From the Colour of Its Bloom: Camas Prairie BIG IDEA project catalog

FROM THE COLOUR OF ITS BLOOM: CAMAS PRAIRIE A BIG IDEA PROJECT

SUN VALLEY MUSEUM OF ART WOULD LIKE TO ­ACKNOWLEDGE THE SHOSHONE AND BANNOCK PEOPLES AND THEIR HOMELANDS HERE IN THE WOOD RIVER VALLEY AND ON THE CAMAS PRAIRIE, AS WELL AS THEIR USE OF THESE LANDS IN THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.

cover: Anthony Hernandez, Screened Pictures Camas #3, 2019, archival pigment print, courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles back cover: Daniel Gordon, wallpaper mural installation (detail), 2020, UV Printing on paper, courtesy the artist and M+B, Los Angeles; photo: Dev Khalsa

FROM THE COLOUR OF ITS BLOOM: CAMAS PRAIRIE JULY 10–SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Projects of this scope require the ­enthusiasm, cooperation and participation of many ­individuals and organizations. We are g­ rateful for the unequivocal support of Christine ­Davis-Jeffers, SVMoA’s Executive Director, and to our Board of Directors, who all recognize that art and arts education are essential to the life of a robust community. In addition to crucial financial s­ upport from Jane P. ­Watkins, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Lehman Foundation and ­numerous private donors, several people provided important advice, d ­ irection and introductions. Judith Freeman and Marilyn Dillard connected us to their friends in Fairfield, whose p ­ erspective and a­ ssistance made this project richer.

Louise Dixey, the ­Cultural Resource D ­ irector of Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and Nolan Brown, Historic Researcher in the Language and Cultural P ­ reservation Department of the ­Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, were crucial in d ­ irecting us to Derek No-Sun Brown and ­guiding us on language and history. Tyler Rollins and his colleagues at Tyler Rollins Fine Art and Elizabeth Leach and her team at Elizabeth Leach Gallery lent logistical support and encouragement. Kay Hardy and Gregory Kaslo’s willingness to allow Sopheap Pich’s sculpture to make its home on their property is a gift to the whole ­community. And finally, our colleagues at SVMoA are remarkable; together they helped us realize so much of the project, from f­ undraising to marketing to production. All of these ­combined efforts have helped make the project a success.

Kristin Poole Courtney Gilbert Artistic Director Curator of Visual Arts

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From the Colour of Its Bloom is made possible through significant financial support from

Jane P. Watkins and generous grants from the

Robert Lehman Foundation and the

with additional support from: The Dawson Family Ann & Mark Edlen The Michael S. Engl Family Foundation Barbara & Tod Hamachek The Hardiman Family Foundation Kay Hardy & Gregory Kaslo Andrea B. Laporte Barbara & John Lehman Jeanne Meyers Linda & Bill Nicholson Richard Smooke & Family Jeri L. Wolfson Sarah & David Woodward

Special thanks to: Cami & Adam Elias and Family Jonathan Lunceford, Lunceford Excavation Skip Merrick, Merrick Concrete for assistance with the installation of Sopheap Pich’s Camas Lily sculpture

KRISTIN POOLE

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fading Post-it note stuck on a c­ abinet near my desk reads, “The West is almost more of a religion than a place.” Scott Hardy, a celebrated western gear maker, made that comment to me more than a decade ago. I keep it there to remember that this place we call home is rife with contradictions and ­expectations, truths and beliefs, pasts and futures, each ­battling for attention and illumination. We cling to the myth of the American West despite the messy and often misrepresented history from which it was born. It suggests awe-inspiring natural landscapes, freedom, space, and a complex and contradictory desire for dominion and protection. The mythology is bolstered by the drama, beauty and vastness of the land, an image that was successfully sold by 19th-century painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, whose paintings set many generations’ expectations about what the West should look like but also contained false assumptions about a land that was open, free for the taking. Today, we recognize the West as a more complicated place—one made richer by our attention to the reality of its history and the often subtle beauty of its land.

As a museum institution, we aspire to share with the community artists and artwork that illuminate our human condition, helping us better understand ourselves, each other and the place we live. It is hugely rewarding to initiate projects that examine our home, inviting artists to explore what is present and, in so doing, allow us to see it anew. The Camas Prairie is worth seeing, worth paying attention to, not only because of its sensory beauty—the wind and grasses, the flowers and birdlife—but also because it is a microcosm that, once investigated, unfolds a true story of the realities of making and keeping a life on the land.

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Landscapes reveal stories of occupancy and acquisition and communities whose relationship to that land evolves over decades.

This project and exhibition were motivated by a desire to acknowledge and celebrate the Camas Prairie, a place of quiet but noteworthy beauty.

It is a place that is often passed over, but we believe it is worth seeing. We focused on the prairie because it is part of the ecosystem that is our home, because it has its own histories and unique beauty but is also representative of many places in the western United States, and because the camas lily is not only visually compelling but embodies a history of Native American land use that is not widely known, understood or appreciated.

Artists’ ability to interpret the world around us can also draw attention to that which we might otherwise overlook. Judith Freeman’s beautiful essay shares the story of the prairie and illustrates how place in the West is largely determined by people’s relationship to the land.

Her writing and the artwork of the other five invited artists reinforce the knowledge that art can reveal truths and obscured histories. We are grateful that each of the artists selected for this project were motivated by the prairie’s beauty and equally interested in its social history. As a result, each of them made artwork that deepens our relationship to a place that is part of our home and illuminates a West that continues to evolve.

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COURTNEY GILBERT, PH.D. CURATOR OF VISUAL ARTS

FROM THE COLOUR OF ITS BLOOM: CAMAS PRAIRIE

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urrounding the remote town of Fairfield, Idaho, the Camas Prairie stretches for more than 30 miles along both sides of U.S. Highway 20 as it cuts across the southern part of the state. The prairie takes its name from the camas lily, which briefly blooms each spring, creating ribbons of flowers that, in the words of Meriwether Lewis, “from the colour of its bloom … resembles lakes of fine clear water.”

The Camas Prairie is a place that travelers often drive through on their way somewhere else, perhaps stopping in Fairfield for fuel, or a snack, before getting back on Highway 20. But those who take the time to leave the highway,

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to explore landscapes crisscrossed by a grid of dirt roads, are rewarded. The prairie is a place of visual contrast and multiple ecosystems: purple-blue lilies against bright green grass, tilled fields and marshy wetlands, big sky flanked by mountains to the north and south. Embedded within the prairie is the Centennial Marsh Wildlife Management Area, home to migrating waterfowl and shore birds. Visitors in spring and early summer will encounter yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds, mallards and teals, long-billed curlews, American avocets, kestrels, meadowlarks and Exhibition installation views; photos: Dev Khalsa more. The sound of

birdsong fills the air at the marsh, greeting visitors as they get out of their cars to walk among camas lilies and around the edges of the water.

The Camas Prairie is also a place of layered social histories. For centuries, the area’s original inhabitants, the Shoshone and the Bannock, have used the camas lily bulb as a staple food.

The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes continue to gather camas bulbs today, but their use of the prairie was disrupted by the arrival of European settlers who established farms there in the 19th century. In the aftermath of the 1878 ­Bannock War, which resulted in part from conflict between Native Americans and settlers over access to the lily fields, the U.S. government restricted the Shoshone and Bannock’s travels from Fort Hall. Tribal people continued to harvest camas, but not in the quantities from prior years. Today the annual Camas Prairie Homecoming and Camas Lily Days festival bring together members of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and residents of Fairfield in celebration of the prairie, its history and the camas lily.

As Kristin Poole and I worked on this exhibition, we sought out artists we believed would be responsive to the particulars of the

prairie. We invited writer Judith Freeman and artists Derek No-Sun Brown, Daniel Gordon, MK Guth, Anthony Hernandez and Sopheap Pich to respond to different aspects of the Camas Prairie as a unique landscape with a complex history mirroring that of the western United States. We believed it was important that each artist have personal experience of the Camas Prairie as a place. Anthony Hernandez and Judith Freeman have lived on the prairie for nearly 20 years and have a deep connection to the land and its history. Derek No-Sun Brown, who grew up on the Fort Hall Reservation, had visited it with his family, gathering lilies together as their ancestors had for centuries. For Daniel Gordon, MK Guth and Sopheap Pich, though, the prairie was entirely new. Each artist visited in preparation for the project, and for both Kristin and me, these trips were a highlight—opportunities to visit the prairie and Centennial Marsh multiple times, in different seasons and different weather, and to see it through these artists’ eyes as we gathered lilies, watched birds and listened to the sounds that surrounded us. The work created by each artist reflects the intention with which they observed the prairie, and responded to it.

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Because this project is so deeply entwined with the idea of landscape in the American West, Kristin and I believed it was essential that it include an outdoor commissioned sculpture.

We were both drawn to the elegant sculptural work of Sopheap Pich, whose exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art we had seen in 2013. Born in Cambodia, Pich spent part of his childhood living under the Khmer Rouge regime before immigrating with his family to the United States when he was 13. After graduate school, he returned to Cambodia, where he has established a career as an internationally recognized artist.

Pich has pursued a number of projects that examine flowers with social or political meaning, including the morning glory, which his family relied on as a source of food during the Khmer Rouge period, eating a soup made from the flower. This exhibition includes a piece from his series on the Rang Phnom flower, Rang Phnom Flower No. 2, a sculpture inspired by a flower important to Buddhists because of its resemblance to the flower of the tree under which the Buddha was Sopheap Pich, Rang Phnom born. Pich was drawn Flower No. 2 (detail), 2015, bamboo, rattan, metal wire, to the history of the private collection, courtesy camas lily bulb as a Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New staple food for Native York; photo: Dev Khalsa

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Exhibition installation view; Americans and also photo: Dev Khalsa to the unique form of the lily itself.

He visited the prairie several times in preparation for the project, first driving across it in winter, struck by the absence of color, humans and livestock. His return the following summer, though, “was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Now there were colors and textures, wild birds with their whistling sounds, groups of deer dotting the fields and in the cold

streams … scenes that I had only seen in old paintings. It was magical.” Pich spent several days photographing the landscape and gathering lilies before returning to Cambodia, where he produced sculptures for this project that convey the wonder he felt on his visit.

As a college student, Pich planned to become a medical doctor, and he approaches plants and flowers with a scientific eye, studying their botanical forms and then rendering them in bamboo, rattan and metal. This attention to form is evident in the drawings and woodblock prints he made in preparation for Camas Lily, the 26-foot-tall sculpture SVMoA commissioned for the project. Sited at 551 N. 1st Avenue in Ketchum, the sculpture depicts the camas lily upside down, its woven petals offering support for the flower’s stem, which emerges into the camas bulb and roots at the top. Pich’s lattice of bamboo, rattan and metal captures the fragility and temporality of the Sopheap Pich, Rang Phnom lily, which blooms very Flower No. 2, 2015, bamboo, rattan, metal wire, private briefly in late spring, collection, courtesy Tyler while casting intricate Rollins Fine Art, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa shadows on the

ground below that evoke fields of waving grass and flowers. The bulb is intentionally placed at the top of the piece, its weight and solidity emphasizing its significance as a source of nutrition and sustenance.

Like Sopheap Pich, Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Gordon approached the Camas Prairie with an interest in the form of the camas lily itself, as well as other flowers and plants on the prairie. While the end result of Gordon’s ­creative process is usually a photographic print, his methods are hybrid. In order to make his prints, he engages with painting, collage and sculpture. In fact, he states that “The idea of photographic transformation [is] at the root of what I am doing.”

Gordon visited the Camas Prairie in the spring of 2019, spending a day making photographs of flowers and landscapes. He came away from the camas bloom interested in the flowers and intrigued by the idea of their root or bulb as a food source. He then returned to his studio, where he selected photographs to print, along with photographs of other objects to scale, which he hand cut and reassembled.

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In some cases, two-dimensional prints became three-dimensional objects, building up the fragments and objects into a traditional still life composition. The final result—three photographic images that juxtapose the forms and colors of the camas lily with other flowers, root vegetables, and ceramic vases—convey the palette and textures of the prairie.

In making these hybrid collaged images, Gordon pushes the boundaries of photography and also reexamines Modernist ideas explored by artists like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, all of whom worked against the idea that it is possible to accurately represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional picture plane. Gordon takes this investigation of the relationship between reality and the picture plane a step further by placing his art in rooms that are covered in wallpaper patterned with abstracted images pulled from his photographic works. Of these pieces he states, “In the landscape images presented through wraparound wall murals and a work on canvas, elements from the still lifes appear again, though they are heightened through abstraction, bringing color and shape more closely to the fore.” In

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Daniel Gordon, installation manipulating and pixelating digitized im- view; photo: Dev Khalsa ages, Gordon gives us an immersive experience that poses questions about abstraction and reality and emphasizes his practice of blurring categories and stretching boundaries.

The camas lily’s history as a staple food led us to invite Portland-based artist MK Guth to participate in the project. Guth’s artistic practice engages social rituals and interactions. For more than 15 years, she has made artwork that brings people together in cultural conversation.

In 2008, for example, she created a participatory installation for the Whitney Biennial. Visitors were asked the question, “What is worth protecting?” and wrote their answers on strips of red flannel cloth that Guth wove into a braid that grew longer each day.

Some of Guth’s recent sculptures combine books, objects and written instructions for events that involve the preparation and sharing of food and drink. SVMoA commissioned Guth to create a new work for this exhibition that would reflect on the camas lily’s edible history.

Guth visited the Camas Prairie last spring,

gathering bulbs and MK Guth, Camas Prairie flags, 2020, fabric paint on learning about their fabric, courtesy the artist, history. The sculpture Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, and Cristin she created after her Tierney Gallery, New York; visit includes the book photo: Dev Khalsa Dinner for a Camas Flower, a reflection on the camas lily and a plan for a dinner at which the host should ask guests to bring an object related to a theme of the host’s choosing. The end of the book includes an archive in which dinner hosts can record the details of the dinner, including guests and objects.

