Trumped: Artist Solves a Sticky Situation for National Parks Pass

When artist Jenny McCarty of Sage Leaf Studio first saw the design for the 2026 America the Beautiful National Parks Pass, the Department of the Interior’s annual season pass for the 433 National Parks sites across the country, she was”definitely disappointed,” she says. And that’s underselling it — she’d earlier told Outside magazine that she was “really fired up” and that she, like most Americans who care about public lands and our nation’s state of ecological being, didn’t want a “politician on my parks pass.”

And there shouldn’t be one there, according to both tradition and American law, which states in 16 U.S. Code Section 6804 that there shall be “an annual competition to select the image to be used on the National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass for a year” and that the “competition shall be open to the public and used as a means to educate the American people about Federal recreational lands and waters.” Traditionally, the new pass introduced every year shows a lovely landscape in the National Parks system.

But Trump photobombing the parks pass alongside George Washington isn’t just against both law and precedent — it’s flat-out hypocritical hubris for a POTUS who’s not only been antagonistic to the mission of that system, gutting its infrastructure and decimating both its funding and workforce, even welcoming drilling and mining-related construction in previously protected pristine wilderness. On top of that, the feds have raised park fees for international visitors, as well as ending free admission on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth — while making Trump’s own birthday a free day instead.

Enter McCarty, both an artist and a professional ecologist working in water resource management. As a lifelong resident of Colorado — she was born in California, but her parents immediately moved the family to the Centennial State — she’s a huge fan of the outdoor life and National Parks, specifically. So she responded to the insult of Trump’s visage on the annual pass by creating several of her own paintings that can be placed over that image, each available in RESIDENT, MILITARY or SENIOR categories: “Calling the Pack” features a wolf from the Grand Tetons, “Denali Dreamin'” is a bear in Denali, and “Peek Behind the Pika” is Colorado’s own adorable fuzzball representing Rocky Mountain Park. All varieties are available for order on McCarty’s website.

“There are a lot of angles to it,” says McCarty. “Some people have called it art activism. Others have called it a micro-protest. But it really started in response to the outrage from people in my community — mainly on social media — about the announcement of the new residential pass design. I had similar feelings.” When she shared the idea online — at first more as a joke than anything — that little pika stickers she’d used as thank-yous for online orders from her art website could be used to cover up the offending image with something a little more in tune with the natural world, the response was immediate. “People were like yes, how do I get one?,” she recalls. That was how it began.

“And all of a sudden, it snowballed,” McCarty says. “I had originally ordered 200 stickers, thinking I’d sell maybe a handful, and give the rest as gifts to friends and family, or stick them on water bottles. But needless to say, I had some quick learning to do about inventory right after that. It’s been kind of crazy.”

To date, McCarty has had almost 2,700 individual orders for well over 5,000 stickers. One of her favorite customer stories involves twenty of the Grand Teton wolf stickers sold to a military squadron out of Wyoming. “That was pretty cool,” she says.

But for McCarty, it’s really about the art — and the defense of it. “People think it’s just a simple piece of plastic, these passes,” she says. “But this is supposed to be art that gets to be seen by people around the country. It’s a celebration of the arts, and a celebration of nature and beauty. For many people, the pass is one of their prize possessions, their means of access to some of their favorite places in the world.”

McCarty calls the decision by the Trump administration to replace the art with presidential portraits “disrespectful,” and points out that while Trump’s photographer gets credit on the official pass, the artist behind George Washington’s presidential portrait, Gilbert Stuart, goes without credit at all. “It’s just another disservice to art and artists in general,” says McCarty.

In response from requests across the country, McCarty is now planning to offer her art on a national scale. “Shops near to national parks, bookstores, cafes,” she notes. And they’ll sell not only stickers, but greeting cards and even puzzles made from her work.

“My passion is in creating fine art pieces that bring wonder to people,” says McCarty. “A lot of my artwork has hidden elements within it that tell a deeper story. So in the three designs on the stickers, for example, there’s hidden animals from that same ecosystem within the landscape. And in the end, I’m just happy to be able to keep painting.”

And if McCarty can do a little grassroots good for America at the same time? That element isn’t hidden at all.