Tag: artists

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Spearfish’s Pot Pedaler

By Michael Zimny

Clay Dykstra in his Black Hills State University studio.

“This has got to be the best view in town,” says Clay Dykstra, gazing at Lookout Mountain from the windows of his Black Hills State University ceramics classroom.

Dykstra knows it well. He’s cranked his way up the mountain countless times since junior high, when the Spearfish mountain biking scene was growing out of its training wheels.

“Lookout Mountain was some of the first trail that a lot of us got to ride,” Dykstra says.”It’s close to town, so that’s kind of where you cut your teeth. For the most part in the early days it was a mix of hiking trails, fire roads and old logging roads.”

In a way, his potter’s wheel and all that two-wheel trail time share a common axis. When he moved back to Spearfish after college in Wyoming, one of the first works he made in clay was a trophy for the Dakota Five-O.

“It’s a really cool event and something that I’m passionate about. I just did it voluntarily. Then I started making mugs.” Twelve years later, he’s still making kiln-fired wares for riders at events like the Five-O and the 28 Below, in a town where mountain biking has become engrained in the local culture.

Dykstra Pottery has also expanded into making vessels for local independent businesses. You can find his mugs at Green Bean Coffee and Blackbird Espresso in Spearfish, Sturgis Coffee Company and Harriet & Oak in Rapid City. His tankards have been a feature at Flanagan’s pub in Spearfish for years.

Through homegrown connections and dedication to his craft he’s finding a way to make it doing what he loves. He’s also passing along the knowledge he’s acquired through the years as an adjunct professor at BHSU.

Lookout Mountain is the backdrop for Dykstra’s creative space.

He’s had some good teachers himself. “Dan Binder was the ceramics teacher at Spearfish High School. When I was a junior I thought it would be really cool to take a class from him. There were definitely a lot of kids that were better at it than I was. But I took a second semester in my senior year, and I’d go in during my free hour and make pots.”

He attended Northwest College, near Yellowstone, to study anthropology. “My goal at the time was to be an archaeologist. I’ve done a lot of volunteering with the Forest Service here and been on a number of digs in the area, so I thought being an archaeologist would be cool.” But the wheel had cast a hypnotic spell on him. “Pottery was open and unattended. They had a big box of clay and I’d go in and make some pots.”

“Then I kind of realized that the more I got educated, the more I’d be behind a desk. And it wasn’t the desk stuff that I liked. It was digging and walking around. I liked reading about it too, but I didn’t want to sit behind a desk most of the time. So I realized, ‘Okay, I think I want to be a potter.’ And I started getting serious about it.”

He continued his education at Casper College under the tutelage of respected potter and longtime ceramics instructor Lynn Munns.

Since moving back to Spearfish, he’s experimented with different formulas for making it as a small town potter, often doing other work — construction gigs and managing the family business (Good Earth Natural Foods) — to get by.

He estimates that the work he does for local businesses comprises the majority of his output. “It’s about ninety percent of what I’m doing. To make it as a potter in the Black Hills, you’ve got to branch out and do some different things.”

Making it here has challenges, but it can also inspire.

“The natural world, aesthetically, is a huge influence on me. Some of my favorite pots — I see them as pieces of a whole, like that really interesting stone that you see on the side of a trail, or that interesting branch on a gnarly old tree. If I had no limitations and could just make what I want, I’d make pots that look as if they were left on the side of a trail. They’d just look like they belonged there.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Artists of Mobridge

Our September/October issue includes an article on the artists and art collections of Mobridge. The city of 3,500 in Walworth County is famous for fishing and ranching, but it has also wrangled sculptures and paintings by some of the West’s preeminent artists. Bernie Hunhoff traveled to the Missouri River town last summer to explore and take photos — too many to print. Here are some that didn’t make the magazine.

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Animal Wisdom Stories

By Bernie Hunhoff


Mark McGinnis has a reputation as an artist who isn’t afraid to mix politics and paint. Nuclear weapons, socialism vs. capitalism and foreign policy are issues he has dealt with throughout his career.

So you can understand his friends’ surprise when he started a series on animals — buffalo, coyotes, mice, frogs and the like.

It developed almost by chance. In 1991, McGinnis was finishing a series on explorers. As usual, he found a controversial angle. He was comparing the explorers’ textbook reputations with his own expression of their lives based on historical research.