She writes, “Dinner for a Camas Flower is really not about the camas fields at all, but rather how a thing or object can encompass meaning and history, and if you experience it with others, you might find a new community. Digging camas bulbs is a ritual and eating together is a ritual. In the doing of something as a group, we create MK Guth, Dinner for a Camas Flower, 2020, artist ties of connection.” book, shelf, wood block, Like all her works, this object, courtesy the artist, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, one proposes that Portland, and Cristin a shared meal can Tierney Gallery, New York; be a transformative photo: Dev Khalsa

experience, bringing people together as they activate the sculpture.

The exhibition also includes flags Guth made in preparation for an interactive project she led in June, “Capture the Spring Prairie.”

Some of Guth’s flags hang in the exhibition; others hang outside The Museum with flags made by project participants here in the Wood River Valley. Both representational and abstract, the flags “embrace the colors, mood and atmosphere that the prairie represents.”

While Pich, Gordon and Guth approached the prairie with a particular focus on the camas lily and its history, the photographer Anthony Hernandez’s work gives viewers a larger experience of its wide-open spaces, of the places where human presence and the natural world intersect. The body of work in this exhibition is the first that Hernandez has done on the Camas Prairie, a landscape that he knows intimately from living there part-time for nearly 20 years.

These new photographs document ordinary things—a barn, a tree, a road—and yet beg for a fuller story and a closer look. The objects, like their histories, are hazy, partially obscured by

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the mesh screen through which Hernandez has shot them.

Hernandez adopted this screened method of making pictures after being inspired by a view he saw looking through the mesh walls of an enclosed bus stop in Los Angeles, which led to a series of photographs made through the walls of that city’s bus shelters. The photographs, which were included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, invite viewers to move back and forth, engaging with them physically as partially obscured subject matter comes into focus. He has now begun bringing mesh screens with him into the field, placing the screen between his camera lens and the subject. Hernandez presents everyday objects in a way that highlights their form, patterns and textures. “Like a plein air painter who uses an easel to stabilize a scene, you could say I was drawing and painting photographically to produce these impressionistic renderings of a remarkable landscape.” The screened photographs are also meditations on photography itself, in which mesh circles function like the camera’s lens, offering individual views onto the landscape beyond.

As Kristin and I began planning this exhibition, we started conversations with Louise Dixey, Cultural Resources Director for the

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Anthony Hernandez,

Shoshone-Bannock Screened Pictures Camas #1 (detail), 2019, archival Tribes, about the pigment print, courtesy possibility of working the artist and Kayne Griffin collaboratively to Corcoran, Los Angeles; photo: Dev Khalsa design and install new signage at the Centennial Marsh that would more fully tell the Shoshone-Bannock history on the prairie, and also their contemporary relationship to it. With Anthony Hernandez, the guidance of Dixey ­installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa and her colleague

Nolan Brown, a historical researcher for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, we identified New Mexico-based artist Derek No-Sun Brown (Shoshone-Bannock and Bois Forte Band of Chippewa) to design the new signage. Brown grew up on the Fort Hall Reservation in eastern Idaho and the Bois Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota, and worked closely with Dixey, Nolan Brown and others to determine imagery for the signage and for a painting Brown made for the exhibition, Sweet Breeze Through the Camas.

Inspired by the history of camas harvesting on the prairie, the painting depicts a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes digging for camas bulbs. Engulfed in a sea of lilies, the woman uses a traditional digging stick, a bo’do.

She could as easily be living in the 19th century as in the 21st. Today the Shoshone and Bannock return each spring to the prairie for the Camas Prairie Homecoming. Members of the Tribes continue to gather camas lily bulbs and to celebrate both their history on the prairie and their contemporary relationship to it.

In Brown’s statement for this catalog, he writes of visiting the Camas Prairie with his extended family after the funeral of his grandmother, Madelyn Punkin, the family matriarch:

“My grandfather told us stories of his childhood and even old myths and legends that were told to him about this very land. When we arrived at the prairie I was comforted by the beauty, the soft sweet breeze and the sounds of birds.… I felt connected to something ancient and I was humbled by it, I felt so thankful to be there on this patch of earth.”

The sense of joy and connection that Brown felt on the prairie illuminates the power it holds for generations of Shoshone and Bannock as well as the families who continue to farm its land and those who visit to watch birds or to walk among fields of camas lilies, ­immersed in the prairie’s rich palette, textures and sounds.

Derek No-Sun Brown, ­foreground; Anthony ­Hernandez, background; photo: Dev Khalsa

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JUDITH FREEMAN

FROM THE COLOR OF ITS BLOOM:

THE CAMAS PRAIRIE 1.

When my husband and I first moved to the Camas Prairie and bought our small farm, almost 20 years ago, I knew little of the history of this area even though I had lived in Ketchum in the 1970s and had crossed the prairie many times while driving back and forth on Highway 20 from the Wood River Valley to Boise.

Many people encounter the prairie this way—by driving through it on the two-lane state highway and never stopping. After all, one might ask, what is there to stop for? This vast prairie, 5,300 feet high, 7 to 10 miles wide and 30 miles long, is one of the least populated counties in ­Idaho, an immense stretch of land—farms and ranches, fields and pasture, with dirt roads leading off here and there into the distance. It’s easy to zoom by the small town of Fairfield, population 408, just a few blocks off the main road, and think it might be nothing more than the convenience store and burger shack on the highway.

And yet, as anyone who has glimpsed this world from even a car window can see, looking out over the prairie one finds a purely beautiful pastoral scene. There is so much openness, such far views, and nothing to block the eye. The Bennett Hills form a low border to the south, and tall mountains rise to the north. It’s a sublime landscape. In many ways the prairie has retained a purity that other regions around it have lost, preserved a feeling of silence and beauty and remoteness, as if the modern world had largely passed it by.

To live here, you have to like silence. Trees cannot be your first thought. It helps to have a tolerance for isolation. You must be able to appreciate the most subtle play of light on an immense flat world and a sky given to the wildest displays of clouds and color. You might spend a lot of time alone, in a yawning space that seems to magnify aloneness. You also

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need to know this about the prairie: After a while you will begin to feel that the wind will never stop blowing, no matter how much you wish it would, and you either will or will not make peace with that.

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There is both great drama and great subtlety to this world, and it announces itself every day with long throws of light and bold sunsets, and with the changing seasons. Different colors rise from the land, different impressions take hold, depending on the time of day, or year. In the late spring, the newly plowed earth appears black with winter moisture, but within a very short time a chartreuse halo rises from the land as the shoots of barley and wheat begin to sprout on the great acreages. In summer, the alfalfa fields are a dense emerald green and the huge stacks of yellowing hay create monumental shapes on the horizon. In the winter, an uncanny and disturbingly bright whiteness lays evenly over prairie, a blinding expanse of deep snow glaring under the sun, and one feels an immense, undisturbed world, locked in a frozen silence. As the snow melts, the yellow grasses poke through and a haze of golden light hovers above the whiteness.

It is in late May, however, that the prairie shows its true color, and it is a stunning purple-blue. It’s then that the native Camas, or Camassia quamash, for which the prairie is named, blooms so profusely that looking out over the land one could be forgiven for thinking that the fields of flowers are lakes of water. The tall, lily-like Camas grows in many wet areas but is particularly abundant near what was once called The Swamp by the old-timers, now designated as the Centennial Marsh Bird Refuge.

As lovely as the flowers are, it is the bulb that has for centuries been treasured by the first peoples of this land, the natives who came here in the summer to harvest the Camas bulbs, traditionally one of their most important foods.

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One of the many things I didn’t know about the prairie when we moved here is that the dirt road that runs in front of our farm is the old emigrant trail known as Goodale’s Cutoff, the shortcut that thousands of Oregon-bound settlers took and which quickly became a popular route, named for Tim Goodale who in 1862 led the first wagon train from Old Fort Hall to Old Fort Boise. The company of 1,095 people and 2,900 animals crossed the prairie at a time when the flowers were blooming and the native grasses grew as high as the belly of a horse and dozens of clear streams ran down from the mountains to the north, causing the awestruck travelers to call this world a paradise, or as one person put it, “a Fairyland as wonderful as Stevenson’s Treasure Isle.”

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This is something, of course, that the local native people—the Northern Shoshone and Bannock tribes—had known for a very long time, since this paradise was theirs and theirs alone, their summer harvesting and hunting ground. With the arrival of the whites everything changed, and the natives who had so revered this prairie began to see it transformed by agriculture, mining, and the great herds of domestic animals that soon roamed everywhere. Although the U.S. government ­promised to accord them perpetual access to these lands, the Indians were tricked by the insertion of a single word into the Treaty of 1869 that was ­eventually drawn up. The document stated that the Indians should have a portion of the “Kansas” prairie, instead of the Camas. The two words sounded so alike that the mistake wasn’t noticed by the natives, but unscrupulous whites intended the error. John Hailey, for whom the town in the Wood River Valley is named, attempted to correct the mistake: He contacted the Secretary of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. in 1873, five years after the treaty was signed, to say that the natives “still believed they were entitled to a portion of the Camas Prairie, where there were no white settlers at the time, and where they roamed at will.” But the change of wording was never made. And, tragically, the Shoshone-Bannock tribes were eventually given much poorer land near Fort Hall for their ­reservation.

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It wasn’t the only instance of trickery being played out: White ­emigrants were also sometimes deceived by the claims of early ­developers. In a brochure entitled THE LAST BIG TRACT OF CHEAP LAND LEFT IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, published in 1915, the authors claimed the prairie to be the healthiest environment in the West: There were no blizzards here, no wet storms, no insect pests of any kind, no pig cholera, no animal or human diseases, and, most outrageously, NO WIND.

No wind? No blizzards? No wet storms? As the newcomers soon learned, the deep snow often came with blizzard force. And the wind? It never stopped blowing.

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The first white settlers on the prairie are thought to have been Mormons who traveled north from the Utah Territory in the 1860s and built their dwellings on Chimney Creek. Emigrants from the Midwest and Eastern states soon followed, drawn by the Homestead Act of 1862 which promised 160 acres to anyone willing to improve the land. Still, the prairie was settled later than other areas in the West. Not until 1881 were the first towns established—Soldier, located just north of present day Fairfield; Crichton, along the Old Emigrant road; and Manard to the south,

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as well as a few other small settlements. None of these towns existed for very long.

As it turned out, neither did many of the first settlers. Some were driven away by drought or the devastating plagues of grasshoppers and crickets that arrived in 1888 and destroyed crops for several years running, leaving the horses and cattle to starve over the winter for lack of feed. Others found the climate too harsh.

“It was difficult to cope with the 45-degree below zero weather and five feet of snow,” wrote one early settler. “Many of our neighbors found it difficult. After they had proven up the ground, they would sell it for whatever they could get and leave for warmer climes.”

A great part of the story of the prairie has always been the hardships that come with extreme weather. I once went out for a cross-country ski in February with my dog Scout. I knew a storm was predicted but thought I could ski for an hour and still beat it home. Instead, it beat me. A blizzard blew up so quickly that the world was instantly obscured in a dense whiteout and I lost all sense of direction. Had Scout not known by instinct which direction to turn and lead me home, I might have perished in that storm. As it was, our bodies were packed with snow on one side where the hard force of the blizzard had driven against us.

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In order for the first settlers to succeed in this harsh world, they needed a market for their farm products. The mining boom in the Wood River Valley that drew hundreds of men to the area provided just such an opportunity, and by the mid-1880s, the butter and eggs and produce and meat raised on the prairie were being hauled north to the new towns of Bellevue and Hailey and Ketchum.

Still, there remained a persistent problem for both the farmers and the miners: the lack of women. Dr. J.M. Rice, an early booster of the prairie, offered a solution in an article printed in the Wood River Times in 1886: For every twenty men in Idaho, there’s not more than one woman. This is certainly embarrassing and will continue so until there is an effort made to secure female help. If my advice is followed, in less than four months the maidens of the East will be found in abundance all over the territory. First, let each bachelor wanting a wife, put into a pool $5.00 and each person wanting a servant, also add $5.00 to the pool. This will pay the expenses for these girls, and those sent out will be such as any bachelor in our Territory would be pleased to select from. By following this advice, the families get their servants, society is

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benefitted, the bachelor is made happy by securing himself a loving wife, and the girls sent out will write back East to their friends to come out so before the first installment is married off, there’ll be abundant help to take their places as servants and each bachelor will be certain of wife.

One cannot help but now marvel at this scheme to correct such an “embarrassing” problem, where “maidens” were viewed as “installments” to be “selected” from, and for a five-dollar investment families could get a servant shipped from the East like a sack of grain. And yet the idea seems to have succeeded: Many “Eastern women” possessed their own adventuresome spirits and accepted the offer to come West. They came not just to be “loving wives” or parlor maids, but also to take jobs as schoolteachers as the population grew. By the 1920s, there were 24 little schoolhouses scattered across the prairie, and many of the early teachers went on to marry local farmers and raise large families. It wasn’t uncommon for a couple to have 10, 11, or even 13 children, which helped to secure a future for the community.

Nettie Higgs, a red-headed tomboy, was one such import: She rode the stage into the main town of Soldier to accept a teaching job. When she overheard the driver say he thought she was the ugliest woman he ever saw, her reaction was to vow to marry him, and she did. His prerequisite for a wife was that she must be able to stand flat-footed and jump into the bed of a wagon. Not only did she do this with ease, but she continued to teach school and follow her avocation of breaking wild horses on the side.

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One cannot underestimate the strength of the women on this prairie. A number of years ago I was asked to interview some of the “Great Ladies of the Prairie” for a calendar a local group was hoping to publish to celebrate these remarkable women, who were all over the age of 90. It is a truism that the women outlast the men here.

I talked to Josie Weatherly, the first female in Idaho to get a pilot license: She accomplished this while still in her teens. She had been taken for an airplane ride by a barnstormer from Gooding and was so thrilled by the experience she went on to get her license before marrying a local boy.

When I asked if she’d continued flying after her marriage, she gave me a rueful look and said unfortunately no: She’d had to give that up to help her husband run the farm.

I interviewed Lena Rice of Hill City, a relative of the Dr. Rice who had hatched the scheme to bring women to the area. At 92, Lena was not just an attractive woman but a vibrant and amusing one: She entertained me

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by reciting a long poem from memory (“I’m known for my recitations,” she said) that seemed to go on for many minutes, and then served me her special “Ice Box Cake,” the recipe for which she had written out on a card for me to take.

