Fire Break, Nebraska National Forest

archival pigment print

2020

23x27 inches

Edition 1 of 5

Dana Fritz uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University. Fritz is currently a Hixson-Lied Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Fritz’s work has been exhibited in over 140 venues including the Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Great Plains Art Museum, and Sheldon Museum of Art in the U.S. International venues include the Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands, Château de Villandry in France, Xi’an Jiaotong University Art Museum in China, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Place M, and Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts in Japan.

Her prints are held in collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Pennsylvania; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Fritz’s artist books are held in collections including Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library; Rare and Distinctive Collections at Colorado University Boulder; and Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.

Fritz has been awarded artist residencies at locations known for their significant cultural histories and gardens or unique landscapes: Villa Montalvo in California; Château de Rochefort-en-Terre in France; Biosphere 2 in Arizona; PLAYA in Oregon; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Wyoming; Huron Mountain Wildlife Foundation in Michigan; and Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska.

Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, and Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. The University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. The University of Nebraska Press published Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape in 2023.

Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape makes visible the forces that shaped the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey, once the world’s largest hand-planted forest. Wind, water, planting, thinning, burning, decomposing, and sowing all contribute to its unique environmental history. A conifer forest was overlaid onto a semi-arid grassland just west of the 100th meridian in an ambitious late 19th-century idea to create a timber industry, and to change the local climate. At that time, tree planting was not considered in terms of carbon sequestration, but as a way to mitigate the wind and evaporation of moisture and to bring order to a disorderly landscape.

While the planners seemed not to appreciate the particular grassland ecosystem of the Nebraska Sandhills managed through grazing and fire until dispossession, they did recognize the reliable water from the Dismal and Middle Loup Rivers that bound the site. Later it was discovered that under all those grass-stabilized sand dunes was the massive Ogallala Aquifer that feeds the rivers through springs. This seemingly unlimited source of water below made it possible to plant a forest on the dry land above where the wave pattern on the riverbeds is mirrored in the larger-scale sand dunes. In 1902, the first federal nursery was founded to produce trees for the new forest and for plains homesteads. That same year a forest reserve was officially established in the grasslands where 31 square miles of trees would be planted.

Historical fire suppression and misguided plantings, (some never taking hold, and others that have become invasive,) present ongoing management challenges for foresters. While afforestation is no longer in practice at Nebraska National Forest, the on-site Bessey Nursery now grows replacement seedlings for burned and beetle-damaged National Forests in the Rocky Mountain region as well as the Nebraska Conservation Trees Program. This unique experiment of row-crop trees that were protected from the natural cycle of fire for decades, yet never commercially harvested for timber, provides a rich metaphor for our current environmental predicaments. This hybrid landscape has evolved from a turn of the 20th-century effort to reclaim with trees what was called “The Great American Desert” to a focus on 21st-century conservation, grassland restoration, and reforestation, all of which work to sequester carbon, maintaining natural ecosystem balance, and mitigate large-scale climate change.

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