“One of the paintings was of Balboa and his dog, Leoncico,” says McGinnis. “To my surprise, I found painting the dog to be very enjoyable. I had never painted animals before.”

A year later, contemplating his next series and weary of confrontational art, he remembered the enjoyment of doing the dog and decided to create a series of animals based on Greek fables.

He soon changed the focus from Greek to Lakota/Dakota. “I thought it would be foolish to do a series on Greek fables when I was sitting in a homeland rich in animal stories of our own.”

As with all his projects, McGinnis began with extensive research. He studied Native American animal legends in turn-of-the-century books about Indian life.

At the same time, he became active in the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center and agreed to interview members of the Lakota and Dakota tribes for a newspaper project. He met many people on the reservations who knew similar animal stories. He also developed an even greater admiration for the Native American culture. “The people I interviewed really opened my eyes to the wonderful diversity of the Indian people and the wisdom that is there.”

When he visited with Indians about the animal stories, he found many knew the tales. “Sometimes they had a slightly different version, but I was amazed at how many had heard the stories before.”

Although Indian literature has historically been passed on orally rather than in written form, McGinnis says it has been preserved, and his goal is not to educate Indians about Indian stories. “This project is structured primarily for the European-American audience. I hope it gets some exposure to the Native Americans in the state, but I don’t think of myself in any way as a person who is going to teach them about their culture.”

Though McGinnis’ previous artistic subjects seemed foreign to South Dakota, he is not. Born and raised in Aberdeen, the son of a Milwaukee Railroad worker, he studied art at Northern State College. He received a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and was working for an Indianapolis art gallery when Northern State offered him a teaching position in 1976.

He came home and taught art for 30 years. McGinnis is now retired from teaching but he’s still making art, specializing in acrylic, black ink and watercolor in Boise, Idaho.

The Meadowlark and the Rattlesnake

Once upon a time, there was a mother meadowlark. She had some little baby birds, but they weren’t quite ready to fly yet.

While she was sitting there with her little ones, a big rattlesnake came and coiled around her nest. She was very frightened. She feared for her little ones. She didn’t quite know what to do. She was shaking. Her heart was beating very fast. She had to think real fast about what to do. So she said,”Oh! Your uncle is here, your uncle almost never comes, finally came today, so I must cook for him!”

She turned to her oldest little one. She said,”Go and borrow a kettle, cause I must cook for your uncle. He must be very hungry. Hurry back with the kettle!”

So she sent the oldest one on. Pretty soon, he didn’t come back for a long time, so the snake waited there and kinda moved around a little bit and squeezed the nest a little bit tighter. And she got scared again so she told the second to the oldest son, she said,”You go find your brother, he must have got lost.”

So the next one [went]. She was just sitting there just talking, trying to keep the snake occupied. She ran out of things to say and the snake got restless because they didn’t come with the kettle. He moved closer and closer and coiled up his head.

She said to the youngest.”Go find your brothers! They should have been back. Maybe they both got lost. Bring the kettle cause your uncle is very hungry. I gonna cook for him,” she said.

So the youngest [ran] out of the nest and left. So now she had all the young ones out of the net, she flapped her wings and she flew up out of the nest as fast as she could. She said,”There, sit there and wait for whoever is going to cook for you.”

— Buckskin Tokens: Contemporary Oral Narratives of the Sioux by R.D. Theisz, editor (1975)

The Eagle and the Beaver

Out of the quiet blue sky there shot like an arrow the great War-eagle. Beside the clear brown stream an old Beaver-woman was busily chopping wood. Yet she was not too busy to catch the whir of descending wings, and the Eagle reached too late the spot where she had vanished in the midst of the shining pool

He perched sullenly upon a dead tree nearby and kept his eyes steadily upon the smooth sheet of water above the dam.


After a time the water was gently stirred, and a sleek, brown head cautiously appeared above it.


“What right have you,” reproached the Beaver-woman,”to disturb thus the mother of a peaceful and hard-working people?”

“Ugh, I am hungry,” the Eagle replied shortly.

“Then why not do as we do — let other folks alone and work for a living?”

“That is all very well for you,” the Eagle retorted,”but not everybody can cut down trees with his teeth or live upon bark and weeds in a mud-plastered wigwam. I am a warrior, not an old woman!”

