As Grass Grows: A Decade of Artist Residencies At Prairieside Outpost in the Flint Hills
09.22.2025
On view September 9–November 21, 2025, at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center’s Front Gallery
The exhibition brings together work from 28 visual artists and writers, many with ties to KCAI, each shaped by the solitude and wide-open horizons of the Kansas Flint Hills.
Chase County, Kansas, is an authentic landscape.
There are no trees, no telephone poles lining the rural roads. Instead, there is air. There is sun. There is land. The wild prairie feels like an ocean of grass at the bottom of the sky. Deer and coyotes live freely in the vast, crushing openness. After 300 million years, the Flint Hills remain largely unmediated by humans.
The environment is both backdrop and foreground to Prairieside Cottage & Outpost.
Every year for the past decade the family-run residency program has welcomed artists to retreat into its isolated setting. In 2023, one such visitor was Katherine Hair Eagle (’07 Printmaking), who observed the movement of animals through the fading grass during the long January nights.
“There were deer and hawks moving through the area, interacting with the work I made there. My project involved wind socks that I dyed from natural plants. I sewed them together and installed them in the prairie space outside the house,” Hair Eagle says.
Looking closely, the wind socks resemble topographical maps. When laid flat, they reveal a kind of overhead view, with markings that trace land tracts and rivers. The work represents invisible communication with shifting cloth cones signaling the direction of the unseen wind.
The skill of perceiving the imperceptible is one she learned from her father.
“My dad was a hang glider pilot and it had such a heavy influence on my childhood. I spent so many weekends, really any time he could get off work, camping and looking at wind socks in launch and landing zones,” she says. “It’s about seeing invisible things, like what the air is doing farther away from you.”
From the residency’s protected porch view she observed more interaction with her work. Hawks perched. A coyote moved nearby along its familiar trail. She witnessed what would overwise be obscured, normally seeing only the evidence of intersection after the fact.
Prairie Retrospective
Moments like these are explored in As Grass Grows: Ten Years at Prairieside Outpost, a group exhibition commemorating the first decade of the Artist-in-Residence program at Prairieside Outpost. On view from September 9 to November 21, 2025, at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center’s Front Gallery, the exhibition features the work of 28 visual artists and writers from across North America, each developing work in the remote, head-clearing expanse of the Kansas Flint Hills.
Among the featured artists are familiar names from the Kansas City Art Institute, including Associate Professor of Painting Corey Antis, Associate Professor of Fiber Kim Eichler-Messmer, Senior Professor of Ceramics Cary Esser, Professor and William T. Kemper Chair of Painting Jim Woodfill, and retired Painting Chair Warren Rosser. Alumni, such as Robert Howsare (’08 Printmaking), Colleen Maynard (’07 Creative Writing & Painting), and Katherine Hair Eagle (’07 Printmaking), are also represented.
The exhibition is curated by Prairieside Outpost Program Directors Chris Akers and Laura Crehuet Berman, Professor of Printmaking and owner of the property with her family.
Intimate Vastness
Laura Crehuet Berman describes the area surrounding Prairieside Cottage & Outpost in a word: Private.
“You can walk less than a mile to Open Range Road and suddenly you’re out with the cows in the Flint Hills. It’s really, really rural and isolated. Nothing interferes with the natural environment, even though Prairieside Outpost is technically in town,” she says.
Matfield Green, Kansas has a population of about 50 people. It’s a small community with a significant proportion of transplants. Berman describes the residents as creatives, people with experience across the country writing, acting, designing, and making. Even in this tiny town, support for the arts is strong.
“I'm from the East Coast and my husband's from Oklahoma,” Berman says. “We discovered this landscape through the beginnings of our relationship and that process became a coming of age story.”
“We were married in Chase County, Kansas, and this is the county where the house is as well,” she says, referring to Prairieside.
The space wasn’t an immediate host to artists-in-residence. When Berman warmed up to the idea, she prepared by taking a Kauffman FastTrac program and created a business model with a budget. She also did lateral research on programs that were rural and family-friendly.
“Including artists along with their families was a mission of our program,” she says. “The studio is separate from the house, which allows family members or collaborators to join the artists. It’s not just a one-person retreat, and that’s actually quite unique in the world of artist residencies. When we founded Prairieside Outpost in 2014, there were only about six family-inclusive artist residency programs like it in North America.”
After a decade in operation, 32 artists have participated in residencies at Prairieside Cottage & Outpost, each spending seven to ten days in the space. There are no requirements in terms of output and artists are expected to do whatever they need to have a creative retreat, including research, studio immersion, and experiencing the unique natural environment. Both the studio and dining room face the property’s open acreage, with windows offering northeast views of the sunrise over the wild prairie.
“When considering applicants, I'm looking for the right fit of person. An ideal Prairieside Outpost artist or writer is someone who understands that it's an isolated setting and who is ready to take a deep dive into their creative work within the quiet and slow-paced setting that this opportunity offers,” she says.
Image: Photo of Separate Studio Space
Berman notes that while many larger organizations have deeper funding and broader resources, this small, family-run program demonstrates that even solo artists living outside the epicenter of the art world can make meaningful contributions to their artist communities.
The mission comes from a place of personal experience, she says.
“This is where I grew as a person, myself, and that, in turn, inspired my creativity in deeper ways. It's a gift for me to have experienced this location, and it has been a gift for me to be in the Midwest for 20 years and to have had a long exposure to this unique landscape and part of our country,” she says.
“My intention is to also provide an aspect of that experience to the artists that come to Prairieside Outpost. Whether or not it's a landscape they are, or are not, already familiar with, she says. “It's just a timeless place.”
Invisible Currents
“I feel like grief is another one of these invisible things that we're all carrying,” Katherine Hair Eagle says. “We all have it, but it's not necessarily at the surface and it kind of comes and goes the same way that air currents do.”
Katherine’s residency at Prairieside Cottage & Outpost came after the sudden passing of her father in 2016. It took time before she was able to return to making work. In 2022, she completed an M.F.A. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research—both then and now—focuses on human entanglements with the natural world and on climate grief. The subjects are deeply intertwined with her own personal loss and has played a big role in processing her father’s death.
“It Comes In Waves” (the windsock piece) is directly about Katherine’s father and his passing, reflecting the profound influence he had on her life. Many childhood weekends were spent at cliffsides, watching him launch himself into the air. It’s a memory of experiences that, to her, never felt out of the ordinary.
In the rolling terrain, she watched her fabric move in the winter breeze off the Flint Hills. The days are short. The nights are long. The sky is large.
“My dad saw invisible things. He read secrets in the topography marked on the map, knowing what hills would create their own weather and when,” she says, reflecting on the residency.
“I remember agreeing ‘Oh, yeah, I see it,” even when I couldn’t because I didn’t want to disappoint him. But I was learning, I have his eyes. Back then I wasn’t practiced at looking yet. Now I am always looking and seeing invisible things.”
As Grass Grows | Artists in Conversation Event
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
11:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Event Schedule
11:00 – 12:00
Open house with light refreshments
11:45
Introduction to the exhibition by Curator and Director of Prairieside Outpost, Laura Crehuet Berman
12:00
Reading with catalog essay writer S. Portico Bowman
12:15-1:30
Gallery talk with As Grass Grows exhibiting artists: Katherine Hair Eagle, Hilary Lorenz, Lilly McElroy, Blake Sanders, Hannah Sanders, and James Woodfill