Tag: artists

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Vermillion via New York

By Michael Zimny

New Union / Re Union: Fifty Artists Who Know Vermillion and/or the Area Intimately Well — an exhibition of work by regional artists, inspired by the poetry of Cynthia Nibbelink Worley, is now on display at the University of South Dakota campus.

Curator — and Vermillion artist — Sarah A. Hanson first discovered the poetry of Nibbelink Worley through an interlibrary loan request, and was intrigued to find that when the book arrived, from Augustana’s Center for Western Studies,”the very book I was holding in my hands had come from [Frederick] Manfred’s personal library.” The poet, who had once studied with the Lord Grizzly author, had sent him a copy inscribed”to Frederick from Cindy.”

Hanson found something else familiar in Nibbelink Worley’s poems, something”extremely visual and visceral, brave and solid.” And something in sync with her surroundings. Even though Nibbelink Worley has been living and writing on New York City for upwards of 30 years, she still incorporates the imagery of her native northwest Iowa.

Hanson wouldn’t know until she met Nibbelink Worley in New York, that Vermillion was a familiar place to her as well.”When I first met [Cindy] in Harlem she discovered I was from South Dakota. She asked, ‘Where about in South Dakota are you from?’ I responded, ‘Vermillion,’ with a question in my voice. ‘Ahh, I know Vermillion intimately well,’ she said with a smile.”

So when Hanson was approached by artist Amy Fill — who had worked with her on an earlier community exhibition in which local artists worked under the influence the poem Desiderata, by Max Hermann — about the possibility of another interaction between a work of poetry and area artists, it didn’t take long before she realized the answer was in New York.

Nibbelink Worley acknowledges that she has never truly left the pastoral landscapes of her birthplace behind.”Northrop Frye said, ‘Poetry is the relaxation of the unconscious,’ and to me that’s having the integrity allow a poem to flow from your unconscious, which is your truest self. I think that is where my best poems come from and the imagery certainly, and that is reflective of perhaps what I know best, and I think that is a rural landscape.”

Hanson selected two poems to guide the project — These Photos Now and How Innocently — from Nibbelink Worley’s book Wild Wild Roses.

“I saw the creation of this exhibition as an opportunity to not only organize our community of artists,” writes Hanson,”but to also reunite those who know Vermillion and/or the area ‘intimately well.'”

Hanson, and fellow artists Amy Fill and Michelle St. Vrain, reached out to artists around the globe who have worked in or around Vermillion.

“Within the exhibition’s contents,” says Hanson,”there is diversity of thought and experience. You may praise accomplishment and mourn loss. You may be surprised and you may be reminded. Most importantly, you will find community — a celebration each of us share.”

The common thread uniting these visions is the poems of Cynthia Nibbelink Worley, the still prairie-inspired New Yorker.

Exhibiting artists include Luanne M. H. Bigbear, Mary Black Bonnet, Keith BraveHeart, Joni Castle Jimnak, Lateesha Caswell, Michele David Mechling, Andrew DeCaen, Julie DeCaen, Amy Fill, Jeff Freeman, Rebecca Froehlich, Alison Galbraith, Nicole Geary, Joshua Haiar, James Halvorson, Nicole Hand, Prairie Hanson, Sarah A. Hanson, Maiko Hasegawa, Susan M. Heggestad, Rayna Hernandez, Phillip Michael Hook, Amy Jarding, David Kitzler, Andrew Kosten, David Langner, David Lethcoe, Danielle Loftus, Kevin Loftus, Krishna Mastel, Angela Meyer, Jess Miller Johnson, Darcy Millette, Klaire B. L. Pearson, Jean Peter-Larson, Cheryl Peterson Halsey, Magil Pratt, Emmalene Aubrey Raasch, Shannon Sargent, Emily K. Short, Eli Show, Mary Sorensen, Tory Stolen, Michelle St. Vrain, Kelsie Jo Thomas, Jordan Thornton, David Versluis, Marc Wagner, Sophia Wermers and Greg Wortham.

New Union / Re Union is on display in Gallery 110 of the Warren M. Lee Center for the Fine Arts, on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion through Feb. 15

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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Drawing the Roundup Years

By Michael Zimny

In the early 1950s, Bert L. Hall was making the rounds of West River ranch and farm country collecting tales of the old days for his Roundup Years: Old Muddy to Black Hills, a cowboy memoir of the halcyon days of fenceless prairie as wide open as the sky — a time as legendary as short-lived, that still exercises enormous power on the American imagination, and at the box office.

