Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz
Exhibition organized by the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University. Museum hours: Tues Wed Fri 10 - 5, Thurs 10 - 8, Sat 11 - 4, Closed Sun, Mon & holidays. Free admission | Free parking
Dana Fritz's photographs in this exhibition make visible the forces that shaped the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands' Bessey Ranger District in the Sandhills. 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 for decades the site was protected from the natural cycle of fire. In 2022 five thousand acres of the park burned in an accidental fire. Fritz's presentation of the site before and after the fire has become an important record.
The forest provides a rich metaphor for the nation's current environmental predicaments, including catastrophic forest fires and tree encroachment in the grasslands. The district, which includes a tree nursery, is today focused on conservation, grassland restoration, and native reforestation, with an aim of mitigating large-scale climate change.
Raised in Prairie Village, Kansas, Fritz is the Hixson-Lied Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the 2025 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist. Her photographic edition, Tallgrass Orientation, 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.