Clarice Frostenson, also in her 90s, talked to me about her early years when she had taught school. She had also married a farmer and for many years worked alongside him. Many wives ran the swathers and balers on the hay farms and cooked big meals for the harvesting crews.

Life had been hard, she said, but they knew how to have fun. There were dances in town every Saturday, potlucks and musical evenings where the celebrated fiddler Manny Shaw entertained, and lots of visiting with neighbors. But then, she said, television arrived in the 1950s and people started staying home to watch TV and the social life of the community changed.

8.

The coming of the Oregon Short Line railroad to the prairie years earlier, in 1912, was the great transforming event for the area. The rail line allowed produce and animals to be shipped to far-reaching markets and residents to travel more easily. But because the railroad was situated two miles south of the main town of Soldier, the commerce shifted and eventually Old Soldier was abandoned and a new town, Fairfield, sprang up next to the rail line. Hill City, at the far western end of the prairie, became the terminus of the railroad and an important sheep shipping center: At one time in the 1920s, more sheep were reputed to have been shipped from the area than anywhere in the world except Australia. As many as 250,000 animals might be sent out in a single summer. Keeping the line open in winter wasn’t easy. Drifting could plug the tracks with four to five feet of snow, and five locomotives were required to push the huge frontrotary snowplow to clear them. Still, for the first time, residents who had been largely trapped during the coldest months were now able to journey beyond the prairie.

9.

Just a few miles west of Fairfield there is a historical marker with the heading BANNOCK WAR. It refers to the last battle fought between the whites and Indians in Idaho. The text on the historical sign reads, “Angered by white encroachment on Camas Prairie lands which had been guaranteed to the Bannock Indians by treaty, Buffalo Horn’s band went to war on May 30, 1878.” It goes on to say that trouble had been brewing between whites and natives for many years as the government had consistently disregarded its treaty obligations, and in response the Bannocks rose up and went to war. The battle began here on the prairie,

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and the natives fought all the way to central Oregon before their leader, Buffalo Horn, was killed and they returned to Idaho, defeated. What the sign does not say is that whites had been driving huge herds of hogs onto the prairie and they were destroying the Camas bulbs by rooting them up and laying waste to the land. Buffalo Horn and his band were not only trying to protect their food source but the prairie they revered. This final skirmish is sometimes referred to as the “Hog War.”

10.

The farm where we live was once owned by W.D. Simon, who moved to here in 1938 and became one of the most successful farmers in the area. In 1961, Mr. Simon made a most remarkable discovery: While working with a tractor in his fields one day, he unearthed a cache of 34 prehistoric Clovis points—exquisitely-crafted stone tools that were made 12,000 years ago by an early North American people, named “Clovis” by archeologists, who roamed this area at the same time as woolly mammoths. The Clovis points Mr. Simon found created a great sensation when they came to light, were featured in a 1972 National Geographic article, and were displayed at international conferences. They are stunning objects, faceted spear heads larger than your hand, made of chert and obsidian and other stone material, some green or blue, some red-hued or translucent, and of various shapes. Because of their exquisite beauty and craftsmanship, it is thought they may have been used for ceremonial purposes rather than hunting. How they came to be buried together on this prairie is unknown, just as we know very little about the people who made them, but they are now permanently housed at the Herrett Center Museum in Twin Falls and are known as the Simon Clovis Points. Often, when I walk the fields and dry creek beds near the farm, I find myself gazing at the ground, imagining what it would be like to find a Clovis point left behind by a hunter 12,000 years ago.

11.

The rail line crossing the prairie was discontinued in 1968 at a time when many of the nearby lines were also being abandoned. It was also around this time that a paved road to Boise was completed, and the sawmill just west of town was shuttered, causing a blow to the local economy.

Many of the stores and businesses that had once lined the main street of Fairfield closed, and the population dwindled to less than 500—not even half of what it had been 50 years earlier. Without the train to sustain it, Hill City declined, although it had never been much more than a railroad station and a collection of a few buildings to begin with. By then, the prairie had undergone a great change. Many of the small farms had been absorbed by much larger ones, leaving half a dozen families in control of

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most of the agriculture. The once free-flowing Camas Creek had been straightened, and the abundant game birds had suffered a loss of natural habitat and been all but hunted out of existence, slaughtered indiscriminately by outsiders. The Bundy family reported finding piles of 50 or more sage hens killed by “sportsmen” and left in piles to rot. Such waste would have been unthinkable for the natives, who had taken from this land only what they could use and offered their praise in return.

12.

There is amazing raptor life on the prairie, the display of abundant hawk life in such variety. Herds of antelope roam freely, and elk and deer.

The Sandhill cranes arrive in spring, as well as many other migratory bird species. One of the best places to birdwatch is the Centennial Marsh, a 3,100-acre protected area. This is also the place for lavish displays of Camas lilies in May.

13.

The Shoshone-Bannocks still return to the prairie every May to harvest the bulbs. It takes more than a mistaken word in a dishonest treaty to take a people from their land. In recent years, they have joined with the locals to celebrate Camas Lily Days, a festival in the Fairfield town park held at the end of every May. They renew their connection to their homeland with drumming and dancing and singing, attired in traditional regalia. Their resilience and the beauty of their culture is a fine thing, and the prairie is still alive with their stories and presence.

14.

To live here is to be reminded constantly of what has gone before.

The layers of habitation. Many descendants of the original settlers have never left: They are known as the Legacy Families. The Rices and the Frostensons, the Weatherlys and the Baldwins, Reagans and Van Skykes, and Wokerseins and Pecks, and many others who have stayed on here through the generations. These old families lend a sense of strength and continuity to the community.

I often think of Mr. and Mrs. Simon, and of the rare Clovis points he unearthed. I’m told he kept them in a shoe box beneath the bed in the room where we now sleep and allowed his grandchildren to take them to school for show-and-tell. There is something about these old habitations that remains. I feel their affection for this landscape and the care they took with it, in the plantings they left behind. I am told people came from all over the prairie in the spring to see Mrs. Simon’s flowers, and her raspberry patch was legendary. The many varieties of trees they planted around the farmhouse still thrive, as does the long windbreak—a true

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shelter belt that makes the windiest days tolerable. I like to walk through the trees, down the bowered allées, and admire the old rows of pines (92 of them, some two or three stories tall), the heirloom apple trees, the willows and Siberian Peas—often planted on the outside of a windbreak as they are bushy and low and the first to cut the wind. I think of what trees meant to the early settlers, like those in Willa Cather’s masterpiece, My Antonia, a novel set on another prairie, one in Nebraska where trees were also rare: Sometimes I went south to visit our German neighbors and admire their Catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the earth . . . trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons . . . there wasn’t a tree here when we first came.

We planted every one . . . I would fret about them when there was a dry time. They were on my mind like children. Many a night I’ve got up and come out and carried water to the poor things. And now, you see, we have the good of them.

15.

When you drive around the prairie now, it is the occasional old tree, the limbed-out cottonwood or the solitary gnarled pine, that tells you where a homestead once stood. Many have been abandoned, the weathered barns and outbuildings caved in, the little houses looking so sorry with their windows like empty eyes. But some of the oldest structures have survived, and like the solitary trees, they have a remarkable presence and beauty.