“It is true that some people are born trouble-makers,” returned the Beaver quietly.”Yet I see no good reason why you, as well as we, should not be content with plain fare and willing to toil for what you want. My work, moreover, is of use to others besides myself and my family, for with my dam-building I deepen the stream for the use of all the dwellers therein, while you are a terror to all living creatures that were weaker than yourself. You would do well to profit by my example.”

So saying, she dove down again to the bottom of the pool.

The Eagle waited patiently for a long time, but he saw nothing more of her; and so, in spite of his contempt for the harmless industry of an old Beaver-woman, it was he, not she, who was obliged to go hungry that morning.

— Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folk Tales Retold by Charles and Elaine Eastman (1909)

The Raccoon and the Crawfish

Sharp and cunning is the raccoon, say the Indians, by whom he is named Spotted Face.

A crawfish one evening wandered along a riverbank looking for something dead to feast. A raccoon was also looking for something to eat. He spied the crawfish and formed a plan to catch him.

He lay down on the bank and feigned to be dead. By the by, the crawfish came nearby.”Ho,” he thought,”here is a feast indeed, but is he really dead? I will go near and pinch him with my claws and find out.”

So he went near and pinched the raccoon on the nose and then on his soft paws. The raccoon never moved. The crawfish then pinched him on the ribs and tickled him so the raccoon could hardly keep from laughing. The crawfish at last left him.”The raccoon is surely dead,” he thought. And he hurried back to the crawfish village and reported his find to the chief.

All the villagers were called to go down to the feast. The chief bade the warriors and young men to paint their faces and dress in their gayest for a dance.

So they marched in a long line — first the warriors, with their weapons in hand, then the women with their babies and children — to the place where the raccoon lay. They formed a great circle about him and danced, singing:

We shall have a great feast

On the spotted-face beast, with the soft smooth paws:

He is dead!

He is dead!

We shall dance!

We shall have a good time

We shall feast on his flesh.

But as they danced, the raccoon suddenly sprang to his feet.

“Who is that you say you are going to eat? He has a spotted face, has he? He has soft paws, has he? I’ll break your ugly backs. I’ll break your rough bones. I’ll crunch your ugly, rough paws.” And he rushed among the crawfish, killing them by the scores. The crawfish warriors fought bravely and the women ran screaming, all to no purpose. They did not feast on the raccoon; the raccoon feasted on them!

— Myths and Legends of the Sioux by Marie McLaughlin (1916)

The Little Mice

Once upon a time, a prairie mouse busied herself all fall storing away a cache of beans. Every morning she was out early with her empty cast-off snakeskin, which she filled with ground beans and dragged home with her teeth.

The little mouse had a cousin who was fond of dancing and talk but who did not like to work. She was not careful to get her cache of beans, and the season was already well gone before she thought to bestir herself. When she came to realize her need she found she had no packing bag, so she went to her hardworking cousin and said,”Cousin, I have no beans stored for the winter, and the season is nearly gone. But I have no snakeskin to gather the beans in. Will you lend me one?”

“But why have you no packing bag? Where were you in the moon when the snakes cast off their skins?”

“I was here.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was busy talking and dancing.”

“And now you are punished,” said the other.”It is always so with lazy careless people. But I will let you have the snakeskin. And now go, and by hard work and industry try to recover your wasted time.”

— Myths and Legends of the Sioux by Marie McLaughlin (1916)

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 1993 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Brimming With Enthusiasm

By Michael Zimny

At Star of the West in Belle Fourche, Brad Montague makes cowboy hats for West River ranchers as well as sports and television stars.

Is the generational divide over cowboy hat brim width just another indicator of the deepening socio-aesthetic chasms in our nation? Probably not. In any case, wide or tight, Brad Montague at Star of the West can shape you up.

He’s been shaping hats since he was knee-high to a buckaroo in Fruitdale, just east of Belle Fourche.”As a kid growing up wearing hats all the time,” Montague recalls,”we had to learn to shape our own hats. We had a pan with a little knob on the top that you could take a screw out and pull the knob off, and when it started boiling it shot steam. So we’d stand over the pan and steam our own hats and shape them.”

He didn’t know then that standing over that jerry-rigged steam kettle, he was shaping more than just his hat.

Much of what makes a hat unique is in the curvature of crown or brim. “In my opinion,” he says, “the harder part of making a hat is the shaping.”