While Hall was out mining the memory banks of the first generation of West River pioneers, a young Jack Ashcraft was sharpening his skills as an artist, taking correspondence courses from the Minneapolis-based Art Instruction Schools, famous for their”Draw Me” ads in magazines and comic books — when he wasn’t busy working on the family ranch.

“We lived out south of Kennebec,” recalls Ashcraft. “But my dad liked the Black Hills and he subscribed to the Rapid City Journal. For some reason I always read the newspaper too. Maybe unusual for a young man, but I did. One article sparked some interest and I recall drawing a cartoon of some sort. I put it in an envelope and sent it out to the Journal, and they published it.”

Soon after Jack’s breakthrough, Hall’s research brought him to Lyman County.

“I think everybody in the [West River] country knew Bert Hall,” recalls Ashcraft. “He made it his business to go around and talk to the old pioneers because he wanted their input for his book.”

Hall visited Jack’s grandfather Herbert Ashcraft, who wrote a piece for the book about his homesteading experience in 1904.

Excerpts: “Our first night in Lyman Co. was spent at Tacoma, then the county seat. We asked where the court house was and were told that the county was too poor to have one.”

Apparently due to Jack’s single cartoon in the Journal, Hall arrived with some awareness of his work as an artist. “We made an agreement on how many [drawings] he wanted,” says Ashcraft, “and I took a bunch of notes on what he had in mind.” Six to eight months later,”he had his art work and I had a little bit of money, which made me think that I had died and gone to heaven, because I was actually getting paid for doing what I liked to do.”

Teenage Jack’s drawings document with a stark (if innocent) simplicity some of the rapid changes in West River country over the course of 100 or so years, from the dispossession of Native people to the cowboy’s demise — and hints at the tension between cattle interests and”honyockers” — a pejorative term for homesteaders.

Though now semi-retired, Jack Ashcraft is still an artist. After a long stint in the Air Force, he started a foreign car dealership in San Luis Obispo, California. In the 1970s, he studied automotive design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he would go on to teach. In the late’70s he founded an ad agency in Medford, Oregon, where he lives today. A longtime Saab enthusiast, he also published the niche magazine, the Saab Journal, and he started a mail-order company selling vintage Saab parts. Though semi-retired now, he still reconditions some old parts while his son runs the business, and does some freelance artwork. He and his wife are also avid ballroom dancers. Apparently that Lyman County mettle never left his system.

While Roundup Years never made The New York Times Best Sellers list, it is one of a handful of true cowboy memoirs, written and/or compiled by riders who could remember the days of the wide-open range. Out of print now, it sells for upwards of $200 per copy — a vanishing memorial to a breed that was already galloping into history almost as soon as it got in the saddle. Decades from now, some Old West museum in Tokyo or somewhere will exhibit a copy, opened to a page with a stark black-and-white drawing signed by Jack Ashcraft.

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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The Puritanical Potter

By Michael Zimny

Her mother wasn’t happy when Linda Meyer moved into a cabin in the woods with no electricity, phone or running water.

Surrounded by Black Hills National Forest, Meyer lives the solitary lifestyle of a backwoods Black Hills potter. Her home and studio sit a few miles outside Rochford (pop. 9) in a divot above Irish Gulch high in the Northern Hills.

She built nearly everything she has here. Four years ago, when a fire that started in her kiln room destroyed her studio, her work, portfolio and copious notes, she started the process of building it all over again, with some reference books, her hands, a hammer and nails.

Raised on a dairy farm in central Wisconsin by her German Lutheran grandparents, she was infused from birth with Weber’s Protestant work ethic.”On the farm you improvise,” says Meyer, who sometimes uses the handle Mud Woman.”If something broke, you fixed it.”

After a year at Lawrence University on a basketball scholarship, she transferred to Northland College, a small liberal arts school on the Chequamegon Bay of Lake Superior. There she found a calling in the painstakingly detailed traditions of midwestern stoneware pottery.

She graduated in 1981 and came to Rapid City to visit a friend. The Black Hills got into her blood. She found a job at a frame shop and stayed.

By 1991, she was an experienced potter when she approached Prairie Edge with some of her work. The relationship is still going 25 years later. With a relative dearth of potters in the Hills, the gallery takes them as fast as she can make them.

When she moved to her mountain home in 1995, the only thing there was an unfinished wood frame cabin. For the first six years, she had no electricity, working at night by the light of candles and oil lamps. She gradually finished the cabin interior, built cabinets, added a kitchen and built a studio — all by hand.

She started throwing her work on a foot-powered potter’s wheel, but has since refurbished and rewired an old electric.

Her childhood on the farm taught her some of the basics of architecture, woodworking and electrical work, but she is mostly self-taught, absorbing books and manuals.

