Kansas State University

Each year, K-State First selects a common reading for first-year students, providing an intellectual experience they can share with other students and members of the university community. The 2022 K-State First Book is The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why by Amanda Ripley. Beach Museum of Art staff have selected two prints as Common Works of Art to reflect different aspects of the book.

In The Unthinkable, Ripley explores who survives when disasters strike and why. Half of all Americans have been affected by some type of disaster, the author observes. She combines the stories of survivors with research into how the brain works under extreme duress and by doing so attempts to shed some light on civilization’s darkest moments. Why do we freeze in the middle of a fire? How can we override this instinct? Why do our senses of sight and hearing change during a terrorist attack?

Monument to a Standing New Yorker (left image), a 2001 print by Tony Fitzpatrick, conveys the chaos of the 9-11 disaster while also honoring responders and survivors—heroes big and small. The events of 9-11 feature heavily in Ripley’s book. Untitled (right image) from the series Transient Landscapes by Yoonmi Nam offers a means of reflecting on internal responses to disaster or change. Nam’s series visualizes buildings being torn down, constructed, or changed in some way, prompting viewers to consider structures as metaphors of human transition and resilience. The image is the 2010 gift print for the Friends of the Beach Museum of Art.

Each year, the K-State Book Network selects a common reading for first year students, providing an intellectual experience they can share with other students and members of the university community. The 2021 K-State First Book is The Marrow Thieves by Canadian author Cherie Dimaline (Métis). Beach Museum of Art staff have selected the print From Upstream I Caught Fish by Neal Ambrose-Smith to complement Dimaline’s story. Like Dimaline, visual artist Ambrose-Smith (Salish Kootenai, Métis-Cree, Sho-Ban) addresses loss of culture, abuse and violence by a majority population and damage to the natural environment while also celebrating survival and resilience.

Book Summary:
In a futuristic world ravaged by global warming, people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. However, getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteenyear-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones, and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek to bring them to marrow-stealing “factories.”

Like the character Miigwan in Dimaline’s book, Ambrose-Smith tells stories. His work often includes elements drawn from Indigenous knowledge and experience, including medicine bundles, canoes, the Trickster figure Coyote, and trailer homes. Images from the present overlay those from the past, since we can only understand our current state by understanding our cultural influences, according to the artist. Ambrose-Smith is a professor and department head at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Related event
Livestream Student Welcome/Common Work of Art/K-State First Book Celebration with Tara Coleman, associate professor, Hale Library; Brandon Haddock, coordinator, LGBT Resource Center; Lisa Tatonetti, professor, Department of English; and Kathrine Schlageck, associate curator of education, Beach Museum of Art.
Thursday, September 2, 2021, 5:30 p.m.
Watch for the recorded video of the event on the museum’s YouTube channel soon.

Image: Neal Ambrose-Smith (Salish-Kootenai, Métis-Cree, Sho-Ban), From Upstream I Caught Fish, 2008, etching and transfer on paper, gift of Joe and
Barb Zanatta, Zanatta Editions, 2009.136