Hixson-Lied Professor of Art and landscape photographer Dana Fritz will guide visitors through her exhibition Dana Fritz: Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape. This exhibition is currently on view through January 4th, 2026.
Free and open to the public.
Dana Fritz’s photographs reveal the forces shaping the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands. Once the world’s largest hand-planted forest, the site is known colloquially as the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey. Wind, water, planting, thinning, burning, decomposition, and sowing all play a role in its environmental history. Located just west of the 100th meridian about 118 miles from Kearney, the conifer forest was built on semi-arid grassland as part of an ambitious late nineteenth-century effort to alter the local climate and establish a timber industry in the Nebraska Sandhills.
This unique experiment of row-crop trees, protected from the natural fire cycle for decades yet never harvested commercially, is a powerful metaphor for today’s environmental challenges. The late nineteenth-century attempt to reclaim the so-called “Great American Desert” with trees has evolved into a focus on twenty-first-century conservation, grassland restoration, and reforestation—all aimed at sequestering carbon, maintaining ecosystem balance, and combating large-scale climate change.
In this exhibition, the photographs comprising Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape are presented alongside two related bodies of work. Re: forest traces the afforestation process as seeds are sown in the Bessey Nursery and then planted as seedlings in Pike, Roosevelt, and Medicine Bow National Forests. Post-fire Postscript documents the altered landscape following the Bovee Fire on October 2, 2022, which burned nearly a quarter of the forest. Through these projects, Fritz traces changing perspectives on land use and management, as well as human interventions in climate change, expressed in the environmental and cultural history of the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey.