The Rural Arts Initiative, an educational outreach program, works to encourage and empower rural school students and their teachers to actively participate in learning through the arts. The Rural Art Initiative came about in direct response to feedback from educators and families working in rural areas. Major challenges such as inadequate funding for art education, few museums and great distances have not allowed the visual arts to flourish in rural areas as much as other forms of art such as music and theater, which accompanied early settlers as they moved west. 

Museum Visits

Two major exhibitions will be selected for the program. Throughout the school year, teachers and their students will visit the Museum to see and discuss exhibitions. Financial support for travel expenses is available for qualifying schools.

Tour Exhibitions

The Museum will organize touring exhibitions of art, relevant to the local communities, that are integrated into school curricula and that can withstand less-than-optimal conditions and handling. Each exhibition targets specific age groups within the K-12 spectrum but all class levels are encouraged to visit and participate in the exhibition. Each host organization must provided a secure facility and staff for the duration of the exhibition. Exhibition times vary depending on location.

The Museum will deliver and install the exhibition

As part of the program Museum staff will train docents on the exhibition and program. In addition, Museum staff will return to pack up the exhibition when it closes. There is never a cost to host organizations. Past exhibitions, Snow Country Prison, Self Portraits, Shelterbelts, Marking the Land, and Animals: Them and Us, have been installed in buildings such as bank basements, Masonic temples, empty store fronts, school gymnasiums, etc.

If you are interested in learning more about the Rural Arts Initiative or would like to book an exhibition call 701-777-4195.

UFF DA: THE FOLK ART OF EMILY LUNDE

2022 – 2023 Booking Season is Open

Emily Wilhelmina Dufke Lunde was born in northern Minnesota and, as she says, “with a handle like that you had to have a sense of humor.” Laurel Reuter says of this North Dakota folk artist: “Were the people of North Dakota to name their treasures, Emily Lunde would certainly be among them. She is one of the state’s eminent folk artists and unofficial cultural historian.” As both artist and author, Mrs. Lunde has recorded the life of Scandinavian immigrants settling the prairies and small towns of the Red River Valley during the early 20th century.

Emily Lunde was born in rural Minnesota in 1914. Her father died when she was five years old, and Emily and her two sisters were raised by her immigrant grandparents on a farm. Memories of those days are the inspiration for much of her work. Emily left home at the age of 18 and went to work as a maid in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Although always interested in art and painting, Emily married and raised four children before beginning to paint seriously in 1974.

Mrs. Lunde’s work in included in a number of important private and public collections in the United States. Paintings by Emily Lunde can be found in U.S. Embassies around the works under the Friends of Art and Preservation in Embassies Project. Dr. Robert Bishop, the late Director of the Folk Art Museum in New York City, has included Mrs. Lunde and her work in his book on American folk art and painters. Dr. Bishop also donated over forty of her paintings to the Art in Embassies Project.

Exhibition Locations

Spirit Room, Fargo
December 15, 2021 – Jaunary 14, 2022

Lake Region Heritage Center, Devils Lake
January 24 – February 18, 2022

North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks
February  28 – March 30, 2022

Taube Art Museum, Minot
April 1 – 25, 2022

Growing Small Towns, Oakes
May 9 – June 13, 2022

Von Hoffman House, Medora
June 20 – August 26, 2022

Dakota Buttes Historical Society, Hettinger
August 29 – September 9, 2022

Cavelier County Courthouse, Langdon
September 12 – 23, 2022

Ellendale Opera House, Ellendale
September 26 – October 28, 2022

Barnes County Historical Society Museum, Valley City
November 1 – 18, 2022

James Memorial Arts Center, Williston
March 6 – 31, 2023

Bowman Public Library
April 1 – 21, 2023

Prairie Village Museum, Rugby
April 28 – May 26, 2023

International Peace Gardens, Dunseith
August 2 – 24, 2023

The Arts Center, Jamestown
September 8 – October 20, 2023

ALEX WEBB AND REBECCA NORRIS WEBB: THE GREAT OPEN, PHOTOGRAPHS FROM NORTH DAKOTA

And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whispers:
“I am not empty, I am open”
—Tomas Tranströmer

This exhibition by creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb brings together two linked yet distinct photographic visions of North Dakota.