16.

“It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious,“ Cather wrote. For her, the symbol of the prairie was the plow against the horizon. Here it is the old shed. The gnarled tree.

The abandoned wooden structure.

The eye on the prairie is always drawn to the distant view and the immense sky.

One feels there is something in this country left of the wild old beast the first settlers attempted to tame. I stand out in the barnyard and look to the west and see the remains of the old settlement of Crichton, not far away: The shapes of the buildings include a barn built by the founder of the town, Jared Peck, and the old hotel he once ran in a little frontier settlement that had its brief moment, as everything here seems to have.

I write these words in what was once the old two-room Willow Creek

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schoolhouse, moved here many years ago by Mr. Simon and used as an outbuilding, now my studio. We continue to plant trees on this farm, and to take care of those they left behind. The past never feels quite past here. It is the land itself that is the hero of any story told about the prairie.

Like that of My Antonia, it is bigger, greater, than those who peopled and struggled with it, or who praised and honored it, or who are now drawn to its beauty and profound silence. It is that history and beauty that this exhibition honors.

Judith Freeman June 30, 2020

LENA RICE’S RECIPE FOR “ICE BOX CAKE, A FAMILY FAVORITE” Mix together:

2 1/2 cups Marshmallows (small)

1/2 generous cup chocolate syrup. Let stand Cream Well Together:

1 cube margarine – softened out of fridge

3/4 cup powdered sugar (generous)

3 egg yolks (use eggs with NO cracks in shells)

Mix well

Add creamed mixture to marshmallow mixture then fold in 2 generous cups Kool Whip and 1 cup walnuts.

Gwinn, Lena and Jim Rice, photo courtesy the Rice Family Lena Rice in her kitchen, photo courtesy the Rice Family

Whip 3 egg whites until stiff

Fold egg whites carefully but thoroughly into the creamed marshmallow mixture.

Put Graham Cracker crumbs (crushed about 1 cup or so) into bottom of buttered 9 x 13 pan. use a Pyrex one

Add the completed marshmallow-chocolate mixture to pan. Spread evenly over pan. Cover with a THIN layer of Graham Cracker crumbs.

Cover with foil and place in refrigerator at least 24 hours before serving. Yum yum good!

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DEREK NO-SUN BROWN

S

weet Breeze Through the Camas

The Camas Prairie for me was more like a dream than reality. After my grandmother’s funeral, we all decided to go pick camas, one of the traditional food staples of the Shoshone-Bannock people. None of us had ever gone before except my brother Nolan, so it was something new and exciting to experience, especially after the loss of a great family matriarch like my grandmother Madelyn Punkin. I didn’t know what to expect, but the whole drive was filled with beauty. My grandfather told us stories of his childhood and even old myths and legends that were told to him about this very land. When we arrived at the Camas Prairie, I was comforted by the beauty, the soft, sweet breeze, and the sounds of birds. We all brought our families, and our children were so happy to play amongst the camas. We were told what camas to pick and warned of the white death camas. We harvested, laughed, played, and smiled at each other. I know we all felt a strange familiarity there and sense of peace. I could almost see my grandmother there with us, laughing and smiling. It was just like a pleasant dream; it was perfect. The bright blue sky gently pushing on the jagged, almost purple mountains, the bright green and purple of the c­ amas was unreal. I felt connected to something ancient and I was ­humbled by it, I felt so thankful to be there on this patch of earth thousands of years have led us back to again. I could have cried, but we laughed and smiled instead and I felt the gratitude that my ancestors would have felt and the same sweet breeze through the camas.

Derek No-Sun Brown, Sweet Breeze Through the Camas, 2020, oil on canvas, courtesy the artist

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SHOSHONE-BANNOCK TRIBES, LANGUAGE AND ­CULTURAL PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT HARVESTING CAMAS / PASIGO (SHOSHONE) / TSUGA (BANNOCK) Camas (Quamash cammasia) is a commonly used vegetal food ­resource for native peoples throughout the Northwest region.

To harvest camas, people will first easily identify the plant by its ­striking purple flowers on top of an elongated stem. Then, traditionally a bo’do (a digging stick) is used to loosen the soil around the bulb so it can be carefully extracted. Caution is always exercised while harvesting to avoid the poisonous death camas, identified by its white flowers, which shares the same habitats. Camas is appreciated for its uniquely sweet taste, and is a nutritious food that can be stored for prolonged periods of time when properly prepared.

SIGNIFICANCE The Shoshone speakers’ place name for this area is Yambadai, a word meaning Carrot Place.

The cultural significance of the Camas Prairie cannot be understated.

Since time immemorial, the vast ocean-like blooms of camas signaled the time for harvesting and social gatherings held dear by native peoples. The massive concentration of oversize camas bulbs, ease of harvesting them from the rich and marshy soils, and availability of other food resources such as yampa (wild carrots), yaha (Yellow-Bellied Marmot), waterfowl and their eggs made this region an ideal location for spending spring and early summer. Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, and visitors from other distant peoples came here for trading, socializing, hunting and gathering.

To the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and relatives, like the ShoshonePaiute of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, the importance of this place to our people endures.

The Bannock leader, Chief Taghee, reserved “significant portions of the Portneuf country and Camas Prairie” in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Bridger with the United States. Taghee reserved the Camas Prairie in ­earlier, pre-cursor negotiations to the 1868 Fort Bridger Treaty, such as the unratified agreement with Idaho Territorial Governor W.D. Ballard at Long Tom Creek in 1863. Furthermore, Article 4 of the Fort Bridger T ­ reaty reserved the rights to the Tribes to hunt and gather in the “­ unoccupied lands of the United States.” The unfulfilled guarantees of the U.S. and ­obstruction by unscrupulous emigrants and their farm

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animals and s­ quatting settlers ignited the tensions over the misuse of the treaty reserved lands, among other historical circumstances, that resulted in the Bannock War of 1878. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes continue to exercise and advocate for these supreme rights and interests.

This place, Yambadai, the Camas Prairie, embodies within a landscape where the people come to sustain deep-rooted cultural practices and values.

Annually, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes’ Language and ­Cultural ­Department and Cultural Committee hosts the Camas Prairie ­Homecoming, bringing the people home to celebrate and harvest. ­

Derek No-Sun Brown, Sweet Breeze Through the Camas (detail), 2020, oil on canvas, courtesy the artist

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DANIEL GORDON

Daniel Gordon, Flowers and Root Vegetables, 2020, ­pigment print with UV lamination, courtesy the artist and M+B, Los Angeles

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I

t was a breezy spring day when I visited the Camas Prairie just outside Sun Valley early last year. The colors I saw were purplish blues, yellows, bits of speckled red and green—it was a spectacular vision to take in. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn more about the history of this ­special prairie and create a work in response. I have made two photographs: one work on canvas, and the other a full wall mural that wraps around the room.

My work operates at the intersection of analog and digital imaging technologies, shifting between techniques common to the traditional darkroom and those made available through the use of graphics editing programs such as Photoshop. In the pictures and murals presented at SVMoA, the art historical genre of the still life and landscape is made the departure point for formal exercises that link handmade and computerbased processes and materials attempting to map out a hybridized terrain for photographic practice today.

