Nemo painter Mark Zimmerman’s exploration of the anything-but-square Bad River valley
By Bernie Hunhoff
Wild landscapes inspire Black Hills artist Mark Zimmerman, so imagine his delight when he discovered the Bad River, which pigtails 161 miles from Fort Pierre to Philip in western South Dakota.
The river valley is a picturesque and sparsely populated stretch of ghost towns, grasslands and big ranches. Zimmerman researched, explored, photographed and sketched the region. Now he is creating art that he hopes will convey his love for a land most Americans consider flyover country.
“I want people to love it the way I do,” he says. “Of course, I know that doesn’t happen just from looking at a picture. I hope I can capture the feel of the space. If you are a child of the prairie, it’s in your soul, and if you are not then you might look at it and still see it as empty.”
Zimmerman is that child. He was born in Greeley, Colorado, east of the Rockies, and raised in Kansas and North Dakota. As a graduate student at Illinois State University, he discovered that he missed the wild prairie. He felt claustrophobic when surrounded by industrial landscapes. Even the Illinois farm fields were too square, too civilized — too straight.
A sculptor from Chicago once assessed Zimmerman’s paintings and told him that something was missing. Zimmerman remembers the critique: “He said, ‘That’s all great, but where is the other stuff? Where is the stuff you don’t like?’”
The painter never forgot the sculptor’s question. “I know what I don’t like about the land I love,” he says. “I don’t like the squares.” So, he began to insert squares in his paintings — jarring interlopers to otherwise natural shapes.
He returned to North Dakota and was working at The Arts Center in Jamestown when he met Mary Wipf, a visiting artist from the Black Hills. She told him that she lived on a small ranch in South Dakota. He imagined a windswept and treeless prairie homestead, which only added to her allure. They married and he moved to South Dakota in 1997.
As it turns out, the ranch is in the forested Black Hills, just a few miles from the tiny town of Nemo, but that hasn’t hindered their relationship or his art career; Mary looks for lichens and fungi in the lowlands, while he prefers to hike the ridgetops.
However, he still seeks opportunities to explore the open prairie. In autumn of 2001 he was awarded a state Arts Council grant to visit Harding County, which he once called “the last best corner” of South Dakota. He spent his days teaching art at the rural schools, and then he drove the backroads, shooting photographs of scenery that has inspired his art ever since.
Zimmerman seldom references his photos as he paints because the prairie is embedded in his imaginative mind. As he developed the Harding County series, his style changed from abstract to expressive landscapes that reflect his affinity for the land of barbed wire, native grasslands and dirt roads.
He also respects the ranching families. He remembers the fifth grader who drove herself to Painter School in a big truck, and the youngsters who spent recess catching garter snakes in a creek. “That was a long time ago and I’m still painting memories of that place.”
Twenty years after Harding County, Zimmerman became interested in the Bad River when he was invited to participate in a 2023 project called “Navigating Narratives: The Corps of Discovery in Titonwan Territory.” Craig Howe, the project’s curator, asked artists and writers to produce a work based on Lewis and Clark’s journal entries from late September of 1804.
Zimmerman chose September 25, a day when the explorers had a tense confrontation with the Lakota at the intersection of the Bad and Missouri rivers in today’s Fort Pierre. Even then, the waterway was known as the Bad River (wakpa sica) by Native Americans because of a major flood in 1738 that killed many people. Lewis and Clark called it the Teton River because of their confrontation with the Teton Sioux, but the original name has survived.
“I read and reread everything I could find from the journals about that day and then I forgot everything and just started to draw and paint landscapes,” Zimmerman says. “I drew circles for the sun and the moon and stars, and intrusive squares. While I was imagining the mouth of the Bad River, I got the idea to paint it like I did Harding County.”
He proposed another plan to the South Dakota Arts Council, and before long he was back in open country. “The first time I ever saw it, I was driving north of the little town of Midland on the Bad River Road,” he recalls. “My first impression was from high above the foothills, and it wasn’t what I had in mind. Then you drop into the valley, past Capa and Van Metre, and I said, ‘Yeah, this is what I like!’”
He took notes and photographs, and he soon wrote a poem of his travels that includes these lines:
Head out, up the Bad River Road,
A stranger in a rangeland,
Steer the gravelly ruts, dust billowing.
Step into wildly surging winds,
Rattling in dancing autumn cottonwoods,
Hissing in sparse, brassy grasses.
Wheel round wriggling rattlesnakes,
Squint into a blazing sun,
Taste gritty dirt
Sweeping the spaciousness.
He wrote of the Capa School (“gone are the laughing children … the forgotten dreams”) and of driving the Capa and Van Metre trails (“where gravel eventually tapers to wandering twin tire tracks, roads named for disappearing places”).
Zimmerman wandered the Bad River for four days. Cattle ranches dominate the valley. Cows and calves share grasslands with deer, pronghorns, eagles and a plethora of other wildlife. On the southern edge of the valley is Ted Turner’s 141,000-acre Bad River buffalo ranch.
In the evenings, Zimmerman retreated to the Farr House, a historic bed and breakfast in nearby Pierre that was once the residence of Governor Peter Norbeck. He sorted his digital photos and notes and did sketches that are now taking shape on canvasses at the studio he shares with Mary near their home, which is buried in the pine forest a few miles south of Nemo.
Nemo, he notes, is a Latin word for nobody, so it is a good place to contemplate his Bad River experience and convert it to art. The spacious studio, which they call Green Ink Gallery, is a remodeled horse barn. There are stalls for their two horses and hay mounds for a big tabby cat that shares the ranch with them, along with a German Shepherd they call Echo.
Most of the people who will see his paintings have never driven the Bad River Valley. He hopes to show them its natural shapes and curves, and its wild nature. “Sadly, there are subdivisions and cornfields and roads coming for it,” he says.
“We live on a sphere, and we’ve decided to cut it into squares. I view it as an imperiled landscape. Most of our prairie is already cut into squares, which seems like a crazy way of dealing with a landscape that’s anything but square.”
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.