In the beginning there was no road to the cabin. To get groceries in the winter she would walk to where she parked her truck in a pull-off on the main road, make the trip to Lead and back, then haul them in on a sleigh. Nothing perishable, of course.

“I need 80 or 90 percent solitude,” Meyer says.”It’s easier to find people than solitude.”

Sometimes people find her out here. Mostly hunters.

One cold night, while she had gone to town for a couple days, a hunter got lost in the dark and panicked. He broke a window and sheltered in her cabin till morning. Fortunately he was a conscientious breaker and enterer. He left a note and said he’d pay for the window, and he did.

A self-proclaimed”coward and hypocrite” (because she’s an omnivore but can’t bring herself to hunt), Meyer is an occasional patron saint of lost or stranded hunters, a unique post on what Jack London would call”the trail of the meat.” She has helped free her share of marooned ATVs. It’s impossible to know if they tell their friends how the Mud Woman rescued them.

Most hunters who cross her land are friendly enough, but some feel entitled to go wherever they will. She’s had to get surly at times.

In the end, her mother’s worries may have been misplaced.

Over the years, the potter has slowly nudged her colony of one toward technological norms, first running power from wind and solar batteries. As of a few years ago she’s on the grid, even has Internet via satellite, but no cell phone and no plumbing. She has a hand-pump well and a freshwater spring for water. She heats with wood. She’s gotten handy with a chainsaw since the pine beetles started dropping trees.

“It is an introspective and contemplative journey,” she says,”a way of life, not a living.”

The self-sufficiency required by living here writes a long chore list that must be checked off before she can make time for the wheel. She’s up and running every day by 5, just like her farm days, and there are no days off.

The fire set her back. She rebuilt her studio, getting help to raise one wall, but otherwise board by board with a hammer and nails. Without much yet in the way of storage space though, she works in a “state of disarray” which offends her inherited tendency toward rigorous precision.

Like her lifestyle, her pottery is soulfully austere, particular and utilitarian. She works with stoneware clay, makes her own glazes from natural ingredients and everything she makes has a function.

“It’s very practical. You can use it every day. Because it’s made by hand it’s a little more of a ritual, and eating used to be such a ritual ancestrally. I like the idea that you can take something as common as eating and enrich people’s lives with something as simple as clay.”

She incorporates the abundant Black Hills flora that surrounds her into her designs, making impressions in clay of spruce, aspen, grasses and sage and casting ornamental pinecones. Local animals, like buffalo and wild horses, show up in the stoneware as well.

“I choose to live here because I can hear what my head and my heart are telling me without a lot of external static. I have a puritanical attitude about simplicity. Although, while on the surface it might seem simple, it’s a lot of work to live simply,” she laughs.

“I try to live my philosophy. I grew up this way, so I was sort of bred for it. But then there were four of us. Here it’s just me. I can do the tasks, but it’s a yeoman’s approach because there’s not enough energy or time in a day.”

Though her work is still sold at Prairie Edge, Meyer started exhibiting at gallery shows several years ago to build a rapport with the people who love her work. And though she may not have indoor plumbing, she does have a website.

You can see Linda Meyer’s work on Saturday, Nov. 7, at the 34th annual Pinedale Bazaar, at Pinedale Elementary School in Rapid City.

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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The Ultimate Survivor

By Michael Zimny

John Lopez’s new sculpture captures the moment that an angry grizzly bear attacked frontiersman Hugh Glass.

On the last weekend in August, Lemmon-based artist John Lopez unveiled a new sculpture commemorating Hugh Glass, close to the spot where the legendary pioneer nearly lost his battle with an angry grizzly bear. The sculpture — depicting the pivotal moment in the Glass legend — comes at a time of renewed interest in his story.

A film biopic based on Glass’ life is scheduled for release around Christmas. The Revenant, directed by Alejandro Gonz·lez IÒ·rritu and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, features the legend of his fight with the bear, his struggle to survive and his quest to avenge the men who abandoned him for dead.

Having grown up in Lemmon, Lopez understands the fascination with the story.”I think [because of] the fact that it happened so close to our hometown of Lemmon, we have all heard the story since we learned about it in history class,” Lopez says. “And every time you drive by Shadehill or Summerville, you’re reminded of it. He’s the ultimate survivor.”

The sculpture was unveiled in front of a crowd gathered for the inaugural Hugh Glass Rendezvous at a South Dakota state recreation area also bearing his name, contiguous to the Shadehill Reservoir and Grand River National Grassland.

