Kansas on our Walls

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Casey Wilson, Jim Richardson, Harold Gaston

KANSAS ON OUR WALLS

In his gallery talk for the “Iconic Kansas” opening at the Emporia Arts Center on Jan. 19, Jim Richardson said that during his growing-up days he found it a bit odd that paintings and photographs on the walls of Kansas banks, hotels and hospitals were usually of  Colorado scenes.

A Kansas native, Richardson now lives in Lindsborg and is a photographer for National Geographic.

Like him, I’m sure many of you remember seeing Colorado pictures on the walls of businesses, too. I did, and the underlying message that I received as a kid was that what we had in Kansas didn’t count as scenery. Real scenery was a mountain, a waterfall, or perhaps waves breaking on a rocky shoreline.

Dramatic landscapes were wall-worthy; grasslands were not.

However, over the decades, we Kansans have become more comfortable with the beauty that surrounds us – the plains and the prairies, our long horizons, cloud-filled skies.

These days, when you visit restaurants or banks or insurance offices in Kansas, you’re likely to see a photo that resembles the immediate world around us, a scene that could be found within a few miles, rather than a picture of alpine flowers with snowcapped peaks in the distance.

Richardson said, “Perhaps with shows like this, ‘Iconic Kansas,’ we are reaching that point in which we really don’t feel that we have to apologize, that we really feel that we can love this place as it is, for what it is, and understand it, without apologies, without feelings of inferiority, without any of those things that would have made us put that picture of Colorado on our wall instead of the prairie in our own backyard.”

Yes, we are at that point. Like a honeysuckle vine that twists itself around a clotheslines pole, our topography has grown on us.

While we may seek other landscapes on vacations – mesas and mountains, deserts and beaches, we now also celebrate the beauty of the prairie.

The “Iconic Kansas” exhibit will be on display at the Emporia Arts Center until March 2. The show features 17 photographers who had previously shared their work on the website for ESU’s Center for Great Plains Studies.

In this show are shots of Greensburg following the 2007 tornado, a one-room schoolhouse, a stone fence, the Hutchinson grain elevator, cloudscapes and barns, abandoned houses and prairie chickens.

These photographs document the world around us, a place we are quite fond of, actually. Indeed, we are smitten with Kansas.

In conversations about our state, countless people have expressed their deep feelings for Kansas – and then they raise a hand to their mouths and whisper, “But don’t tell anyone. We don’t want everyone to know how wonderful Kansas is.”

While we may not brag publicly about this state, we can’t seem to get enough of the place. Thousands of Kansans spend the warm-weather months exploring the state, antiquing, museum-hopping, and visiting small towns. Travelers head for Atchison, or the Red Hills, Arikaree Breaks, or maybe to Route 66 in the southeast corner of the state.

And it’s not just professional photographers who take off their lens caps in Kansas. Digital cameras make it easy for all of us to document the seasons, the song birds, the rich wildflowers that rise from pastures in June. We take pictures of sunsets, wheat fields, and old wooden barns that lean into the past.

We have awakened from the old interpretation that this landscape is bland and boring. We now crave the scenery before us, the green rounded hills dotted with cattle, sapphire-colored ponds tucked into crevices in the Flint Hills, sunlight riding the stretched lines of barbed wire which are knotted around hedge posts that will stand for a century.

We have learned to value the beauty in simplicity; we have bonded irrevocably with the prairie. And these days, most of us have Kansas landscapes hanging on our walls. We have come home to stay.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh

The “Iconic Kansas’ exhibit will be open through March 2 at the Emporia Arts Center, 815 Commercial.

Dave Leiker visits with Jim Richardson.