Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape: Dana Fritz
2025 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print Artist
February 4–August 2, 2025
This exhibition will make visible the forces that shaped what was once the world’s largest hand planted forest, now administered by the Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands. Black and white prints by photographer Dana Fritz reveal the patterns in sand, water, planting, and burning present in this late 19th-century experiment to create a timber industry and change the climate of a semi-arid Nebraska prairie. Fritz is Hixson-Lied Professor of Art at University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Dana Fritz, Fire Tower View, 2021, inkjet print, 16 x 40 in., courtesy of the artist
2025 Gift Print:
Every two years the Friends of the Beach Museum of Art commissions a limited-edition print by a recognized Kansas artist for sale to the public. Kansas State University’s Friends of Art started the gift print program in 1934. Dana Fritz’s Tallgrass Orientation is the 2025 Friends of the Beach Museum of Art Gift Print and will be available for purchase from Feb. 4, 2025. Fritz has written about the work:
Inspired by my 2023 Tallgrass artist residency in the Kansas Flint Hills, I layered compass plant leaves with a topographic map of the area where I collected them. The fingers of their giant leaves point to the poles and orient their flat faces to the east and west sun. Indigenous and settler travelers valued compass plants for orientation in a vast landscape with few large landmarks. I was struck by the resemblance between the shape of the compass plant leaves and the topographic representation of the land around Matfield Green.
For more information about becoming a Friend or purchasing this year’s gift print, please contact the museum at 785-532-7718 or email rlonborg@ksu.edu. Friends of the Beach Museum of Art receive a 25% discount.
Dana Fritz, Tallgrass Orientation, 2024, inkjet print, 16 x 20 in., courtesy of the artist
In Bloom
February 25–August 30, 2025
Join us in celebrating the 150th anniversary of the K-State Gardens with floral selections in the museum’s collection. This exhibition is also our annual collaboration with the Manhattan Public Library’s summer reading program. The American Library Association has chosen the theme “Color Our World,” and we promise a riot of color!
John Steuart Curry, Peonies, 1939, oil on canvas, 15 7/8 x 20 1/4 in., gift of Dr. Daniel Schuster, 1993.1