“Rendezvous” is the name given to a loose network of outdoor festivals for history buffs, where the facial hair and throwback clothing are reminiscent of modern day Brooklyn, but without the irony or the artisanal pickle stand. And for any group that celebrates the pioneer ethic, it would be hard to find a more rugged embodiment of frontier grit than Glass.

Lopez worked on the sculpture in his Lemmon studio earlier this year.

“The life that he had even before he was mauled by the grizzly bear, and then to crawl 200 miles after the grizzly attack, puts him in a category of frontiersman where he has a cult following among rendezvous-ers and historians,” Lopez says.

The visual aesthetic Lopez has employed echoes the chaos in the moment. While he incorporates his usual divergent mash-up of found objects, the energy of the piece is in the long flowing plasma-cut strips of sheet metal that form the grizzly, insinuating frenetic movement and fear.

What we know about Glass is steeped in the mythos of the American West. It’s probably impossible to know if he truly ate the half-rotten flesh of the same bear that nearly killed him — or the carcass of a buffalo calf he scavenged from wolves — to make it through the first few days after he was abandoned to the elements.

We know that he already had a reputation in the West as an adventurer — a tall, wiry man who wore buffalo skins and cut his hair with a knife — when he signed up for the”Ashley’s Hundred” fur trading mission, led by General William Ashley of the Missouri militia.

Frederick Manfred described his frontier ambition in the 1954 biography, Lord Grizzly. “The new, the old new, just around the turn ahead, was the only remedy for hot blood. Ahead was always either gold or the grave. The gamble of it freshened the blood at the same time that it cleared the eye. What could beat galloping up alone over the brow of a new bluff for that first look of beyond?”

We know that over a brow of the beyond, near the forks of the Grand River, Glass surprised a mother grizzly with her cubs. How exactly he survived is the stuff of lore, but he did survive, though mutilated and broken. Expedition leader Andrew Henry left Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald to give Glass a proper burial when he succumbed to the inevitable. The pair dug him a grave, then abandoned him, afraid of being caught in hostile territory. They didn’t have to steal his rifle and knife to leave him even more helpless, but they did.

Hugh Glass faces his adversary.

After the bear fight, his struggle to survive his abandonment is what entrenches the Glass legend in the frontier narrative. Though his memorialization is in some ways an American update on the sacred iconography that has kept the memory of martyrs like Saint Sebastian alive for millennia, Glass parts ways from the ancients. His ordeal is more the consequence of wanderlust than unwavering faith or innocence. Though he would learn virtue later, he’s been enshrined in the American memory for brute frontier badassery.

His road to Fort Kiowa confirms in an excruciating tableau of hardship and pain what he’s made of. Desperately, he employs maggots to eat the dead flesh from his mangled back. Recalling the biblical allegory of Job, without emulating his patience, Glass fights buzzards, wolves and coyotes, eats rattlesnakes, fashions a splint out of bear skin for his broken leg and crawls more than 200 miles.

“Three months of plain hell,” is how Manfred’s Glass describes his torment when he finally arrives. From there, legend says he embarks on a whiskey and hate-filled quest to avenge Fitzpatrick and Bridger. But by the time he finds their trail, the grizzled old mountain man has learned forgiveness, adding a moral component to his fabled resilience.

These scenes have lived in literature, and an obscure western corner of the American conscience, for nearly two centuries. With a new monument by one of South Dakota’s most innovative artists — to communicate the raw terror in his defining moment, and his stubborn will to survive — the legend of Hugh Glass is secure in the Grand River forks foothills.

The new sculpture will be on permanent display at the Grand River Museum in Lemmon.

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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Finding Home in Flyover Land

By Michael Zimny

Editor’s Note: Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and will contribute arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

I’m honored to write for South Dakota Magazine. Ever since the Black Hills pulled me from the city, I’ve been relentlessly stupefied by the breadth and diversity of natural beauty secreted away here from the wider world.

I’m a native of a seen-better-days suburb south of Chicago called Harvey. My alma mater is the University of Memphis, but I learned more in four months at Fort Benning.

My immersion in Dakotiana has only begun, though I’ve tried to make up for lost time. Fourteen months ago, the love of my life and I left Harlem, bought a’96 Infiniti and took off for the Black Hills. I had spent seven years rebuilding my writing career in New York City — after a stint in the Army at Fort Hood and in Iraq — as a creative copywriter.

New York was good to us, if not in a material sense. But beneath all the cosmopolitan sheen was the reality that a kind of insularity can thrive even where the rents are high. When that itch sets in, you start batting at some flitting notion of the flyover as a place to be you again.

