First Friday at the Great Plains Art Museum

The Great Plains Art Museum is open late Nov. 6, 5-7 p.m. with three exhibitions and light refreshments. On View: “Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours” August 25-December 19, 2026 | Lower-level Gallery The prairie is not just a place-it is a presence. A rhizome not just beneath our feet but also within our psyches. Just as native prairie grasses grow from entangled networks underground, the stories here emerge from roots that are collective, dispersed, and resilient. “Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours” invites us to understand Nyi Brathge (Nebraska) not only through geography but through relation. It asks: What lives beneath the visible? What networks of kinship, memory, and survival shape this land-and those shaped by it? This exhibition brings together the work of three artists-Elizabeth Burden, Willa Ahlschwede, and Marci Sue Black-descendants of formerly enslaved Black American, immigrant European American, and Indigenous communities shaped by prairie life. Their works use image, sound, artifact, and gesture to trace and unsettle memory. They invite us to remember not through monuments of stone, but through echoes in the soil and whispers in the archive. “Jennifer Angus: Like a Moth to the Flame” August 7-December 19, 2026 | First-Floor Galleries Jennifer Angus creates site-specific, immersive art installations that utilize dead and dried insect specimens to create environments that are often described as otherworldly, magical, and sometimes uncomfortable. Over time, Angus’s work has evolved to consider issues related to the environment and the important role insects play within it. “Like a Moth to the Flame” explores the Great Plains region, an ecosystem home to the Sandhill crane migration, American bison, mountain lions, foxes, badgers, and countless other mammals. Less visible, though no less essential, are the nearly 30,000 insect species that inhabit this landscape, most living unseen beneath leaves, within soil, and among grasses. This exhibition invites visitors into that hidden world, asking them to imagine themselves insect-sized, dwarfed by the sculptural works around them. Within this immersive environment, the extraordinary adaptability of insects becomes visible, revealing how these small creatures sustain the intricate balance of an interconnected ecosystem. This exhibition at the Great Plains Art Museum is presented in collaboration with CAREMI-the Community for Arthropod Research, Education, and Materials Innovation-a transdisciplinary initiative at UNL that brings together researchers, engineers, artists, educators, students, and community members to harness the diversity and resilience of arthropods as sources of knowledge, inspiration, and innovation. This exhibition is supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment. “Moving with the Hydrocommons” August 7-December 19, 2026 | Mezzanine Gallery A commons is a shared resource that is vital to collective life and the relations such a resource instantiates. The “hydrocommons” extends this idea to water. “Moving with the Hydrocommons” is an exploration of water and bodies within, around, and beyond the Great Plains. Following the inquiry, “What does water teach?” and drawing from collected vignettes, personal reflections, and contextual research, a screendance was choreographed as an exploration of water across bodies-social, historical, geographic, sensorial. A companion zine shares the contributed narratives, movement and sensory scores, and other watery notations for moving with the hydrocommons. “Moving with the Hydrocommons” is Mac Kelsey’s project as the Center for Great Plains Studies’ 2025-26 Student Storyteller in Residence. Kelsey is a teacher, artist, researcher, and PhD candidate in Educational Studies (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education) at UNL. She focuses on developing curricula and pedagogies for technology/media studies, cultural theory, and somatic practices in education. The Student Storyteller in Residence program is funded by the Michael Farrell Fund for Student Storytelling, administered through the University of Nebraska Foundation.