Great Plains Series: Points of Return – Spaces of Departure
The first iteration of the Great Plains Series, In the Middle of Everywhere (2022), pushed against the notion that the region is static or peripheral compared to the coasts and posited the Plains as a central hub—dynamic, layered, and deeply connected to broader histories and geographies.
In this second installment, we return to one of the themes explored in the first: the concept of movement. In Points of Return – Spaces of Departure, movement is positioned as a lens through which to understand the experiences of flora, fauna, and people who have traversed these lands. Though often imagined as a place of stasis, the Plains have always been marked by activity: seasonal shifts, cycles of weather, cultural exchange, migration, and trade have shaped its terrain, atmosphere, and communities. At the same time, the exhibition challenges narratives that describe the region as a space to pass through, whether by expedition, migration, or the forced movement of goods and people. Those renditions overlook the region as a terminus, discounting the ways that life here on the Plains has been sustained, adapted, and renewed.
Event/Exhibition meta autogenerated block.
When
October 10, 2025 – April 7, 2026
Where
Marquee Gallery
The works in this exhibition reflect on these histories of continuity and rupture. They point to histories, geographies and experiences shaped by the dispossession of land, the disruption of human and non-human migrations, and the fragmenting of communities through colonial impositions. Yet they also highlight the regroupings, mobilizations, and acts of reconstitution that have persisted on the Plains in the wake of these upheavals.
Organized around the movement of people, the more-than-human, and colonial infrastructures, the exhibition traces how artists engage with journeys, migrations, and exchanges, as well as the flows of animals, plants, water, and wind, and the imposed systems that cut across the Plains. Together, these works remind us that the region is not static but in continual motion—a crossroads of survival, resilience, and imagination.
Artists:
- Teresa Baker
- Alana Bartol & Latifa Pelletier-Ahmed
- Diedrick Brackens
- Matthew Buckingham
- Bill Burns
- Crystal Z Campbell
- Stanley Day
- Rosalie Favell
- Yatika Starr Fields
- Gabriela García-Luna
- Richard Gorenko
- Gregory Hardy
- Elisa Harkins
- Sky Hopinka
- Robert Houle
- Liz Ikiriko
- Jason Lujan
- Jeannie Mah
- Patrick Nagatani
- Ann Newdigate
- Edward Poitras
- Ed Ruscha
- George Ellis Russell
- Susan Shantz
- Levente Sulyok
- Richard Allan Thomas
- David C. Umholtz
- David Bernard Williams
- Steven J. Yazzie
