Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2007
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 3-23.
Abstract
Once part of a great inland sea, Kansas and other Great Plains states have been landlocked for millennia. Yet the prairies' "grassy waves" and "islands of cottonwoods" continue to evoke these ancient waters. Diane Quantic in The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction points out that "[ilt is a rare plains writer who does not invoke the image of the sea of grass, and a rare critic or observer [of the plains] who does not comment upon [this image's] ubiquity." In his index for The Great Prairie Fact and Literary Imagination, under "Prairie, likened to ocean," Robert Thacker cites twenty entries. Indeed, comparisons of prairie to sea by early American writers, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser, or in the case of Herman Melville, of sea to prairie, are well known. Christine Martin's song, quoted above, as well as Julie Dunlop's poem "Grasslands" (2003), telling us that "The tall grasses golden ripple the way of waters / moving in waves and it is sea here with nowhere to go / but everywhere," testify to the fact that the sea remains a dominant metaphor for contemporary writers who continue to struggle to grasp the prairie's special attributes.
Contemporary visual artists in their paintings and photographs of the prairie also evoke the sea. However, as Joni Kinsey in Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie points out, "the favorite literary metaphor for the grasslands-the sea-was of little use to visual artists, with the possible exception of their depictions of prairie schooners, the covered wagons that streamed across the region throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century.". Although she astutely contends that over time "the land's malleable character" has allowed for shifting cultural interpretations and pictorial representations, Kinsey neglects to note that a number of significant contemporary prairie artists do appear to represent an inland sea. The contrast of recent work by Kansas-connected prairie artists with historical paintings of the Great Plains as well as with maritime paintings past and present illuminates a continuously shared cultural aesthetic between seascapes and prairiescapes as well as a new regional art, which is recognized by critics and shown in galleries and museums throughout the country. It is explicitly through their aesthetic connection with the sea that these contemporary prairie artworks have achieved the status of regional art as defined by Roger Stein:
Regional art is ... an active strategy of the artistic consciousness to refashion and give shape and structure to the data of local seeing in a way that will communicate with an audience of viewers who live mostly beyond the aesthetic field and whose premises about life and art are not controlled by their experience of the particular geographical area.
The number of contemporary Kansas prairie artists whose works project an affinity for the sea continues to grow. Although I refer to many of them, my focus is on six in particular: painters Robert Sudlow, Keith Jacobshagen, Lisa Grossman, and Louis Copt, and photographers Terry Evans and Larry Schwarm, all of whom have been associated with the Department of Art and Design at the University of Kansas since the 1980s, and each of whom has created an extensive body of works depicting the prairie. Each of these Kansas-connected prairie artists has also exhibited frequently and widely, drawing critical attention to the prairies.
Not only does the work of these Kansasconnected artists present the prairies as being aesthetically intriguing and inspiring-very like the sea-but it also directly challenges continuing perceptions of Kansas' open spaces as flat, drab, and empty, as belonging to the "Great American Desert," a nineteenth-century image which has been propelled into the twenty-first century by Kansas' negative representation in the cinematic version of Frank L. Baum's The Wizard of Oz. While sociologists Roxanne Fridirici and Stephen E. White demonstrate that the perceptions of Kansans themselves verbally counter such negative images about the state's dominant terrain, Kansas artists go further in revising these images. I suggest that their experimentation with diverse aesthetic strategies in representing open space succeeds by relating it to a new sublime and a new drama as well as by documenting the prairies' unique environment. As a consequence, the work of these artists creates an ethic of caring about the prairie environment, about its loss and the need for its conservation.
Comments
Copyright 2007 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln