their feathers. Some of the birds he painted were already disappearing while he painted them. His books preserve a record of the natural world as he encountered it, along with the scientific debates, human habits, and changing landscapes that surrounded it. Art, science, history, and conservation are all part of his work, inseparable from one another and from the world Rex was trying to record.
We finished archiving and publishing all twelve volumes of Birds and Trees of North America May 2026, following the same principle. This publication is how we keep Rex’s legacy going.
Every issue explores a new prompt. The first issue is a salute to trees. Rex painted trees alongside every bird because he understood that one life is the condition of another. Nothing exists without what feeds it, shelters it, and shares its air. We are asking the same question. The oldest living things on earth have been standing very still, paying close attention, for almost five thousand years. That is something worth trying and studying. What does a tree hold? How does it survive? What grows in its canopy and what struggles in its understory? What belongs in a landscape and what invades it? What do we harvest and what do we leave standing? What does old growth remember, and what is a sapling still becoming?
We are open to work in any medium and from any discipline. Writing, poetry, painting, photography, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, music, field notes, scientific research, historical inquiry, architectural thinking, or anything that sits between or beyond those categories. If you can make it with your own mind and your own hands, then you should submit it. We are especially interested in work that refuses easy classification. The field sketch alongside the essay, the research paper that reads like a love letter, the photograph that asks a question the caption cannot answer.
Submissions are welcome from every continent, every discipline, and every kind of maker. Solo submissions, group submissions, in a class or outside of one, all are welcome. There is no age limit and no credential required. The work stands on its own. That is the only measure that matters.
Rex never called himself a teacher, but he taught anyway. He wanted people to understand that they didn’t need to shoot a bird, rob its nest, or cage it to love it, and that doing any of those things was only a betrayal. His alternative was simple. You could watch. You could learn a bird by its living instead of its dying, and both of you would come out ahead.
Students have always been at the heart of Rex’s work. While a school year is not a lifetime, it’s a pretty good place to start.
Perhaps that means a biology unit grown out of a single stand of trees. Or maybe it’s an art project that gives a semester to the maple outside the window — a year with one tree spent watching what happens to it and what happens to you. A doctoral paper on canopy loss and a child’s letter to an oak will lie in the same volume, where they belong. This is the kind of project built to carry a whole school year, something a class takes up in September and doesn’t put down until spring.
One discipline can carry a unit just fine, but we think it gets far more interesting when the unit spans several disciplines. Rex’s work is proof. A single plate is a painting, a field record, a piece of writing, and an argument about how we ought to treat the world around us. He didn’t treat them as separate tasks, and a classroom shouldn’t either. National learning standards strongly encourage and support cross-disciplinary units. Both the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were designed to break down traditional subject “silos” and support interdisciplinary learning.
We would love to see this become part of a curriculum, whether that means a thesis, a class project, or even something looser. Schools and educators who want to build this into a program are encouraged to contact us directly. We have curriculum and instructional design experts on staff at the RBA who can help shape your unit to meet your needs. Ask us questions, or brainstorm with us. Or, take the prompt and run with it on your own. There is no permission to ask for. We only ask to see what comes of it.
Rex was eight years old when he first decided that he was going to paint every bird of North America. Nobody assigned it to him. In fact, most people told him he couldn’t do it, that it was too big a job to fit into one lifetime. “Well, I’ll just have to find a way to fit two or three lifetimes into one,” was his response. If you’re not in a classroom and nobody assigned you this either, you’re in good company. You do not need a syllabus, a partner school, or a degree. This is for anyone who has been paying attention to something and wants to make something of what they've noticed. You can work alone, with others, inside an institution or entirely outside of one. There is no singular path into this publication. Send us what you have.
Work must be complete at the time of submission.
For written work, there is no strict word count. Send us what the subject requires. A poem, a field note, or a 5,000 word essay. We are interested in work that is as long as it needs to be and no longer.
For visual work, all images must be submitted at a minimum of 300 DPI.
The annual is our conversation with Rex across time. It is a way of wandering through the histories, landscapes, and living world that shaped his work. Rex painted 500 watercolors, decided he could do better, and threw them into the furnace. He painted a second set, realized they weren’t up to standard either, and threw those into the fire too. When he finally completed the 859 watercolors, he searched until he found a printer who understood that the printing mattered as much as the paintings, and then proceeded to hand-color 85,900 prints. His entire process demanded failure, revision, and the knowledge that only comes from making something with your hands.
Rex did not accept careless work, and neither do we. We’re not asking you to set fire to your work twice, but the work should only come from your hands, your eyes, and your time. These are very wonderful things to have, so you should use them! Work that is generated by artificial intelligence would offend Rex and thus will not be considered. If Rex could paint every bird of North America and maintain his patience and discipline all the way through, we suspect you can make something pretty great too.
The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2027. Send your work to hello@rexbrasher.org.
We are looking forward to seeing what you find when you really look.