In two of the mounted photographs, I have used common still-life subjects in connection with the camas flowers and roots. Printing the images on paper before cutting them out, I assemble a three-dimensional tableau in the studio that I then photograph with an 8x10 large-format camera. In this way, I attempt to transfer my chosen materials from the 2D to the 3D and back again. The resulting pictures inhabit an ambiguous pictorial space and oscillate between flatness and depth.

In the landscape images presented through wraparound wall murals and a work on canvas, elements from the still lifes appear again, though they are heightened through abstraction, bringing color and shape closer to the fore. Produced via a kind of digital excavation, these compositions are the remainder of a repeated process of peeling away transparent layers in Photoshop. The use of simpler forms and solid planes of color in these images attempts to turn process perceptible, drawing out the expressive and mark-making capacities of the digital.

Daniel Gordon, Camas Root and Blue Vase, 2019, ­pigment print with UV lamination, courtesy the artist and M+B, Los Angeles

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MK GUTH

S

tanding in the camas fields in the spring of 2019 with a group of women I barely knew, I was held by the vastness of the land and intensity of the colors. Shades of purple, greens, blues, the speckle of yellow and orange saturated the landscape and horizon. Along with this group of women I knelt on the ground and dug camas bulbs with a stick and small shovel; understanding that these movements that were unfamiliar to me, were performed by generations of women from the Nez Perce and Shoshone tribes. Surrounded by a set of histories, performing a gesture sequence that had been done for hundreds of years, I was struck by how this small purple lily held a whole world, centuries of narratives and embedded meaning. I left the field with a new collective of women who shared my experience.

The work I created for SVMoA, Dinner for a Camas Flower, acts as a still life, where an artist book and a small object sit together on a shelf, the two objects informing each other. If the artwork is activated, the instructions from the book invite guests to a meal to share the story of an object of their choosing. Dinner for a Camas Flower is really not about the camas fields at all; instead, it considers how a thing or object can encompass meaning and history, and if you experience it with others, you might find a new community. Digging camas bulbs is a ritual, and eating together is a ritual. In doing something as a group, we create ties of connection so that when we share knowledge, it is imprinted on the act. For me, this is what inspires Dinner for a Camas Flower.

MK Guth, Dinner for a Camas Flower, 2020, artist book (cover), courtesy the artist, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa

MK Guth, drawing from Dinner for a Camas Flower, 2020, ink on paper, courtesy the artist, Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York

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ANTHONY HERNANDEZ

(from upper right, clockwise) Anthony Hernandez, Screened Pictures Camas #3, Screened Pictures ­Camas #4, Screened ­Pictures Camas #2, Screened Pictures Camas #1, 2019, archival pigment prints, courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

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T

hese four pictures—Camas #1, 2, 3, and 4—are the first photographs I’ve made on the Camas Prairie using a custom-made black metal screen with round perforated holes and tripod legs. Working with this screen as a “filter” gave me the freedom to look at the huge open spaces of the prairie in a very different way. Like a plein air painter who uses an easel to stabilize a scene, I was, you could say, drawing and painting photographically to produce these impressionistic renderings of a remarkable landscape.

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SOPHEAP PICH

CAMAS LILY IMPRESSION:

The first time I drove up to Ketchum in February 2019 felt as though I was ascending into the clouds on another planet.

Almost completely absent of human and livestock, the houses and barns along the vast flatlands looked like weathered miniature scale models that had the potential to be blown away by a gust of wind or buried entirely by the next snowfall. All around, dramatic views of mountain peaks and grey tree trunks and branches looked like pencil line drawings against the white background of snow.

Returning to this area in June and seeing the Camas Prairie in bloom for the first time was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Now there were colors and textures, wild birds with their whistling sounds, groups of deer dotting the fields and in the cold streams and in front of people’s houses … scenes that I had only seen in old paintings. It was magical, I thought to myself.

Sopheap Pich, Camas Lily 1, 2020, woodblock print, ed.

15, courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York

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Sopheap Pich, Camas Lily No. 2, 2020, bamboo, rattan, metal wire, courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa Sopheap Pich, Untitled (Camas Lily drawing, detail), 2020, ink, colored pencil and pastel on paper, courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa Sopheap Pich on the Camas Prairie, spring 2019

CAMAS LILY:

I learned from my research at the local library that the camas lily grows only in certain parts of the upper Northwest. One of the areas with a large concentration of camas lilies is located close to Ketchum.

Camas bulbs were a very important food source and trading commodity for the Native Americans who have occupied this land since the 1700s, and then, later on, the settlers of the early 1900s. The camas bulbs were planted, fiercely protected, and harvested by different tribes. Today, there are ceremonies by indigenous people and locals to honor this plant.

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CAMAS LILY SCULPTURE: Having gone through many possible directions in my head, I thought it would be best to make a sculpture that is accessible to as many people as possible while also honoring the history of how this plant played a vital role in the indigenous people’s lives. I also used this opportunity to explore how I could make an outdoor piece combining my natural materials of bamboo and rattan, bearing in mind that the work will need to stand up to the elements for many years to come.

(left to right) Sopheap Pich, Camas Lily (detail), 2020; Untitled (Camas Lily drawing, detail), 2020, ink and colored pencil on paper; Camas Lily ­(detail), courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art; photos: Dev Khalsa

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Sopheap Pich, Camas Lily sited in Ketchum, 2020, bamboo, rattan, metal, courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York; photo: Dev Khalsa

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PARTICIPATING ARTISTS AND ESSAYIST

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DEREK NO-SUN BROWN (b. 1986) is ­Shoshone-Bannock and a member of the Bois Forte band of Chippewa. He grew up on both the Fort Hall Indian R ­ eservation in eastern Idaho and the Bois Forte Reservation in northern Minnesota. He received his BFA in 2013 from the Institute of American ­Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and c­ urrently lives and works in Española, New Mexico. He has exhibited his artwork extensively in New Mexico and around the country, and is the founder of War-Medicine Art, an online marketplace for art, apparel, and music.

DANIEL GORDON (b. 1980) received his undergraduate degree at Bard College and his MFA from Yale University. His work is included in museum collections throughout the world, including Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Frieze and Architectural Digest, among others. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles.

JUDITH FREEMAN (b. 1946) is the author of a short story collection, two nonfiction books, and five novels, including “The Chinchilla Farm” and “Red Water,” and the forthcoming “MacArthur Park” (2021). Her novel “Set For Life” won the Western Heritage Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame, and her biography of Raymond Chandler, “The Long Embrace,” was named one of the best books of 2007 by Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate magazine. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and was also awarded the Erle Stanley Gardner Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center. She has taught in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California, and her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications. She was raised in Ogden, Utah, and lives on the Camas Prairie with her husband, artist-photographer Anthony Hernandez.

MK GUTH (b. 1963) earned a BA from the ­University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an MFA from New York University. Her work was ­featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and in exhibitions at the Contemporary Art ­Center, Cincinnati; the Boise Art Museum; A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Swiss Institute, White Columns, and Artists Space, all in New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the Henry Art Gallery and Frye Museum, both in Seattle. She has received h ­ onors that include a Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award through the Seattle Art ­Museum and an Award of Merit from the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue, Washington.

