Terry Evans: Ancient Prairies and Fragmented Landscapes

The prairie ecosystem has been a guide for Terry Evans since 1978. She photographs the prairies and plains of North America, the urban prairie of Chicago, and landscapes threatened by climate change. Combining both aerial and ground photography, she delves into the intricate and complex relationships between land and people, especially recently where local people’s landscape is threatened by corporate industrialization.Explorations of the effects of industrial land use on local people have led her to photograph in Southeast Chicago, Illinois with local people who fought petcoke storage in their neighborhood on the banks of the Calumet River. Evans has exhibited widely including one-person shows at Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, The Field Museum of Natural History, and Amon Carter Museum of Art. Her work is in museum collections including New York Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Nelson–Atkins Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Washington, DC National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum of Art and many more. Terry Evans has five books including Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans and Prairie Stories. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of an Anonymous is a Woman award.