A hat’s shape conveys subtle messages about the age, persona or social milieu of the wearer. The”taco” look — a high, narrow crease in the crown that looks ripe for a spoonful of carne asada — is popular on the horse show circuit. The “cattleman” crease is a little wider and tends to be favored by more mature cowboys.

Brim width tends to correspond with age.”For years, the standard brim width of a hat was 4 inches. You’re starting to see the factory hats go to 4 and a quarter. A quarter inch doesn’t sound like much, but when you add a half inch in diameter it makes a huge difference in the appearance of the hat.”

“When you start getting into the older generations — 70s and up — you’ll see them going to a 3 and a half inch brim as opposed to a 4.”

Montague understands the visual subtexts communicated by a hat. More importantly, he intuitively understands how to formalize that visual language with his hands. And he knows what every cowboy used to know — that while styles can fade, a hat made of the right materials will endure.

Like most makers of Western hats, Montague uses the”X” rating system (unrelated to the old MPAA rating) to grade his hats.”The higher the Xs, the more quality and durability you get.”

Montague begins with a raw hat body and shaves away any excess felt before shaping the crown over a hat block.

But he doesn’t necessarily recommend relying on the rating system.”For years, Xs meant a lot more than they do now.” A higher”X” rating on a hat will generally mean a higher ratio of wild fur, but there is no governing body to set exact requirements for any given rating.”Anybody can label whatever they want.”

“If you take a hat from the’60s or’70s and it’s labeled as a 3X, you’ll find that little 3x is probably better than most of the 10Xs nowadays.”

Montague uses rabbit and beaver fur exclusively. A higher”X” rating means a higher percentage of beaver fur. More fine, short beaver hairs make for a stronger, more compact hat.

Older cowboys and cowgirls know this, but,”It’s gotten to the point that somebody my age or a little younger can’t feel a hat. I’ve had people come in here and argue with me that the higher quality the hat, the thicker the material is. No, that’s a lesser quality felt.”

Somewhere along the way, a tactile kind of knowledge was lost. People lost touch with their hats and started relying on the labels.”Cowboys that have been wearing hats their whole life will tell you that the movie Urban Cowboy is what killed it.” Not because John Travolta wasn’t true West, but because the movie’s popularity triggered a wave of hat inflation. Xs became status symbols rather than a measure of dependability.

“Around here, most people buy a hat to wear for dress, but eventually they make a work hat out of it. They wear it on a daily basis where it’s going to shed the sun, rain, the snow — the durability becomes a big issue. You know, if you’re going to spend $400 on a hat, you want something that’s going to hold up.”

Like most custom hatters in the U.S., Montague gets his felt hat bodies from Winchester, Tennessee. The Winchester Hat Corporation processes beaver, rabbit and other furs and forms them, with liberal use of steam, into a basic hat body.

At this point the hat body is cone-shaped and looks something like the hat worn by your classic hillbilly caricature. Maybe real hillbillies saved moonshine money by buying unfinished hat bodies directly from Winchester.

Cowboys are more particular about their hats.

Ironing helps shape the brim, which typically finishes right around 4 inches wide.

Montague starts with the raw hat body, molds it into the crown height he needs by pulling it tight over a hat block, cuts the brim to the desired width, irons out the Dionysian hillbilly lilt and forms a forward-facing Apollonian ellipse — a brim built to unfurl the Plains beneath a gaze like a hot branding iron. Nature renounces chaos beneath the benevolent tyranny of the brim, huddling into ordered bands like branded beeves. Rattles cease abruptly as its power surges over the land like a spinning blade severing serpent heads. Voles hunker. Storm clouds dissipate. Raptors trace its lines with flight.

That this instrument, so crucial to the breaking and taming of nature, itself comes from nature … well, Mother Nature should have seen that one coming. What else could the beaver portend? The beaver — nature’s self-intervention, altering ecosystems with its chompers and can-do. The beaver, whose pelt-money would launch wars and help John Jacob Astor build Manhattan, whose tail would make Davy Crockett a living legend. Of course the hat that donned the heads that broke and platted the Plains would be prized above all for how much of it was beaver.

Montague moved to Rapid City in the 1990s. He’d been working construction in the summers and took a winter job at the since-closed Western Way Work Warehouse.”Once they figured out I knew how to shape a hat, they paid me enough to keep me on.”