As a fellow Dakotan, Rebecca Norris Webb takes a poetic and intimate look at the natural world of North Dakota. Her work often explores those places where the natural world and one’s inner landscape meet, especially during times of change, upheaval, and shifting weathers—both meteorological and metaphysical. Her storytelling serves as a map for when one’s loss seems to have its own geography, most notedly with her book and NDMOA exhibition, My Dakota: An Elegy for My Brother Who Died Unexpectedly. Drawn to the great openness of the mixed grass prairie and the broken, surreal beauty of the South Dakota badlands while grieving for her brother, Norris Webb began photographing in the North Dakota badlands. The badlands, too, felt like a kind of geography of grief for Theodore Roosevelt as a young man, who lost his mother and wife on the same day—of this moment he wrote: the “light went out of my life.” During this devastating time, Roosevelt moved to the North Dakota badlands, which slowly kindled his lifelong love of the Western landscape, as well as ultimately transforming him into “the conservationist president,” who would end up protecting some 230 million acres of public land during his presidency. Following a similar path, Norris Webb photographed other North Dakota landscapes resonant with loss and memory, including the Lincoln Drive Park, once home to some 350 residences lost in the 1997 Red River flood in Grand Forks; and the Fort Totten Historical Site, once an Indian boarding school, which was part of a former U.S. program designed “to kill the Indian” in tens of thousands of Native American children through forced assimilation practices. As she continued traveling across the state in August 2022, Norris Webb was guided by North Dakota’s ever-shifting light and weathers: from the dark stormy skies over a luminous yellow canola field near Starkweather—to the Gumbo Lilies near Medora, which bloom at night from the crevices of the badlands, only during those summers with enough rainfall.

Meanwhile, Alex Webb, raised predominantly in New England, has been described as a “shadow sociologist” by writer Pico Iyer. The author of some 20 books—including Amazon, Istanbul, La Calle: Photographs from Mexico, and the collaborative book and NDMOA exhibition Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba with Rebecca Norris Webb—he has photographed in more than 50 countries and 200 cities around the world, sometimes commissioned by museums and other cultural institutions as well as such magazines as National Geographic,Geo, and The New York Times Magazine. Webb takes a more global and often urban approach to North Dakota. During two trips to the state in August 2019 and August 2022, he photographed in the parks, neighborhoods, and flea markets of the more populated cities and towns of the state, including Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, and Williston. He also photographed at various festivals and other events across the state, including the Icelandic Festival in Mountain, the Spirit Lake Professional Bull Riders on the Spirit Lake Reservation, the Morton County Fair and Rodeo in New Salem, and the Twin Buttes Powwow south of the Missouri River on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Additionally, Webb photographed neighborhood celebrations, which include some of the most recent residents in North Dakota, a state, which over the past decade, has resettled over 4,000 refugees, and, for several years, its total refugees per capita was the highest in the nation.

In order to create a more multi-layered portrait of North Dakota, the creative couple have interwoven their work in this exhibition—powwows and sunflower fields, rodeos and buffalo herds, twilight street scenes and badlands nightscapes. The Great Open is their seventh collaboration, including projects about a country (Cuba), a city (Rochester, NY); a borough (Brooklyn); a town (Wellfleet, MA); and now a state (North Dakota).

The artists want to thank the North Dakota Museum of Art and the National Endowment for the Arts for their support in creating this body of work—with a special thanks to NDMOA Founding Director Laurel Reuter and NDMOA Director Matthew Wallace—as well as all the North Dakotans who invited them into their lives and their landscapes.

Exhibition Partner:

This program is supported by a grant from
the National Endowment for the Arts.