UNL’s Great Plains Art Museum is open late, from 5-7 p.m. on Nov. 1. Join Great Plains Student Storyteller Karla Hernandez Torrijos for the opening of her exhibition, “Dear Great Plains.” The event will feature light refreshments and admission is always free.

“Dear Great Plains” is a postcard-writing campaign that hopes to tell a different story of the Great Plains: more complex, more diverse, and more nuanced. A collective letter, “Dear Great Plains” raises questions of heritage, history, and home. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Knowing that you love the earth changes you […] but when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.” Karla asked letter writers to consider their bond with the Great Plains and spent time collecting postcards from various communities and online.

Karla Hernandez Torrijos (she/her) is a poet and workshop facilitator who has been invited to read in venues across Nebraska, including The Bay, El Museo Latino, and The UNL Wick Alumni Center. The recipient of the 2022-2023 Irby F. Wood Prize for Poetry and the 2020-2021 Vreeland Award for Poetry, her writing interrogates our understanding of home, displacement, and the liminal space in between. Torrijos was the 2021-2022 Creative in Community Resident for The LUX Center for the Arts and is the inaugural Student Storyteller in Residence for The Center for Great Plains Studies. Her work can be found in “Preposition: An Undercurrent Anthology.”

The Student Storyteller in Residence Program is funded by the Michael Farrell Fund for Student Storytelling, administered through the University of Nebraska Foundation.

Other exhibitions include:
“Contemporary Indigeneity 2024”
This exhibition features over 25 Native American artists from across the Great Plains. For the fifth iteration of “Contemporary Indigeneity,” the Great Plains Art Museum sought Native American artists addressing any issues and themes relevant to the contemporary Indigenous experience on the Great Plains. A panel of Native American art professionals reviewed the submitted work and made selections based on the artwork’s aesthetic merit and contribution to the field of contemporary art.

“Confronting the Legendary West”
This exhibition continues the themes of the Center for Great Plains Studies’ 49th annual conference, “Confronting the Legendary Great Plains,” by focusing on the complex mythology of the American West. “Confronting the Legendary West” includes works from the Great Plains Art Museum’s extensive collection of western art and considers the perspectives that have—and have not—been included in the art that tells the stories of this region.