A couple years later, previous Star of the West owner Todd Christenson called him and offered him job. The plan was to take six months to apprentice Montague in hat making, then eventually sell him the store.”I’m one of those, if I can watch you do something, I can pick it up,” he says.”So I’d get ahead of what I was doing, and I’d watch [Christensen] finishing the hats. He was gone one Saturday, so I went to finishing hats. He came in that Monday and said, ‘Well, you got it figured out. Holler if you need anything.'” Montague was running the store within a month, and bought it out four years later.

Six days a week he takes felt hat bodies from Winchester — made up of more or less beaver depending on the X-quality the customer wants and is willing to pay for — shaves the excess felt down to an impervious surface, shapes the crown to the bespoke needs of the buyer, cuts, embosses and sews in the goat skin sweatband (“they cost a little bit more, but in the long run they’re more durable”), and makes hats out of them. He shoots for three per day on average.

A hat’s crease says a lot about its wearer. High and narrow creases are popular on the horse show circuit, while cattlemen often prefer a wider crease.

His shop is a like an enclosed fumarole. Most steps in the process involve plenty of steam. Steam, shape, steam, cut, steam some more. Gradually the union of heat, moisture and fur spawns something obdurate and supple.

“There are a lot of tools that take the hands-on thing out of it, but the more machines you get involved, the less custom-made it is.”

And a truly custom-made hat is getting harder to find. Since the 1990s, Western wear retail options have been steadily diminished, in Rapid City and the region. Even Pete’s Clothing in Belle Fourche — the local shop Montague grew up with — will close in the next few months. Consolidation means it’s harder to find something unique. And custom craftspersons with their own storefront are more rare than the shrinking number of Western wear outlets. He estimates there might be 50 makers of custom Western-style hats in the country. That’s why people come from far and wide to Star of the West.

“If you’re wanting anything different than what the shelf hats are,” says Montague,”you’ve got to come to me.”

Cowboys and cowgirls have noticed, including some noteworthy athletes.

“There was a year I think I had 10 of the top 15 bare back riders in the world wearing my hats.”

The walls of his store are lined with pictures of rodeo stars and country musicians wearing his hats. The most star struck he ever felt was when country artist Bobby Bare walked in. Outside of American ranch country, he ships hats to Japan, Australia, Russia and the UK. He’s even been commissioned to hat the casts of TV series like Fargo and Hell on Wheels.

Western styles are his bread and butter, but not a bridle on his powers of expression.

“I actually built a steampunk [fedora] here not too long ago.”

Still, the only trade show he does is the Black Hills Stock Show. Winter is his busiest time. Once calving season starts, some people might not make it to the shop for a while.”Hats will start to pile up on the floor.”

“A lot of my customers are people like me, people that I grew up with, that are interested in a lot of the same things. And the ones that aren’t cowboys, ranchers and all that — you get to learn.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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Chairs that Last

By John Andrews

Kerry Hogan jokes that he is Tripp’s finest chair maker, but even if the town (pop. 625) was 10 times bigger, he might still be right. Hogan specializes in Welsh stick chairs, a unique style dating to the 17th century and popularized again by woodworker John Brown in the 1990s. Hogan has been making cabinets and furniture since 1989, when he was living in St. Paul. But he and his wife Penny wanted to escape the urban environment and found 2 acres in Tripp after an online real estate search. When he discovered the huge elm trees on his new property, Hogan knew they would be perfect for the chairs, which he’d read about in Brown’s book, Welsh Stick Chairs.

The only power tool you’ll find in Hogan’s Sacre Coeur Woodshop is a table saw. All other work is done using hand tools.”I’ve had them in the past and I prefer the quiet and slow pace of hand tools,” Hogan says.”This is not some quaint preference. My very sharp Stanley No. 5 plane makes a much faster job of smoothing the octagonal legs.”

A”quick” project may require 65 hours, but Hogan says his pieces are built to last.”A chair that falls apart is called firewood,” he says.”What I have made will never be thrown away. Treated well, it will not break. Someone’s grandchild will say, ‘This was grandpa’s chair.'”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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From Nature to Your Home

By Emily VanDerhule

Jeremy Schmidt was on his tractor when a tire blew. The culprit? A deer shed. He hung on to the antler, hoping to make a bottle opener out of it. The shed proved too small, so he made a coffee scoop instead. That became the start of SoDak Honest, the business Jeremy and his wife Bobbi operate from their farm near Custer. Along with naturally shed antlers, the Schmidts use scrap metal, downed cottonwoods and other items found in nature to create household products.

