Tales of Dakota Sandstone | Terry Evans

MAY 28-AUGUST 31, 2025 

For sixty years I have known this pasture, but I didn’t really know it. I mainly ignored it, seeing it as rather boring overgrazed pasture being overtaken by Eastern red cedar trees. And besides, I was really only interested in photographing rich pure prairie that had never been grazed or changed in any way. A perfect ecosystem could be my teacher, but not this rough pasture. How preposterous. Here is this pasture, prairie grasses and forbs on top, grasses chewed off but returning after the burn, and underneath it and on top is Dakota Formation sandstone everywhere. We can see it now that the cedar trees are gone, cut, dragged into piles and burned..

Look at this rock! It is at least one hundred million years old. Dakota Formation in this pasture is part of what holds us up, part of the ground we stand on. There it is having displaced the earth’s surface, rocks scattered over the ground. I’d been looking at the surface of ground, prairie ecosystems, for almost fifty years. Even now, I could not see the ninety- five to one hundred- million- year old sandstone if it hadn’t shifted through the surface. Rex Buchanan, Kansas State Geologist emeritus, says that this land was at sea level at time of deposition. We are seeing an old beach surface river channel in the ripples of rock. Dakota dips slightly to the west and is underneath limestone and then comes back up as it gets near the Rocky Mountains, which are some twenty million years younger than this Dakota Formation sandstone.

My husband, Sam and Rex and Bud Sullivan, our friend for fifty years who knows this pasture well, and I look for Dakota Formation outcroppings. We drive over the rough pasture in Bud’s ancient jeep. Along with the coppers, browns, oranges and greens of ground and grasses and rock, I catch glimpses of white. Circles of white ash where piles of cut cedar trees were burned, an occasional sun- bleached white cattle bone, countless white golf balls hit into the pasture by the neighbor, a flock of white pelicans flying past overhead.

When I first started photographing a pristine prairie back in 1978, I thought that if only I could understand the biological structure of a prairie ecosystem, I might understand the structure of the universe. But now I wonder if looking at anything long enough and hard enough might reveal the structure of the universe? My friend, Chris Kempes, biophysicist at the Santa Fe Institute, and his colleagues are looking for equations that would describe everything from the tiniest cell to each star in the universe, Dakota sandstone included. We are all connected.

Terry Evans
March 31, 2025

Programming:

June 6 | 5-7 PM | FREE
First Friday & Opening Reception

June 27 | 5 PM | FREE
Join us on June 27 for an Artist Talk with Terry Evans as she discusses the ideas and images behind Tales of Dakota Sandstone.

Thank you to Friends Of Terry Evans: Sid & Suzy Reitz, Dr. Brad Stuewe & Dr. Paula Fried, Jamie & Brigid Hall, Morrie & Sydney Soderberg, Mark & Carolyn Wedel, Heather & Dr. Boyd Smith, Mike & Debbie Berkley, and Saralyn Reece Hardy.

Corporate pARTner – Wedel Financial Group