When you commit to leave manufactured experience behind — and having worked in the factory, I think I know it when I see it — you want to settle on a place that speaks to you matter-of-factly, and here’s where South Dakota has a chance, as a place where pretense never bothered to plant a flag.

So we bought a jalopy in Tennessee and drove through St. Louis, crossing the Muddy as it snakes through St. Charles then Kansas City, then across the Plains of southern Nebraska, through the Sandhills and up across the Cheyenne where the Southern Hills begin to bristle with Ponderosa pines, and into Hot Springs, where I spent a sopping wet fire season at Wind Cave, falling back on Infantry experience and writing the occasional PR piece for the NPS on the side. That led to an opening at South Dakota Public Broadcasting, where I attempt to stake a claim for the polite world of public media in the cutthroat social media space, write for the Art & Culture blog and some other things.

In a short time, I’ve seen four corners of South Dakota, from the buffalo ranges of the Southern Hills to the sunny butte country of Perkins County, across the glaciated plains to the Coteau des Prairies, back down to where the Mo holds the Loess Hills at bay. I sincerely hope to be stop-lossed on this tour as long as possible. The people I’ve met, and the land I’ve only just begun to befriend, take time to know.

There’s so much still to do — kayak Split Rock Creek and the Belle Fourche, and ride the Mickelson Trail — and journeys started that have longer to go, like exploring the arts communities of Sisseton and Agency Village, digging into the history of the cowboy Atlantis under Oahe once known as Le Beau, and rediscovering artists like Charles Greener and Hazel L. Drown Sawinsky Hoven. If you’re thumbing, I’d be glad to have you ride along wherever this road takes us.

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Our Joyful Weaver

Just hours after we wrote this came the sad news that Grete died at a hospice in Rapid City. She’ll be missed for many reasons — but mostly for her cheerful smile and her love for all things South Dakota. Our condolences to Chuck and all her family and friends.

By Bernie Hunhoff

Grete Bodogaard and her husband, filmmaker Chuck Nauman, have been hanging out in the little Yankton County town of Volin for a number of years.

Many of us who live here in southeast South Dakota felt quite blessed to have such a gentle soul in our commuity. Grete and Chuck didn’t participte a great deal in community activities, but they were apt to show up now and then. And you might catch them at Mac’s Pub, which was across the street from the old Volin Bank where they lived and worked.

I looked for them on several trips to Volin this summer and fall, but to no avail. After asking around, I was told they had returned to the Black Hills because of Grete’s health. She is serioiusly ill. Our thoughts and prayers go to her and her family.

When in Rapid City last weekend, I attended a forum at the Dahl Arts Center on Seventh Street downtown and felt fortunate to happen upon an exhibit of Grete’s creations titled “Celebration of Works.”

Grete was born in Norway, and learned some of her techniques in the old country. She came to the United States in 1969, and she quickly spun her way into our hearts and into our art culture. She is not only one of South Dakota’s greatest and most accomplished artists, but also considered one of the master weavers of our time.

“As I travel on my journey around the sun I have learned to spin fibers, dye yarns and weave my thoughts and ideas,” she says in an introduction to the exhibit. “Weaving is my other language, my expression of joy and frustrations.”

Her contributions to South Dakota have brought only joy, and we thank her for that.

The exhibit will be up through Jan. 31, 2015.

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A Working Artist

By Scott Stoel

“The Figure.”

Editor’s Note: Celebrated South Dakota artist Marian Henjum died at her home in Sioux Falls on Sept. 24 at age 69. “She’s one of the state’s finest watercolorists,” Kara Dirkson, director of the Visual Arts Center at the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science, told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.”She just really embodied this sense of optimism and comfort in her work.” Henjum illustrated several South Dakota Magazine covers during her career and designed the state’s centennial postage stamp in 1989. We visited Henjum in her Sioux Falls studio in 1994, and this story appeared in our July/August 1994 issue.

Marian Henjum’s paintings depict the flowers, rocks, trees and plains she grew up with on a Garretson farm. Now she paints from a studio in Sioux Falls, where her designs are inspired from scenes outside the city limits.

Marian Henjum in 1994.

Life as an aspiring artist in South Dakota hasn’t been easy. To support her watercolor habit, she has worked as a teacher, fashion illustrator, commercial artist and free-lance designer. Slowly, she won a reputation as one of South Dakota’s most accomplished artists. Her works are in many private and public collections, including six permanent collections.

Upon graduation from Garretson High School, Henjum received a home economics scholarship to attend South Dakota State University in Brookings. She entered college with the goal of becoming a fashion illustrator. Eventually she dropped home economics as a major and went into art. After some time as an art major, Henjum decided she had to find a safety net because, as she said, “you don’t often pick up the classified ads and see ‘Help Wanted: Artist.’ I took the education block of classes just to be safe.”

After Henjum graduated from SDSU with high honors, she was offered an opportunity to teach. “When I was a senior in college, one of the professors took a sabbatical for a year so they asked me to take his place. It was like going to graduate school. I had to do a lot of research to get my stuff together. It was really good experience for me,” she said.

Instead of just remaining for a year, she stayed for three before she moved to Sioux Falls to become a freelance artist. She covered all kinds of territory working as a fashion illustrator at Michael’s and Burke’s, art director at the Argus Leader and at an advertising agency. Henjum counts her time at these jobs as valuable in learning her trade as an artist.”I got to learn production and how to turn these things around fast,” she said. All during the time she worked on the commercial side of art, she continued to work with paint and went to art shows.

“Tulips/Red Stripes.”

Today, Henjum works out of her home on the east side of Sioux Falls. Her studio in the basement looks like a small commercial artist’s office. A drafting table sits under a window with a view of flowers in her back yard. A long shelf holds books of art and design above her desk. The wall opposite the window displays various pictures clipped from magazines for design ideas and drawings by nieces, nephews and the neighbor kids.

Henjum’s paint of choice is watercolor. She was initially attracted to the medium while taking a course in college.”I just started working with it and I loved the spontaneity. I’m not one to sit and labor over anything, like you would with an oil painting. You put it down, it’s dry, you’ve got to move ahead. It fits my personality I think.”

Another aspect of watercolor she enjoys is its unpredictability.”I like the way it happens. The nature of the medium is just so exciting and things happen that you just can’t control. It’s more exciting than other mediums,” she said.

Every characteristic of watercolor painting she lists suggests the need for speed and an almost athletic, concentrated effort. Henjum’s paintings are large (she has a 4-by-8-foot table she uses to work on some paintings), and she takes little time in completing them.”I use big brushes, and it takes a lot out of me. Sometimes I do a painting in an hour. I put so much into it that I’m just pooped afterwards. That’s the nature of the subject and the way I treat it,” she said.

Her most popular subjects are flowers, which Henjum likes because they lend themselves to working with elements of design and abstraction.”First of all I like all subject matter. I’m more interested in design, patterns and composition than I am in expressing an emotional statement about what is going on in the world today. I don’t know if that is shallow or what. It’s not as if I am not emotionally involved with politics. I like to stylize what I see around me. I’ve done a lot of floral paintings, but I don’t feel that I am just a floral painter.”

“Bluegrasses.”

Henjum plans to move into other subject areas and has entertained the idea of getting into figure painting. But subject matter has never been a limiting factor.”I like to do anything, mainly just designing what I see. I don’t have to travel to China to paint something although that would be wonderful,” she said.

Her ability to quickly produce paintings has helped her keep up with the many commissions for her work.”I’ve always got at least two or three commission projects going. I just finished up some and I now I have a couple more. But before I get one done it seems a couple more come in.”

Commissioned work has been easier to come by in recent years. Henjum has noticed the attitude toward art in the area, and especially Sioux Falls, has improved.

“I think people’s feelings toward art have changed a lot even in the last ten years or so. People want original art in their home more so than a print. This isn’t Chicago or the West Coast, but it is going forward.”

About half of Henjum’s commissioned works end up in private homes and the other half in businesses.”I sell a lot to the medical centers and to doctors and lawyers,” Henjum said. “People in general want to save up money for an original piece of art.”

With commissioned work, people often request specific colors and subject matter, but these limiting factors have never got in the way of Henjum’s creative spirit.”It’s more of a challenge than anything. Once someone wanted me to do posies, and they wanted them black with a black background. Well I don’t think much of posies, and black posies just struck me as strange, but once I got down to it I really enjoyed the challenge,” she said.

Henjum received critical praise for her work. In 1989 she was selected by the United States Post Office to design the South Dakota Centennial Stamp. The honor gave her attention and name recognition in the state. She was also awarded the Emerging Artist Grant from the South Dakota Arts Council.

“Containers.”

Henjum succeeds in making a living, but she admits there are difficulties in her line of work that can’t be overcome. “It’s a profession that demands isolation to get the job done. When I talk at schools the kids ask what it’s like to be an artist, and that is one of the things that I like to stress the most because I never thought of that. It is the hardest thing for me to deal with, more so than making a living at it. Especially if you are a people person like I am.”

As far as advice for those who would choose to go into art, Henjum suggested following the road she took: “Know more than just one subject and have something to fall back on, because it’s not easy to make a living as an artist.