“I like to know what the things in my house are made of, where they came from, and I want to be able to shake the hand of the person who made it,” Bobbi says.

The Schmidts do custom work, like a 7-foot bench so solid even the blustery winds atop a Missouri River bluff wouldn’t move it. Barnwood tables can be made to fit any space.”We also make small items like jewelry,” Bobbi says.”The natural oils from a person’s hands keep our rings from drying out.”

Jeremy is mostly self-taught aside from a few classes in high school.”There’s a lot of math involved. I use the Pythagorean theorem more than I ever thought I would,” he jokes.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Strangely Familiar World of Andrew Kosten

By Michael Zimny

“I’m a basement dweller,” says Andrew Kosten. And it’s true. He banks major dwell time in the basement studio of his Brookings home, cranking out intaglio vignettes from the world inside his head.

From this world, strange, forlorn and fantastical characters conduit via pencil onto the pages of his many sketchbooks. Then his work begins. “I’m always making, always working,” he says.”I’m kind of the silent worker type, that’s just inherently who I am.”

Printmaking through the traditional etching method is labor-intensive. “It’s a very physical process. That’s what I really love about the process is its physicality. That’s why I’ve chosen to make prints. I’ve been in love with the process since I first did it.

“I was a painter before I was a printmaker. I did still lifes. I had a fixation with objects and formal aspects of spaces and color relationships as they were represented in these still lifes.

“My work wasn’t really about a whole lot. It was just about painting. But I had a separate body of work in sketchbooks. People were like, ‘You need to be doing this.'”

The Memphis, Tennessee native took a printmaking class at Washington University in St. Louis and, like a printer’s ink, he found a niche.”[The University of South Dakota] was put on a shortlist of grad schools to look into. Initially I was like, ‘South Dakota?’ And I put it on the bottom of the list. I visited Vermillion and I was attracted to the calm and the spaciousness. I could tell this was like going off somewhere and just focusing on your work. I was able to get a lot done there.”

He studied under Lloyd Menard, the legendary longtime instructor-artist and Frogman’s Print Workshop founder, in his final years at USD. After grad school, Kosten took turns at several teaching posts before settling in Brookings, where he lives with fellow artist and partner Diana Behl.

Kosten’s art seems to draw more from an inner well than his adopted home, though you can find elements of prairie solitude in his work.”I think I’ve absorbed the sense of openness, the open spaces — the idea of mapping your observations. Spatially there’s a way the work has opened up in a way that’s new for me. Whether or not you can attribute that to the locale I don’t know.”

There’s a whimsical reminiscence in his work, though one that seems to recall the bygone days of another dimension. But maybe that’s memory. Whether the pining kind, or even the good-riddance variety, images of the past are altered in the mind’s eye by time and subconscious agendas.

The characters from Kosten’s world might seem familiar to you, though it’s hard to articulate why.”I’ve always been an avid collector. Going back to my childhood, I’ve had collections of things that were more about a fixation or fascination with that particular object and the feelings or nostalgia they evoked.”

A first-generation Sony Trinitron delivers vivid aperture grille TV technology to his studio. In a hobby room off his studio he has a collection of box turntables, cassette decks and curly-cord analog phones. “Much of what influences my work is the experience of the every day and how I can mix that in to this dark and comical world I create in some of the imagery.”

The dreamy tonal quality of his prints is an effect of the aquatint technique he uses in parallel with the traditional etching process.

He starts with a drawing and a clean copper plate, coating the plate with a waxy, acid-resistant ground. To create the aquatint effect, he applies rosin to the plate, heats the rosin for an evenly distributed coat, and then uses a scraper tool to create varying gradients of shade.

He scratches the drawing into the ground with an etching needle, then gives the plate an acid bath that etches lines into the areas where the ground has been scratched away.

After the plate has been etched and the ground wiped away, ink is applied and finds its way into the areas etched beneath the surface. The plate is wiped down again, then run through an etching press, which applies pressure to transfer ink from plate to paper. The paper is then hung to dry. Each additional color, if any, requires another run.

