Introducing four South Dakota Artist Fellows

Arts Council awards Fellowships to four South Dakota artists

Each year the South Dakota Arts Council selects a group of South Dakota artists to receive the Artist Fellowship grant rewarding individual artistic excellence. The $5,000 fellowships, awarded following an extensive review by a judging panel, reflect the variety and quality of art being produced in South Dakota. For FY2021, four artists were selected as Fellows.

Ben Miller

Ben Miller is the author of River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa. He has received a creative writing fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a research grant from the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. His writing has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, The New England Review, The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, One Story, Fiction International, The Kenyon Review and other venues. The first South Dakota project he developed involved collecting new translations of the William Carlos Williams poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the 140 languages currently spoken in Sioux Falls. For more than three decades, he has been married to writer Anne Pierson Wiese, the recipient of an SDAC Artist Fellowship in 2018.

Kevin Pourier

Kevin Pourier, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, has been carving buffalo horn in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota for nearly 30 years. Pourier is one of the only artists in the country working in the medium of incised buffalo horn. The works he produces carry forward Lakota artistic practices for creating spoons and vessels of sublime beauty from the horns of the revered animal. His carvings reveal the beauty he sees in the world around us, utilizing imagery intent on inspiring thought, growth and creating the opportunity for education.

Marty Two Bulls Jr.

Marty Two Bulls, Jr. is an artist and educator based in Rapid City. Two Bulls is an Kevin Pourier enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and was raised in the high plains of South Dakota. Two Bulls comes from a family of diverse artists. His father, Marty Two Bulls, Sr., is an accomplished artist and was his first art instructor. Two Bulls grew up in his father’s studio where he learned the fundamentals of sculpture, illustration, graphic design and how to make a living as a creative person. He is a graduate of The Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and spent several years in Santa Fe developing his art practice and working in contemporary art galleries before returning to South Dakota in 2017 to be a full-time art faculty member at Oglala Lakota College. Two Bulls has exhibited his artwork in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally with works in several museum permanent collections.

Stephen Yarbrough began his musical career as a flutist/arranger with the Air Force Academy Band outside of Colorado Springs, CO. In 1982 he took a teaching position in Music Theory/Composition at the University of South Dakota, and in 1983 was awarded his D.M.A. in Music Composition from the University of Oklahoma. His work has been commissioned and performed by the National Symphony Orchestra, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, internationally renowned tenor Scott Piper, Maestro Henry Charles Smith and many others. He has three times received the Artist Fellowship Grant from the South Dakota Arts Council, and was commissioned to write compositions for South Dakota’s Bi-Centennial year, the Sesquicentennial Celebration for the City of Sioux Falls and the 125th year of SD statehood. Yarbrough is a writer member and publisher member of ASCAP—the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers—and Emeritus Professor in Music and former Composer in Residence after 29 years of teaching at the University of South Dakota.