Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Moon with Clouds”

For Moon with Clouds, I wanted to offer a strong moon emblematic of the rugged American prairie below, a symbol of tenacity and grit, and a nod to the Kansas motto, Ad Astra per Aspera, to the stars through difficulties. To represent the plains farming heritage, I chose the cotton canvas of a vintage grain sack found in a rural antique store. The painting is raw and sculptural, comprised of paint, stone, indentation of wheat, rust and the black ash of freshly burnt prairie sage hand-gathered in north central Kansas. I use organic materials to connect people to the spirit of the wild things of the prairie. Rust symbolizes that time is fleeting. Grain reminds us that small things, well tended, can grow into greatness. Prairie sage encapsulates the pure energy of a hundred suns and moons absorbed through the plant’s leaves and roots. It is custom framed with reclaimed wood. (canvas 24×20 inch, 27×23 inch framed)

Starting bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $400

About Angela Müller and her Connection to the Midwest

Angela Müller is a visual artist and writer based in Russell, Kansas, a fifth-generation Kansan with a family farming heritage. She grew up on the prairie knowing the land and sky, but moved away as an adult and immediately felt a visceral disconnect. It wasn’t until she returned to the prairie years later so her children might enjoy a similar upbringing, that she saw this place with a new set of eyes and began to paint, incorporating hand-gathered earthen materials to connect people to the spirit of the wild things. She has shown work in group and solo shows across the county with an aim toward lifting up the ruggedness of the American prairie, creating with grain, stone, wild plant ash, cedar berries, rust, rainwater and other elements. Her studio is located on the mixed grass prairie at Fossil Lake. 

See Angela’s work in print throughout our literature section in The New Territory Issue 12.

Personal hopes for art in the Midwest:

“It is a place austere and wrapped in wind, where you can keenly feel your connection to something greater.”

My personal hope for art in the Midwest is that creatives continue to explore all the peculiar places, crevices and things that make this place distinctive. I think people who live on the land are connected to it in unique ways. We notice the geese migrating, sense thunderstorms forming on the horizon and pay attention to when the Cottonwoods change. That is because we depend upon the land. It is a place austere and wrapped in wind, where you can keenly feel your connection to something greater. When art opens your world to the innate beauty of a kernel of grain or causes you to think about the past life of a small fossil shell encased in limestone, you gain wisdom and an awareness of both eternity and impermanence. And that’s a special thing.

Buy tickets to The Pageturner here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

The post Angela Müller, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Laying Old Ghosts to Rest”

30″ x 22″, gouache on black Arches, and from the first 12 paintings in DARK MATTER.

Both are in museum quality frames. Framed size is 33 1/2″ x 25 1/2″.

This painting comes with a poem, hand written in silver ink on black card stock, inspired by and written after them by physicist and poet and physicist Agnes Vojta.

Starting bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $2,400

Early Dark Matter pieces

Two of his Greg’s early DARK MATTER pieces, minimum bid $500 each.

To bid at The Pageturner Fundraiser: Starting bid on two, for $1,000.

• “Bending the Truth,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “Y Knot,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “The Whirlpool Charybdis,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020
• “The Sea Monster Scylla,” 11″x8.5″, gouache on graph paper, 2020

About Greg Edmondson

“…It was the four years spent at a remote artists residency on the banks of the Gasconade River that offered me an authentic connection to Missouri as my ‘Place.'”

I was raised in Oak Ridge Tennessee, the “Secret City” of the Manhattan Project built in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The Midwest was a foreign land when I first moved to St. Louis in 1983 to begin Grad School at Washington University. After graduation I received two fellowships to Europe and spent the next five years in Germany. In 1993, I returned to St. Louis, this time for good. Although my practice has now been based here for over a quarter century, it was the four years spent at a remote artists residency on the banks of the Gasconade River that offered me an authentic connection to Missouri as my “Place.” My childhood had been spent playing in woods, in creeks and on rivers. Missouri is a topography of wilderness and water, and the rhythms of its rivers are the heartbeat of its landscape. While my heart is in Missouri, my art is on the walls of Elton John, Halle Berry, and the Berkshire Museum.

See Greg’s work in print throughout the literature section in The New Territory Issue 14.

Personal hopes for art in the Midwest:

My primary hope for the Arts in our region requires a shift in perception. I hope we can drop the perception that Art and Culture must be imported to the Midwest from New York or LA, and begin to legitimize the Art and Artists being generated and incubated here. One reason we are so often thought of as cultural followers is that we indeed are often more willing to follow than lead… There is great work being made here. Unfeigned ideas are being explored all over the region, too often with insignificant opportunities to be presented, viewed, seen or heard.

“My primary hope for the Arts in our region requires a shift in perception.”

Greg Edmondson’s artwork:

My work is still informed by a lifelong interest in the natural world… its patterns of organic growth and decay, its systems of intricate interdependence… As an undergrad I studied painting, in grad school I studied sculpture and printmaking. Over my four decades plus as a working artist, my practice has ranged widely in scope, scale, material and subject matter. But I seem to always circle back to formal abstraction. When confronting the purely abstract, you are never dealing with a singular “What”, but always and only with an endless “What if.”