“I think it’s important to have a double interest, and if it complements the other that’s great. But let’s get realistic about making a living in art. I think I am able to make a living because I have been here a long time and I’ve worked like you can’t believe. I would suggest that people have a second profession to fall back on.”

Henjum is busy with more things than ever. Recently she returned to work part-time with the art department at the Argus Leader. She also is part owner of Dakota Galleries in Sioux Falls. Through her recent divorce, she took over her husband’s portion of the gallery, and she successfully found a new business partner. She is concentrating on advertising and revamping the image of the gallery and hopes to continue offering her services as a freelance designer.

Henjum says she works at many things so she is able to keep painting. There probably will come a day when her painting is all she will need to support herself, but for now she enjoys her sideline occupations as well as watercolors.

And when she is asked to define her painting, she answers the question as if there is only one answer she could give:”It’s my work.”

To Marian Henjum, it’s that simple.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 1994 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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125 Years on Canvas

By John Andrews

South Dakota means something different to all of us. As we celebrate our state’s 125th birthday this year, a collection of artists have put their interpretations of life in South Dakota into a special exhibit currently on display at the Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls. “South Dakota 2014 Art Exhibit and Sale: Observing the State’s 125th Anniversary” is a juried show highlighting the works of 40 artists from around the state. Each piece tackles themes of statehood from a personal angle.

There’s an amazing array of diversity throughout the exhibit. Artists painted rural landscapes and city scenes, ranch crews and depictions of Native American life. The exhibit runs through Sept. 27 in the Center’s Simmons/Madsen/Nelson/Elmen galleries. Here’s a small sampling of what you’ll find on display:

La Hoo-Catt, by George Prisbe-Przybysz, depicts the Missouri River as it was originally surveyed by William Clark in 1804.

Bear Creek Branding, by Ariadne Albright, is based on a vintage photograph of cowboys working on a Harding County ranch in the 1930s.

Cave Hills Twilight, by Peter Kilian, showcases the beauty of Harding County’s unique landscape.

Toronto Morning Patterns, by Gary Steinley, portrays a scene at the Toronto grain elevator.

United, by Ron Backer, shows the Fort Pierre railroad depot, which is currently under restoration at the Verendrye Museum in Fort Pierre after years as a storage shed and sheep shearing facility on a local farm.

Pow-Wow Dancer, by Dennis Linn, features a young dancer preserving his Lakota culture.

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Oscar Howe’s ProtÈgÈ

Editor’s Note: Bobby Penn, a student of Oscar Howe, was among the foremost Native American artists of the late 20th century. He was a master of oil and acrylic painting, drawing and printmaking. His subjects focused primarily on Indian themes and his own life story. Penn died Feb. 7, 1999, after a long battle with lung problems. His work is included in public collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago. Some of Penn’s artwork is available through the Akta Lakota Museum online gallery. This story is revised from the July/August 1991 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

By Rick Geyerman

From its perch above a southern window in a century-old Clay County farmhouse, a stuffed crow watches Bob Penn paint South Dakota landscapes and Native American symbolisms. Outdoors, a pair of red-tail hawks flies above the hilly grasslands. Just a few country miles away is the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where Penn studied under Oscar Howe, the master of Sioux art.

Penn, a 44-year-old Sicangu Sioux/Omaha, is rising to the top of his field and is currently doing some of his most bold and striking work. Penn paintings hang in permanent collections at the Smithsonian and the Vincent Price Gallery in Chicago, as well as a dozen regional galleries on the Northern Plains. He has been the focus of 16 one-man shows, including exhibits at the Dahl Fine Arts Center in Rapid City and the Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis. Next year, he will share the spotlight with two Oglala Sioux artists, Richard Red Owl and Arthur Amiotte, at an exhibit of Plains Indian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Art. A new mural commissioned by the Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Medical Center and the mounting of a traveling retrospective occupy his current studio time.

He served as chairman of the art department of Sinte Gleska College in Mission for three years, and has also taught at three other institutions. Early this summer he taught the Oscar Howe Native American Art Institute at the University of South Dakota, an honor Penn particularly cherished. The workshop had been discontinued since Howe’s death in 1983. Penn originals can sell for many thousands of dollars, and thanks to his partner/wife Alta, many of his works are now marketed as prints.

He never imagined such success when growing up on the Winnebago Sioux Reservation in Nebraska. At the age of 8, he was placed in an orphanage. In the summer, the school closed and students were sent to foster homes.

Bob learned about farming, carpentry and machinery in boyhood summers. He also joined the orphanage boxing team and for two years was the national champion in his weight class. Every boxer on the orphanage team, in fact, placed as either the national champ or the runner-up.

