In our new video series Hot Off The Press, we have conversations with our photographers about their new work. In this week's episode, we are talking to Chicago-based photographer Terry Evans about her recent series Ancient Prairies and, more specifically, her newest piece "Fall Bur Oak, 2019."
Many of the works in her series capture a bur oak tree in Jackson Park. To date, she has four completed pieces portraying this treee--one for each season. Terry discusses her fascination with this 300 year old tree.
"In Chicago I started visiting the wooded island in Jackson Park, and there was this particular tree, this bur oak that is quite large with long, sweeping branches. I kept going back and photographing it over and over and now I have made a completed image for each season of the bur oak. In addition to thinking about the bur oak tree, the leaves, and its beauty, I'm also thinking about how colors work and how spacial images work when you put them on a flat surface."
"This is a tree that has great presence and great wisdom and...I love it."
- Terry Evans
Terry Evans was born in the heart of the American prairie, Kansas City, Missouri, spending most of her adult life in Salina before moving to Chicago. It is in Kansas, among the hay bales, grain silos and cultivated fields, that Terry's passion for the great plains was born - a passion that has led her on a photographic journey spanning more than twenty years. Terry Evans' work is part of numerous private and public collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has three monographs produced on her work: Disarming The Prairie (Johns Hopkins Press, 1998), The Inhabited Prairie (University Press of Kansas, 1998), and Prairie: Images of Ground and Sky (University Press of Kansas, 1996).
