The Tallgrass Artist Residency announced the groups of artists who will be visiting the great plains of the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve this summer.
The Tallgrass Artist Residency is a program of the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission centered in the small community of Matfield Green near the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. The residency works with local organizations to house artists and host events in addition to collaborating with other partners throughout the Flint Hills region.
The residency invites applicants who currently live in a place that is ecologically considered prairie (though it may be paved and urbanized), plus one “eco-exchange” artist from outside the region. Eight artists are selected each year for two-week residencies from May – September.
Each artist will give a public program during their residency period — look for details on how to connect throughout the summer. Residents also participate in a group exhibition and symposium at the Fall Gathering event in Matfield Green which will be held this year on Saturday, Oct. 12.
This year’s artist in residency include:
Madeline Cass, Lincoln, Nebraska — April 5-14
Madeline Cass is a multidisciplinary artist based in Lincoln. She primarily works within photography, poetry, artist books, painting, and drawing. In 2017, she earned a BFA in studio art with an emphasis in photography from the University of Nebraska. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her book how lonely, to be a marsh was featured at Fotobokfestival Oslo, and has been collected by institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art Library, The National Gallery of Art Library, The Getty Research Institute Library, and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library. She has contributed photographs to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic, among others.
Growing up in a major monoculture state, Cass’ worldview has formed by seeking overlooked wildness that exists around us and how people can connect to these spaces. Her work examines the multitude of relationships between art, science, nature, and humanity. Acting as a translator for nature, her practice is formed by sauntering and examining the landscape intimately, fostering dialogue and empathy. Through interacting with her local habitat in unexpected ways and inviting others to join, she offers alternative pathways into environmental consciousness and ecological thinking.
Colleen Thurston, Tulsa, Oklahoma — May 6-15
Colleen Thurston is a documentary storyteller and film curator from Tulsa. Her films explore the relationships between humans and the natural world and focus on Indigenous perspectives. Colleen has produced for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, PBS, and federal, tribal, and non profit organizations. Her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide. She has received support from Firelight Media, the Sundance Institute, Patagonia, ITVS, the Redford Center and Creative Capital.
Colleen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, the project coordinator for the Indigenous video series, Native Lens, and is a programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and Make Believe Seattle. She’s curated film programs for institutions such as the Momentary (Bentonville, Arkansas), UCLA Film and Television Archives and Vidiots (Los Angeles, California), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). Colleen is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Averi Israel, New York City — May 13-22
Averi Israel is a writer/producer/director from the eight cities that raised her. She moved to New York City to pursue a Film Studies degree from Columbia University, where she graduated as the class recipient of the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts. Now she is cultivating a career at the intersection of art and activism, exploring themes of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and love in the context of American culture. As a writer, her pieces for stage and film consist primarily of historical fiction works highlighting obscured corners of the Black experience, seeking to root our contemporary moment in both its foundational past and visionary future. She is a 2022 recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts Women’s Fund for Media Music and Theatre, a member of Theatre Producers of Color Cohort III, and a 2023 Athena Film Festival Writers Lab participant.
David Wayne Reed, Kansas City, Missouri — May 15-24
David Wayne Reed (he/him) is a writer/director inspired by narratives of landscape, memory, transformation, and time. His work can be found on page, on stage, and on screen and includes: land and flower, Eternal Harvest, Goliath, Help Yourself, Jolly Rancher, Shelf Life, and more.
Poppy DeltaDawn, Lawrence, Kansas — May 18-27
Poppy DeltaDawn is an artist and educator making work that is guided by material. Her current research includes the communication and transition between ancient and modern technologies of labor as they relate to cloth production, land cultivation, and lineages of knowledge.