See Greg’s art in print in the literature section of The New Territory Issue 14.

The post Greg Edmondson, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Mark Twain National Forest

Shell Knob, Missouri

By Aaron Hadlow

There is a burled oak tree that stands on the knuckle of a ridge finger behind my parent’s house in Shell Knob, Missouri. Despite its disfigurement, the oak is otherwise straight and tall. Given the oak’s stature, the other trees around it have little choice to stretch for sunlight and grow tall and straight too. As a child, I recall that oak’s bloom of leaves in the spring reached what I perceived, from the Mark Twain National Forest floor, to be a heaven, even if just a lower one. The oak is a waymarker tree and many times growing up I was relieved to pass by it, knowing that the comfort of home was not far. I fear now I would become lost if I tried to find that oak, even though those woods are quite familiar. One may become lost even among the familiar.

Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s most storied artists, knew this sense of estrangement all too well. I became acquainted with Benton’s work when I was in elementary school. On a road trip from Southwest Missouri to Columbia to watch the state high school basketball championships, my father stopped at the Capitol building in Jefferson City. My brother and I raced through the wide polished corridors of the Capitol, the stone echoing footsteps and our voices. Our father led us to the Missouri House of Representatives Lounge. Once inside the room, Benton’s many paneled mural, The Social History of the State of Missouri (1936), stilled our feet and voices.

As an adult, I can now see the mural is characterized by Benton’s depiction of laboring bodies. They are often sinewy, in fluid motion, bent under a gravity of some unidentified downward pressure that suggests the yoke of their exploiters. Their bodies rarely find repose, except for a cabal of politicians who sit smoking Roi-Tans and drinking, presumably, bathtub gin. Those bodies yield to the same gravity throughout the work but find a comfortable recumbent ease. The stylistic truth of Benton’s mural is only part of its genius.

But the dissonance is striking between the way Benton writes his own life and the subjects depicted in many of his paintings. This dissonance is best exemplified by an anecdote from his autobiography, An Artist in America (1937), recounting a hike in the woods after he planted the plank of his father’s remains in a respectable cemetery in Neosho, the site of his childhood home.

Long-absented from Missouri, Benton had returned to Neosho in 1924 to sit next to his father’s deathbed. Benton’s father was a former U.S. Congressman and as he neared death, his “cronies” also neared to tell stories. In those long hours of vigil, Benton listened, and his father’s friends became his friends. Benton was “moved by a great desire to know more about the America” he’d glimpsed in Neosho. He declared that “for the hangovers of idealistic social theory, Missouri is a grand pickup,” going so far as to laud the “individual will” deeply grooved in the “American character.”

Not long after, the artist set out on a walk in the “White River country along the Arkansas-Missouri line,” in an effort to discover the America he’d been missing. Benton stumbled through the hollows and hills of this area, growing increasingly weary of snakes and cursing the “distrusting” locals, who he blamed for giving him bad directions. He referred to a ferryman who initially denied him passage as a “goddamn son-of-a-bitch” because the ferryman feared Benton was the culprit of a bank robbery the night before. He eventually appraised the locals as “marauding and shiftless hill people,” whose “depredations,” “wild quarrels” and “wild fornications” fill the records of the county courts. Eventually he arrived at his destination in Forsyth. His evaluation of the denizens of the Ozarks was adduced from a hike he estimated to be about 50 miles. I imagine he passed by that burled oak behind my parents’ house near Shell Knob without realizing how close to home he actually was.

In 1935, Benton was commissioned to paint The Social History of the State of Missouri by the Missouri legislature. The windfall that came with the commission must have made it easier for Benton to return to Kansas City to live, though he summered in Martha’s Vineyard until he died in 1975.

Since his death, Benton’s relevance has waxed and waned, leading the editor of my copy of An Artist in America to derogate Benton an “artistic nationalist,” an “irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian,” with “nineteenth century” artistic vision. As an irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian myself, this all sounds a bit harsh. Of course Benton is problematic for reasons that are self-evident upon reading his autobiography. A privileged heterosexual white man born south of the Mason-Dixon line shortly after the twilight of reconstruction, his ethical blind spots can be easily surmised.

Benton is also regularly criticized for what is thought to be his “provincial” subject matter, verging on caricature. Despite his upbringing in Missouri, Benton’s connection to the America that he is most associated with was attenuated by the path he chose. He fled the Ozarks as soon as he could and only returned for the sort of selective excursions that permitted him to extract experience to fuel his creative work — like a gouty gourmand deigning to visit an ungentrified urban area only for a tasty treat. By the time of his trek through the woods, he’d become all but a stranger to the country. Instead, perhaps the most salient and lasting truth of Benton’s work is the politics of his curved lines. Benton’s strong yet disfigured bodies — bodies that bend down and rise up — defy any theory praising the solitary individual will. It is a truth of form and structure, if not subject. It is the truth of every stand of woods.

Aaron Hadlow is a lawyer and writer. He lives in the Ozarks with his family.

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