Looking back, he attributes such success to the fact that other fighters cannot “psyche out” an Indian. Bob’s father was a professional boxer and Bob thought about going to the Olympics or turning pro. Instead, he turned to the other love of his life — painting.

Ironically, it was the second time art triumphed over combat for Penn. His first art lesson occurred when his father separated him from a fight with his brother, sat him down and drew an Indian chief’s head. “Sit here until you can do that,” he commanded. Bob was fascinated … and hooked on art.

He attended St. Francis Indian School on the Rosebud Reservation and then enrolled at USD in Vermillion and experienced “super shock.” It was the first time he felt the pains of prejudice. But it was also the place he met Oscar Howe, the Yanktonai Sioux from the Crow Creek Reservation who became South Dakota Artist Laureate and was recognized worldwide as the leading painter of Sioux art.

Howe rigorously fought the categorization of Indian art. In 1958, the curator of the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa refused one of Oscar’s works because it didn’t fit the “Indian style.” In an indignant reply, Howe wrote: “Who ever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed. There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. … Every bit in my paintings is a true studied fact of Indian paintings. Are we to be held back forever with individualism, dictated to, as the Indian always has been, put on reservations and treated like a child … ?

“Well, I am not going to stand for it,” continued Howe’s letter. “Indian art can compete with any art … I only hope the art world will not be one more contributor to holding us in chains.”

Howe’s letter cast off restrictions that had bound Indian artists for years at the Oklahoma exhibit. Indian painters deluged the competition with new and innovative styles of work.

It was in this atmosphere of new artistic freedom that Bob Penn began his instruction under Howe. For five years, the two worked together, often one-on-one, and Penn recalls these years as the most significant period of his life. Howe termed Penn his most talented student.

However, talent and hard work don’t always mean immediate success in the art world. Penn has paid his dues. He played in several rhythm and blues bands and worked as an artist for both the USD School of Medicine and USD Educational Media Services. Though much of the work involved graphic layout, signs and posters, he learned technique and self-discipline. Between jobs he traveled to show his art, and slowly his paintings gained popularity.

His career also was boosted by romance. He met his wife, Alta, when she was an art gallery curator in Sedona, Arizona. She is an artist in her own right, but she is also adept at business and handles most of the family financial arrangements. She spirits Bob’s works from the studio as soon as he finishes. “Otherwise,” she says, ”I’m likely to come downstairs and find that he’s done a touch-up, and covered a perfectly good painting completely with an entirely new one!”

They enjoy Clay County living. The hawks who patrol the river valley seem to welcome the Penns, and Bob and Alta persuaded their landlord to preserve the prairie grassland pasture which cascades southward from their front porch to the Vermillion River.

Vermillion, despite those first awkward years in the 1960s, has been good to Bob Penn. The university commissioned him to create a mural for the Lakota cafeteria in 1989. It is a traditional Sioux design Penn had contemplated for years, saving for just the right location. The pattern — narrow horizontal bands of color which represent the four directional winds, struck through with yellow (lightning) and anchored by a shield — wishes visitors a long and fruitful life.

W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion also commissioned a piece that Penn calls “in the Charles Russell style.” The museum is building a room to showcase the painting.

Penn has not yet seen the movie Dances With Wolves but says he was glad to hear it is not just another movie where the white super-hero comes along and saves the Indian. “I understand that (Costner as) Lt. Dunbar is respectful and inquisitive, willing to let the world be what it should be.”

Penn added, “I try to approach my art the same way. To be prejudiced closes so many doors to things you can learn.”

A look around his workshop makes it obvious that Penn, like his mentor Howe, is stretching the limits of what might be considered traditional. Abstracts, still lifes and unusual landscapes are on canvasses. With a smile, he notes that anything he does is Indian art solely because he is Indian.

“The important thing is not to draw limits for myself, but to continue exploring new media and styles,” he says. “If a brush stroke doesn’t give me the effect I’m seeking, I may go into the yard for a misshapen twig. Art is what forces me to grow … my desire is just so strong.”

The crow watches, always, from his roost by the farmhouse window. And the crow often appears in his works. Penn calls it his personal totem.

“Birds were important to the Indian,” he explained. “They could fly higher, carry the prayers closer to God. I chose the crow because of its cunning, its adaptability, and ability to survive. The crow is the organic shape of many of my works that balances the harder edges. For a good painting I try to find a balance; I try to live my life the same way.”

Rick Geyerman, of Mitchell, was a classmate of Bob Penn at USD in the 1960s. One of his avocations is freelance writing.