“Loss is a cousin of loneliness,” Olivia Laing. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone My mother and Lost Bird, a Lakota woman who died at the age of 29, share at least one thing in common. Both have lived at All Saints, the Sioux quartzite building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota….
what is seeing dakota?
In this installation, we bring together the artistic process and works of a visual artist with the reflections of a theologian to cultivate imaginative and possibly transformative ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. We intertwine not only two differ-ent professional practices of art and theology but also our two different ways of seeing Dakota. Our hope is that you who are seeing this installation will see Dakota in a new manner. We invite people to look with intention, to ponder the images and words, and to gather insight from the art and words.
selected works
School of the Spirit (Ask the Animals)
I had thought that when I turned 60 I would have fewer questions about life and more answers. But the exact opposite has happened. As my own mortality looms closer on the horizon of life, my field of vision has expanded the boundaries of life’s meaning and stretched me further than I could imagine. At…
Song Of The Open Road
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you . . .” from the Book of Job “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . ….
Fences
Two summers ago, while participating in the annual bike trip Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), I spent long minutes looking at fences. South Dakota fences. Which are sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the lodgepole pine fences I helped build in my youth in Montana. Those fences were made of trees we found up…
Wind (turbine)
Winter: Turbulent northwest winds usher in blizzard conditions, leaving Dakota buried under ice and snow that piles along the roads, crusting into white and black. In 2013, winter arrived prematurely when a blizzard blanketed western South Dakota, killing tens of thousands of cattle, horses, and sheep. In one day, the West River rains switched to…
Vespers: Sails and the River
The sails frame the clouds, like a door frame across the threshold of my home. I’m transported to the Missouri River, can feel the humidity in the thickness of the clouds, and smell the pungent odor of the water. The Missouri’s beauty is wide and deep, framed by cliffs and hills that buttress the prairie…