Projects include exhibitions and projects at H Space Gallery & Muted Horn (Cleveland, Ohio), Ortega y Gassett Projects (Brooklyn, New York), Below Grand (New York City), Zürcher Gallery (New York City), Standard Space (Sharon, Connecticut), and Heidelberg Project in Detroit, among others. Residencies and fellowships that she has participated in are numerous and include a Media Arts Fellowship and Workspace Fellowship at BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn, New York), and artist residencies at Caldera Arts (Sisters, Oregon), the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts), ACRE Residency (Steuben, Wisconsin), and a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont), among others.
DeltaDawn’s work has been written about in Site Unseen, Hyperallergic, and Maake Magazine, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, both in Fiber. Prior to beginning her current appointment of Assistant Professor of Visual Art in Textiles at the University of Kansas, DeltaDawn was a Full Time Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022-2023, and has also taught in the Fiber & Material Studies departments at Tyler School of Art, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Kayla Romberger, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — June 17-26
Kayla Romberger is an artist and arts organizer based in Philadelphia. Exhibitions of her work include Satellite Projects (Miami, Florida), the 4th Gwangju Design Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea), BASE Beijing (China), MOCAD, Work-Detroit, and the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 (New York). Reviews of Romberger’s work have appeared in The Guardian, The Detroiter, ArtForum, and Designboom, among other publications.
Romberger holds an MFA in Art & Design and Certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Prior to teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, she held internships in programming and education at the Whitney Museum of Art and Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA). She is co-founder and co-director of the bookshop and exhibition space Ulises, where she has organized exhibitions with artists and publishing groups including Hannah Black, Martine Syms, Pablo Helguera, Hardworking Goodlooking, and Bidoun. Current projects include “Publishing As Practice,” an experimental art publishing residency funded by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Veronica Anne Salinas, Chicago, Illinois — July 13-22
Veronica Anne Salinas is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator currently based in Chicago. Her creative research explores sound practices ranging from compositions, soundwalks, multi-channel sound, improvisation, text scores, field recordings, writing, performance, to Deep Listening. Her work engages with themes of perception, orientation, landscape, near- spiritual experiences, site, bodies, marginalized voices, and ecologies. As a dedicated teaching artist, Veronica collaborates with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, Chicago Public Schools, and Campbient to nurture the growth of listening as social practice. She studied at the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and holds an MFA in Sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Brian Johannesen, Iowa City, Iowa — July 20-29
Brian Johannesen is a singer-songwriter, landscape polaroid photographer, and talent buyer in Iowa City. He has recorded five albums, including his latest, Holster Your Silver, which was released in January of 2020, shortly before the world changed. Once the pandemic hit, it derailed all the plans he had laid for the next year, and ultimately the trajectory of his life and career, as it did for so many. Brian decided to take a step back. He had been creating music and working in the industry since he was a teenager. He decided to pursue another passion – nature and sustainability. He had always been a National Parks buff, carving days out of his tours to visit as many as possible, taking polaroid photos of the landscapes and selling them at his merch table. He had also started to dive deep into the climate crisis, a passion that started back in 2007 when he saw Al Gore give his famous An Inconvenient Truth presentation as a freshman at Arizona State University. He decided to go back to school and earned a Certificate in Sustainability from the University of Iowa. As he studied, his worlds collided. He realized the most effective way to communicate the effects of the climate disaster was through telling the human stories of those impacted. Since then he has been gathering these stories, through travel and research, compiling them into a cohesive piece – a snapshot of a planet on the brink – like a polaroid, fuzzy, grainy, and uniquely its own.
Christopher Williams, Lincoln, Nebraska — July 30-Aug 8
Christopher Williams is a visual artist who earned their Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in Ceramics. They earned their BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute, and finished a two-year Post-Baccalaureate at the University of Arkansas. Christopher has spent time studying traditional fresco techniques and classical painting in Florence, Italy and spent time in residencies across the United States. They are a story-teller through colorful handbuilt ceramics, drawing, installation, performance, video and hand-drawn animation.
Canese Jarboe, Kansas City, Missouri — September 6-15
Canese Jarboe is the author of SISSY (Garden-Door Press, 2024) and the chapbook dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). They are a poet, essayist, and queer and trans+ archivist in Kansas City.