Every step in the process is meticulous, and some are time-intensive. But in the process is where this basement dweller hits his stride. “I can isolate myself and get deeper and deeper, so I’ve got to maintain that healthy regimen of getting out and being exposed to art and artists.”

One way he interacts with other artists is through exchange portfolios. A group of artists each sends a print to the person putting together the folio. Then they send each artist a complete set of prints by each participating artist. When we visited, Kosten was printing an edition of 25 two-color prints for an exchange.

The print — inspired by something an adolescent Kosten glimpsed across the Lake of the Ozarks at summer camp — is a nice introduction to the hazily dreamlike quality of his work. Do you have some recollection of this place but you’re not sure how? Dive a little deeper.

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A River Town with Spirit

Our November/December issue includes a story on the clever characters in Springfield. The Missouri River town has been through more highs and lows than most South Dakota communities, but the overall effect has not squelched the town’s spirit or creativity. South Dakota Magazine sent intern Chloe Kenzy, editor-at-large Bernie Hunhoff and his grandson, Steven, to visit the folks who help give Springfield its unique personality. Here are some of Hunhoff’s photos that didn’t make the magazine.

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A Monumental Sculpture

Our September/October issue includes a story on Dale Lamphere’s Dignity, a 50-foot sculpture depicting a Native American woman wrapped in a star quilt. Its unveiling is scheduled for September 17 on a Missouri River bluff near Chamberlain. Bernie Hunhoff visited the Spirited Winds Tatanka Ranch near Scenic where Lamphere and a team of welders worked this summer. His photos accompanied the story, but here are a few more that didn’t make the magazine.

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Harvey Dunn, Working Man

By Roger Holtzmann

Harvey Dunn, working on panels for Lord & Taylor in his studio.

Fathers and sons don’t always see eye to eye when the younger man comes of age and starts making his own decisions. Thomas and Harvey Dunn certainly didn’t. Thomas thought his boy should stick to farming. Harvey had what his father considered a harebrained idea: he wanted to leave the farm behind and earn his living”making pictures.”

Thomas Dunn lost that particular argument with his strong-willed son; whether he did so gracefully is something only the two of them ever knew.

Harvey Dunn’s first step from the family’s Manchester homestead came in 1901, at age 17, when he enrolled at South Dakota Agricultural College in Brookings. Dunn’s scholastic record in the required courses was nothing if not balanced, with equal numbers of As and Ds, but those studies were of less importance than meeting Professor Ada Caldwell of the art department. She recognized Dunn’s raw talent and encouraged him to continue his education at her alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Flame That Cuts Through Sea and Steel. Air Reduction Company, Inc., 1945.

Brookings hadn’t done much to polish Dunn during his time there. Harvey was still a gangling sodbuster in an ill-fitting suit when he hit Chicago, but he embraced both the clamorous city and,”the splendid freedom given me . . . to pursue the activities nearest my heart,” he said later.

Dunn’s enthusiasm and evident ability couldn’t compensate for his deficiencies in the minds of some. About three months into his time at the Art Institute a delegation of older students took it upon themselves to try and,”discourage him from pursuing a career in art,” wrote Bob Karolevitz in Where Your Heart Is, his biography of Dunn.”Art, they felt, presupposed not only a certain amount of talent, but a high degree of culture and bearing on the part of the artist himself. In their estimation, the raw-boned farmer from South Dakota could never acquire the necessary personal attributes and, therefore, he should go back to his plow before he . . . suffered any bitter disappointments.”

As later become apparent, their ill-advised attempt to”help” did influence Harvey Dunn’s attitude about art and his life’s work — in precisely the opposite direction from the one his would-be benefactors intended.

After two uneven years at the Art Institute, Dunn decided it was time for a change: he packed up his portfolio and headed east for what turned out to be the most significant interview of his life. Howard Pyle, the country’s preeminent illustrator at the time,”liked what the 20 year-old Dunn showed him, and he accepted the young man from Dakota as a pupil,” wrote Karolevitz.”From that moment on [Pyle] shaped . . . the rawboned westerner not only as an artist, but as a teacher and a humanist as well.”

Harvey Dunn’s prairie sensibilities sometimes inclined him to adopt an”off-hand, self-deprecating tone” when talking about his work, according to Karolevitz. That trait was never more evident than in his recollection of the moment he parted ways with the man whose opinion he valued most in the world:”One day, after looking at my work, [Pyle] sighed deeply, and in a voice of a tired and disappointed old man, suggested that I get a studio somewhere else and see if I could get some work to do.”

