CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Eleven artists explore the dynamic relationship between people and place in a new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum. “Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie” opens Jan. 29 with a reception from 5-7 p.m. and runs through July 2. The exhibition showcases new work by faculty members from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Art & Design.
With a remarkably wide range of media and artistic approaches, “Another Place” includes stories told through sculpture, installation, photography, printmaking, video and performance.
“The exhibition considers how people make and define place through stories, and how stories carry out a kind of labor, maintaining narratives about the places we live and about us,” said Terri Weissman, the curator of the exhibition and an art history professor. She is featuring work that explores the prairie, Central Illinois, Chicago and how people use stories to connect to place. She said she hopes the exhibition will help visitors think about how places are informed by their histories and cultures and “visually reveal how people make and define place through stories.” The exhibition is connected to this year’s theme for the Humanities Research Institute, “Story and Place.”
Art professor Ryan Griffis, a 2025-26 HRI Faculty Fellow, said such stories can be eye opening and empowering. Griffis, an artist who works in video and other media, created the multimedia project “When the Landscape Recognizable Today Was Shaped.” It includes a 36-minute film that looks at the history of the Illinois River Valley and how the landscape was shaped by industrial farming; the creation of levees, locks and dams; and the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River. It is told from the perspective of an errant soybean plant left over from the legacy of commodity farming, at a future time when that is no longer in place. The film includes interviews about the Emiquon Preserve, a restored wetland along the Illinois River.
“I really wanted to focus on not just what the history of the landscape is, but also to think of other kinds of futures with it and what kind of ecological restoration projects are happening,” Griffis said. “When you’re surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans, it’s hard to imagine anything else being there because it’s so expansive and covers the landscape as far as you can see. But it was produced. It didn’t just happen. If you see things around you and realize people made it that way, you can also think that if you don’t like what’s there, you can make something different.”
He collaborated with four other artists whose work intersects with narratives from the film, including two Illinois art professors whose work is in the exhibition, in addition to being in Griffis’ film.
Sculptor Stephen Signa-Avilés’ project, “The Recollector,” is an arresting, 9-foot-tall wearable sculptural assemblage that is a “speculative, sci-fi, futuristic device that enables the wearer to collect stories from the past and bring them into the future,” Griffis said. Printmaker Emmy Lingscheit made a lithograph with an image of the past, present and future of wetlands in the Illinois River Valley.
Sculptor Melissa Pokorny said her daily walks through a pocket prairie at the Illinois Arboretum and a recent trip to Svalbard, Norway, inspired “(Spectral) Prairie: Day for Night.” The installation combines textiles, metal frameworks and photographs into a relational set of landscapes, Pokorny said.
They include fabric panels printed with photos of the prairie, using a filter to make them look as though they are nighttime images, even though they were shot during the day. “The prairies that we know and love are similar — they are stand-ins for the prairies that once covered most of this state,” she said. Pokorny rephotographed the fabric panels of prairie plants in the Arctic, creating another landscape.
“We hold more than one idea of place in our minds at all times. When I was walking in the Arctic, I was thinking of the prairie and vice versa,” she said.
Pokorny is interested in the idea of place and “the often invisible cultural and natural histories embedded in landscapes,” she said.
Graphic design professor Nekita Thomas’ project “Field of Dreams” reflects on the history of public housing in the U.S., her childhood living in a Chicago public housing complex and its baseball field. The baseball field sat in the middle of the complex, but because of conflicts among the residents, the field was rarely used by neighborhood children, she said.
“I don’t remember many people playing on that field,” she said, but “that didn’t stop me from building a community with friends there.”
The work features a map of the neighborhood and the layout of the baseball field. On top of it, Thomas added the names of her childhood friends and words relating to play, joy and second chances. “Field of Dreams” creates a dream space of speculation about the field, she said. It also asks viewers to think about the relationship between the baseball field, corn fields and the prairie.
Thomas said her work examines the social dynamics of public space, and she wants this project to help get beyond the horror stories of public housing as dangerous places or slums and reimagine what it can be.
Brooke C. White, the director of the School of Art and Design, uses photography to examine landscapes and reflect her love of the outdoors and her concerns about climate change. When she first arrived in Central Illinois from the Gulf Coast, she did research at the Illinois Natural History Survey’s Herbarium and crop sciences’ Energy Farm.
“I remember being out in the field where the grasses were shaking. The sound alone transported me back to the ocean, a familiar sound in an otherwise foreign landscape with the flatness and lack of water,” White said.
Her series of 30 photographs in the exhibition, “Ocean of Grasses,” includes photographs of herbarium specimens; cyanotypes, or blue-colored prints made from exposing photo paper treated with iron salts to sunlight; anthotypes that use an emulsion made from plant pigments — she used cone flowers and turmeric; and photos on paper subtly embossed with plant material made by the Fresh Press paper lab at Illinois using agricultural waste.
The latter mimic how White feels in the prairie: “You really have to enmesh yourself in the landscape to experience those moments where place reveals itself,” she said.
The other art and design faculty members with work in the exhibition are graphic design professors Sharath Chandra Ramakrishnan and Stacey A. Robinson, studio art professor Joel Ross and art education professor Blair Ebony Smith. Interdisciplinary artist Deke Weaver will give a performance in the spring of the latest work in his project “The Unreliable Bestiary,” which spotlights endangered animals.
Krannert Art Museum will host artist talks in conjunction with the exhibition during the spring semester. A companion book with essays about the artists’ projects will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2027.
Editor’s notes: To contact Terri Weissman, email tweissma@illinois.edu. To contact Ryan Griffis, email rgriffis@illinois.edu. To contact Melissa Pokorny, email mpokorny@illinois.edu. To contact Nekita Thomas, email nthomas5@illinois.edu. To contact Brooke C. White, email brookecw@illinois.edu. For information about Krannert Art Museum, contact Evelyn Shapiro at esha@illinois.edu.