Guth is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York.

ANTHONY HERNANDEZ (b. 1947) divides his time between Los Angeles and the Camas Prairie, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Judith Freeman. He has exhibited his work at major institutions around the world and has had solo exhibitions at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, among many other museums. In 2019, his work was highlighted in the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the exhibition May You Live in Interesting Times. His photographs are in numerous museum collections, including the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Hernandez is represented by Kayne Griffin Corcoran in Los Angeles and Thomas Zander Gallery, Cologne, Germany.

SOPHEAP PICH (b. 1971) was born in ­Cambodia and moved to the U.S. with his family in 1984. He received a BFA from the U ­ niversity of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Cambodia in 2002. His 2013 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, was the first solo show given to a contemporary Southeast Asian artist. Pich has had other solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore; the National Gallery Singapore; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas; and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and has participated in Documenta (13) in Kassel, Germany, and the 2017 Venice Biennale. His work is included in the collections of the Centre Georges ­Pompidou, Paris; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan M ­ useum of Art, New York; the Albright-Knox Art ­Gallery, ­Buffalo; the San Francisco Museum of ­Modern Art; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the ­Singapore Art Museum; and M+, Hong Kong, among other institutions. Pich is represented by Tyler Rollins Fine Art in New York.

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ISABEL POUND’S LETTER TO HER MOTHER, MARY WESTON, MAY 22, 1885, DESCRIBING A TRIP TO THE CAMAS PRAIRIE

THE ORIGINAL LETTER WAS A GIFT TO THE EZRA POUND ­ASSOCIATION, HAILEY, IDAHO, FROM THE POET EZRA POUND’S DAUGHTER MARY DE RACHEWILTZ. EZRA POUND WAS BORN IN HAILEY ON OCTOBER 30, 1885.

My dear Mama, May 22/85

You shall have a letter by today’s mail whether the dishes are washed or not – from which remark you will infer I am not surrounded by the Celestial atmosphere.

Last Sunday we drove to a mine beyond Deer Creek Hot Springs.

Monday with half an hour notice we started for Camas Prairie, Mr. [Forte], Mr. Pound, Homer and myself. The weather has been more unsettled this month than during the whole time I have been here and particularly so during our drive Monday. We had rain, hail, snow and glorious sunshine and each time the sun shone we could not believe that in another half hour we would be glad of our gossamers and umbrellas but so it was. The drive was delightful and merry, the scenery fine. At one eminence we had a picture before us like Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, peak after peak until one could just distinguish the outline of the farthest in the blue distance and near us we could see the deep valley.

The entrance to Camas Prairie is down a steep narrow gulch prettily wooded with a stream beside the roadway. Looking down the gully to the Prairie I could but think of the old patriarchs looking over into the Land of Canaan.

On the Prairie there are many streams to ford and at one of them I was so much engaged watching to what depth the horses would go in that my pedal attachments were submerged and all the things in the wagon, our lunch, robes etc. Thereafter we looked like the moving panorama of the great American washday. We drove twenty miles on the Prairie, stayed over night at the Inn of Soldier where the lands belonging to various members of the family are situated. It is all fine farm land, rich and level and there are many settlers all about. A large quantity of fencing has been done, miles and miles so as to protect the farmer from herds that range there.

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Homer and Mr. Forte have fenced forty acres each to protect the [amts?] planted. Their lands join but […] at a little distance. We left Soldier at five the next morning so as to get Mr. Pound to Hailey in time for the Ketchum train, as he wished to see to some business there regarding the Alturas mine. We last did it the train had started from the depot but I waved a handkerchief and it halted. All the difficulties regarding that most promising mine are at an end. The jumpers were engaged to work it and one has already been sold.

Mr. Pound returned to lunch with us Wednesday and left by the special train that afternoon with the Omaha Business Men’s excursion.

The Celestial left the morning we started for Camas. I hoped to find a girl while out there but our time was so short I could only leave word at Hotel that there was occupation for one in Hailey.

I have not had a letter from Aunt for a long time. My […] came the other day so I know she has my last letter and Uncle sent me Life. The lining came a long time ago. I mentioned it in a letter to you as I supposed it was at your instigation. You can get them at Sturs Moschowitz Linings they are good fits and so easy to make even the place to sew is marked if you ever attempt a tournure. Get one of them. They will measure you at the store. I get 34 inches. My tournure is cut out.

My yellow kitten still retains my affection though it does not entirely fill the aching void. I want a yellow dog. Mr. Pound asked if you were not coming out to visit me. I wish he could get you a pass for this year but I fear his railroad influence effects only his own locomotion. I don’t know though. He may be out again in a month or so. I’m told I have secured his admiration in many ways and his stay was much enjoyed. I shall write to Sara as soon as I wash the dishes. What is Tom contriving now is there a promise of some new opening?

Isabel Pound, letter to Mary Weston (detail), 1885, private collection; photo: Dev Khalsa

Lovingly, Belle

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BOARD & STAFF SUN VALLEY MUSEUM OF ART

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Ellen Gillespie, President Jim Reid, Vice President Linda Bowling, Secretary Linda Nicholson, Treasurer Amber Busuttil Mullen Kelly Corroon Ann Edlen Adam Elias Anita (Kay) Hardy Caroline Hobbs Ellen James Andrea (Andie) Laporte Barbara Lehman Wendy Pesky

ADVISORY COUNCIL Kathy Abelson Ruth Bloom Michael Engl Marybeth Flower Philip Isles Glenn Janss Carol Nie Van Gordon Sauter Roselyne C. Swig Patricia Wilson Jeri L. Wolfson

STAFF Christine Davis-Jeffers Executive Director Kristin Poole Artistic Director Scott Palmer Producing Artistic Director, ­Company of Fools Holly Bornemeier Marketing Manager Kristine Bretall Director of Performing Arts Peter Burke Wine Auction Director and Special Events Chris Carwithen Administrative and Theatre ­Assistant, Company of Fools Jordyn Dooley Art Therapist and Enrichment Educator Caroline Dye Development Coordinator Katelyn Foley Director of Education and ­Humanities Brooke Fullmer Director of Finance Courtney Gilbert Curator of Visual Arts Mary Hall Operations and Human Resources Manager

Chris Henderson Production Assistant, Company of Fools David Janeski Database Manager Jenn Johnson Communications and PR Associate Jeanne Knott Visual Arts Class Assistant Alexi Nelson Events Assistant K.O. Ogilvie Production Manager, Company of Fools Kris Olenick Company Manager, Company of Fools, and Volunteer Program Manager Susie Quinn Fortner Visual Arts Education Program Coordinator Blanca Ruiz Administrative Assistant Patrick Szczotka Technical Director, Company of Fools

THE MUSEUM 191 Fifth Street East, Ketchum, Idaho HAILEY CLASSROOM 314 Second Ave South, Hailey, Idaho LIBERTY THEATRE 110 N. Main Street, Hailey, Idaho 208.578.9122 SUN VALLEY MUSEUM OF ART P.O. Box 656, Sun Valley, ID 83353 208.726.9491 • svmoa.org