Illustration for “Bug Eye” by Paul Annixter in Cosmopolitan, August 1944.

With characteristic verve, Dunn established a studio in Wilmington, Delaware, and started making the rounds of art buyers in New York and Philadelphia.”I cannot claim that it was due to my wisdom that I picked the best time since the Civil War to enter upon the activity I did, for at the time it was just beginning to be realized by advertisers that the weekly and monthly periodicals offered a splendid field, and a great wave of advertising swept the country on a flood of new magazines,” he said.”To supply these, illustrators were in great demand.”

Dunn’s skill and farm-bred work ethic made him an instant favorite with publishers.”Buyers learned they could depend on him, not only for good work but for punctual delivery,” wrote Karolevitz.”He was not a procrastinator nor an esthete who had to wait until inspiration dawned. No wonder he was able, on one occasion, to turn out 55 completed illustrations in 11 weeks.”

Harvey Dunn’s first assignment for a national magazine was a story illustration for the Saturday Evening Post of June 2, 1906. Thus began a long, mostly agreeable professional association. Dunn produced almost 350 illustrations for the Post over the next 40 years.

“Because Dunn was respected by the Post for his ability to get to the heart of a story, he was regularly given manuscripts by the top writers, particularly of frontier life and the Old West,” wrote Walt Reed in Harvey Dunn, Illustrator and Painter of the Old West. Dunn’s Post assignments included artwork for stories by Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and W. Somerset Maugham among others.

Dunn’s professional work was by no means limited to western and adventure subjects. His paintings graced a number of novels, most notably an illustrated edition of A Tale of Two Cities, and more than 30 magazines, from Cosmopolitan to American Legion Monthly. Those who are most familiar with Dunn’s prairie pictures might be surprised to discover he also turned out demure women and manly men for the amorous tales that were a staple of women’s magazines.

One of Dunn’s World War II clients was the White Motor Company of Cleveland, Ohio. Their campaign featured the uses of buses and trucks in the war effort, illustrated by Dunn’s painting titled The work starts at the bus stop – production starts when the worker is delivered, 1944.

Advertisers eagerly embraced the advances in printing that made full-color illustrations possible in the mass circulation magazines of his era, and that was a boon for artists such as Dunn. His clients included several insurance companies, Steinway Pianos, Maxwell House Coffee and White Motor Company, who commissioned 11 paintings in 1943-44 to publicize how the company’s trucks and busses were contributing to the war effort.

There was the occasional, inevitable clash between the supremely confident artist and buyers who had definite ideas about what they wanted. Dunn would never alter a picture to satisfy a client, according to Dean Cornwell, one of his students, but he would paint another picture for them. In this way he satisfied everyone and kept buyers calling with new assignments. ≠

Unlike”velvet pantaloon artists,” his derisive term for painters who equated starving with purity of heart, Harvey Dunn wholeheartedly embraced commercial work and the profit motive.”Any artist who is a good artist should be able to adapt his skill to the exigencies of the day — to fit his work for the use, commercial or otherwise, for which it is intended,” he said. Dunn consigned”long-haired, flowing tie artists” to oblivion and in their place elevated”businessman-artists” who made $10,000 or more a year as the new standard.

It isn’t hard to imagine Dunn saying as much to his father, who had doubted he would ever be able to earn a living in the field, or to the students who had once disparaged him as uncultured. Time and his determination to succeed on his own terms had vindicated him and proven who the”real” artist was.

Harvey Dunn’s thriving career was put on hold in 1918 when he agreed to accompany the American forces fighting on the battlefields of France during World War I. He was in uniform for just over a year, but it was a fruitful interlude that saw him produce literally reams of powerful, often poignant illustrations of life in the trenches and rear areas.

Seeing the slaughter and suffering and cruelty of war first hand changed the man from Manchester.”After Dunn’s battlefield experiences in France, Cornwell noted, illustrating a mere manuscript was too tame for him,” wrote Karolevitz. Dunn resumed producing quality commercial work at a pace which hardly qualified as malingering, but he also,”began to think more and more in terms of significant and lasting pictures, and when the war dimmed in his memory, his mind returned to the Dakota prairies.”

Where his heart had been all along.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2012 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.