The Great Plains Art Museum is open late on Dec. 2, 5-7 p.m. Visit the museum for two exhibitions plus refreshments and an all-ages ornament making activity featuring Great Plains animals.

On view:

Michael Farrell’s “Wayfaring Strangers” features a set of large-format portraits created during the pandemic in fall 2020. The work was done in a backyard natural light alcove, harkening back to 19th Century portrait settings.

Farrell is a veteran in public broadcasting specializing in history and humanities documentaries, as well as programs about diverse topics, such as music, art, and rural and environmental issues. In addition to teaching, he co-leads the Platte Basin Time-lapse project, a collaborative, multi-year initiative that uses time-lapse photography to show a watershed in motion over time.

In “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape,” Dana Fritz’s photographs show the forces that shaped the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands, once the world’s largest hand-planted forest. Wind, water, planting, thinning, burning, decomposing, and sowing all contribute to the environmental history of this conifer forest overlaid onto a semi-arid grassland in an effort to create a timber industry and change the local climate.

Fritz is Hixson-Lied Professor of Art at UNL. She uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She is the author of Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) and Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape (forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in January 2023).

Exhibition support is provided by the Charles W. Guildner Great Plains Art Museum Excellence Fund, UNL’s Hixson-Lied Faculty Grants, and the UNL Arts & Humanities Research Enhancement Fund. Admission is always free.