Heartland—The Photographs of Terry Evans

The landscape and people of the American Midwest have captivated photographer Terry Evans (b. 1944) throughout her forty-year photographic career. Evans has a deep connection to her native region, which she has explored from a variety of visual and thematic perspectives. Heartland traces the evolution of Evans’s vision, beginning in the early 1970s with her social documentary images of people in Kansas. She became a landscape photographer in 1978, focusing on the grasses, land, and skies of the prairie; this was followed by an aerial survey of the entire Great Plains, from Texas to Canada. She has also photographed Chicago from the air, an abandoned military site, small-town life in Kansas, and historical samples of prairie flora and fauna from Chicago’s Field Museum. More recently, she has documented the steel industry in the Midwest and oil and gas drilling in North Dakota. This generously illustrated book examines all of these works, which together reveal the enduring beauty of the prairie landscape.

Keith F. Davis is senior curator of photography, Jane L. Aspinwall is associate curator, and April M. Watson is associate curator, all at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.