Midwestern photographer featured in upcoming Beach Museum of Art exhibition
Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025
Kansas State University's Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art will feature Midwestern photographer Dana Fritz's work in the upcoming "Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape" exhibition. This is "Fire Tower View," a 16 x 40 in. 2021 inkjet print. | Download this photo.
MANHATTAN — An upcoming exhibition at Kansas State University's Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art will feature photography of the Nebraska National Forest by Midwesterner Dana Fritz.
"Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz" will be open from Tuesday, Feb. 4, to Saturday, Aug. 2, in the Ruth Ann Wefald Gallery. Fritz, who was raised in Prairie Village and now resides in Lincoln, Nebraska, is the Hixson-Lied Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the museum's 2025 gift print artist, and limited-edition prints of her work will be available for purchase at the museum.
Fritz's photographs in this exhibition draw attention to the forces that shaped the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands' Bessey Ranger District in the Sandhills region. This hand-planted conifer forest was overlaid onto a semi-arid grassland in an ambitious late-19th-century experiment to create a timber industry and change the local climate.
In black-and-white close shots and panoramic views, Fritz beautifully highlights the natural and human-defined patterns on the land. The forest's row-crop trees were never commercially harvested, and the site was protected from the natural cycle of fire for decades. In 2022, 5,000 acres of the park burned in an accidental fire.
Elizabeth Seaton, Beach Museum of Art curator, said Fritz's presentation of the site before and after the fire has become an important record. Fritz's photography helps viewers visualize how the more than 100-year-old site has become a metaphor for our current environmental predicaments.
"Dana Fritz's work invites us to reconsider our relationship with the natural world by exploring the intersections of art, science and human intervention in cultivated and constructed landscapes," said Kent Michael Smith, museum director. "This exhibition is significant for the museum, as it aligns with our desire to foster dialogue about humanity's impact on the environment through the arts."
Fritz's photographic edition "Tallgrass Orientation," this year's gift print, relates to work she created during a 2023 Tallgrass artist residency in Chase County. Giant leaves of a compass plant lie over a topographic map of the area where she collected them. The leaves' fingers point to the poles and orient their flat faces to the east and west sun. Indigenous and settler travelers valued compass plants for orientation in a vast prairie with few landmarks.
The 2025 limited-edition gift print, "Tallgrass Orientation," will be available for purchase at the Beach Museum of Art. Dana Fritz, 2024, 16 x 20 in. inkjet print. | Download this photo.
Fritz's work has been exhibited widely across the United States, Europe and Asia. Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogues, and she has several self-published, limited-edition artist books. Additionally, she published "Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass" with the University of New Mexico Press in 2017 and "Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape" with the University of Nebraska Press in 2023, which won the 2024 Nebraska Book Award in the Nonfiction Nebraska as Place category.
"Through her lens, Fritz transforms complex ecological narratives into evocative visual experiences, offering our audience a unique opportunity to engage with critical ideas about sustainability, stewardship and the ways we shape the world around us," Smith said.
The Beach Museum of Art will host several events related to the "Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape" exhibition, including an Artist Talk from Fritz at the museum on Feb. 20 and a livestream conversation about tree planting campaigns on the prairie and their impacts on April 24. The conversation will be moderated by Elizabeth Seaton, museum curator, and it will feature Fritz; Jesse Nippert, university distinguished professor of biology at K-State; and Carson Vaughan, author and freelance environmental reporter. See the museum's events page for more details.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Greater Manhattan Community Foundation's Lincoln & Dorothy I. Deihl Community Grants Program and David and Judith Regehr.
The gift print program was started by Kansas State University's Friends of Art group in 1934. Continued by the Friends of the Beach Museum of Art, the group commissions a limited-edition print by a recognized Kansas artist for sale to Friends and the public every two years. Friends of the Beach Museum of Art at any level receive a 25% discount on the price. For more information about becoming a Friend or purchasing this year's gift print, please contact the museum at 785-532-7718 or visit the museum's website.
The Beach Museum of Art is on the southeast corner of the K-State campus at 701 Beach Lane. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursdays; and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. Admission to the museum is free, and free parking is available adjacent to the building. To catch a livestream event or view exhibitions online, visit the museum's website, or watch videos of the museum's special programs and events on its YouTube channel. For more information about programs and events, view the museum's calendar.
