Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz

2025 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist
February 4–August 2, 2025

Dana Fritz’s photographs in this exhibition make visible the forces that shaped the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands’ Bessey Ranger District in the Sandhills. This hand-planted conifer forest was overlaid onto a semi-arid grassland in an ambitious late-19th-century experiment to create a timber industry and change the local climate. In black-and-white close shots and panoramic views, Fritz beautifully highlights the natural and human-defined patterns on the land.

The forest’s row-crop trees were never commercially harvested, and for decades the site was protected from the natural cycle of fire. In 2022 five thousand acres of the park burned in an accidental fire. Fritz’s presentation of the site before and after the fire has become an important record.

The forest provides a rich metaphor for the nation’s current environmental predicaments, including catastrophic forest fires and tree encroachment in the grasslands. The district, which includes a tree nursery, is today focused on conservation, grassland restoration, and native reforestation, with an aim of mitigating large-scale climate change.

A book related to the works in the exhibition, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), was awarded the 2024 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction “Nebraska as Place.”

Raised in Prairie Village, Kansas, Fritz is the Hixson-Lied Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is the 2025 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist. Her photographic edition, Tallgrass Orientation, relates to work she created during a 2023 Tallgrass artist residency in Chase County. Giant leaves of a compass plant lie over a topographic map of the area where she collected them. The leaves’ fingers point to the poles and orient their flat faces to the east and west sun. Indigenous and settler travelers valued compass plants for orientation in a vast prairie with few landmarks.

Major Sponsors: Greater Manhattan Community Foundation’s Lincoln & Dorothy I. Deihl Community Grants Program
Contributing Sponsors: David and Judith Regehr

Related events
Free and open to the public

Artist Talk | Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Nebraska’s Hand-Planted Forest
Thursday, February 20, 2025, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Beach Museum of Art

Trees in the Grasslands: Three Perspectives
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 5:30-7 p.m.
Livestream conversation with Dana Fritz; Jesse Nippert, K-State professor of biology; and Carson Vaughan, author and freelance environmental reporter. Moderated by Curator Elizabeth Seaton.
Click here to register. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with information about how to join the program via Zoom.

The 2024-2025 Beach Museum of Art Gift Print is available now for purchase.

Please call 785-532-7718 or email beachart@ksu.edu for purchasing this year's Gift Print. Click here for more information about the museum's Gift Prints.

Dana Fritz, Tallgrass Orientation, 2024, inkjet print, 16 x 20 in., courtesy of the artist