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For 50 years, creative minds, including artists, musicians, and poets, have expanded the reach of our research and deepened people’s experience of this place through immersive experiences. They have shaped our culture and identity, offered new ways of seeing, and helped imagine the possibilities we seek to realize.
Place-based installations across the festival grounds invite visitors into conversation, reflection, and community gathering. Participating artists include Dana Fritz, Sean Whalen, Karen McCoy, Rena Detrixhe, Ernesto Pujol, Lori Brack, and the Prairie Works Designs Team, composed of Chip Parker, Ann Zerger, Jesse Nathan, Josue Coy Dick, Kristofer Parker, and Timothy Parker. In honor of its 50th anniversary, The Land Institute is also commissioning Chicago-based artist Jenny Kendler to create a land-based installation at Marty Bender Nature Area, a multi-year commitment to ecological restoration.
Several musicians will perform on all three days of the festival to generate energy and create space for community gathering, including The Land Band, The Little Miss, Jim Scott, and Ann Zimmerman. Day 2 of the event on Saturday will also hold space for a poetry circle, as well as community poetry led by Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas.
Artists have continuously expanded the reach of our research and deepened people’s experience of this place. They have shaped our culture and identity, offered new ways of seeing, and helped imagine the possibilities we seek to realize. See this year’s artist lineup below.
Lori Brack’s Kansas roots are currently planted in Lucas, a town with a population of 400. She is the author of three books: A Case for the Dead Letter Detective (Kelsay, 2021), Museum Made of Breath (Spartan, 2018), and A Fine Place to See the Sky (The Field School, 2010). Her essays and poems have appeared online and in print, including North American Review, Cutleaf, Atlas and Alice, Another Chicago Magazine, Rogue Agent, and Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction. She has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize as well as for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions.
Rena Detrixhe is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Kansas City, MO. Through objects and installations, ephemeral sculpture, performance, drawings, and process-based work, she explores systems of value and cultural relations to land and the more-than-human world with attention to histories of injustice. Her research has been supported by multiple grants and residencies, including a Serenbe Co-Esistere Residency, Stoneleaf Retreat, Tallgrass Artist Residency at the Konza Prairie Biological Station, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and a one-year research residency with The Land Institute.
Josué Coy Dick is a fifth-year student at Bethel College (KS) studying Violin Performance and Social Work. He has won the Hutchinson Symphony Anderson Concerto Competition and the NMKSO Dwight Beckham Young Soloists competition twice. He is currently the concertmaster of the Bethel College Chamber Orchestra and a member of the Newton Mid Kansas Symphony Orchestra and the Salina Symphony. He is a substitute with the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and occasionally plays with the Wichita Grand Opera.
Through photography, Dana Fritz explores how we shape and know land, engaging ideas about climate change, environmental history, and ecology in a place-based practice. Fritz’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States, Europe, and Asia, including at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, KS, and the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney, NE. Her prints and artist books are present in several public collections, and she has also self-published several limited-edition artist books.
Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and naturalist based in Chicago and various forests. Over the last two decades, her projects on climate change and biodiversity loss have been shown at London’s Hayward Gallery, New York’s Governors Island, Storm King, Smithsonian NMNH, MCA Chicago, and public locations from urban riverwalks to remote deserts and tropical forests. She was an artist-in-residence with NRDC from 2014 to 2024 and is a current Artistic Fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature. She sits on the Board of Directors of 350.org, ACRE, Arts First, and is a founding member of Artists Commit.
Karen McCoy is a Professor Emerita of Sculpture and Social Practice at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she taught for 26 years from 1994 until her retirement in 2020, and served as Department Chair for a decade. Teaching, mentoring, and studio-based research were central to her teaching practice, alongside her active career as a sculptor. McCoy has received numerous awards and honors, including the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award in 2017. The same year, she was named Visual Artist for The Land Institute, where she created a site-specific collaborative exhibition and walking-based project for Prairie Festival.
Jesse Nathan was raised in Northern California and rural Kansas. His first book of poems, “Eggtooth,” was published by Unbound Edition Press in 2023, and the collection won the 2024 New Writers Award in Poetry. It also won the 2024 Housatonic Book Award and the 2025 Kansas Book Award. Nathan’s poetry has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, The Believer, Zyzzyva, and the inaugural issue of Revel, among other magazines. Nathan was a founding editor of the McSweeney’s and also contributes occasional prose to the New York Times.
Chip Parker was born in Maryland and was raised as an Air Force brat in Maryland, Florida, California, Iowa, and Kentucky. Prior to moving to Kansas in 1988 to set up Prairie Works Designs Inc., Chip worked as an architect for IBM, and in 1997, Chip merged the architecture practice of PWD with WDM Architects of Wichita, Kansas as a partner. Ann Zerger is a native Kansan who has lived and worked throughout the United States. Ann was a Professor of Art at McPherson College from 2004-2019 and currently pursues art that centers around expressing the complex non-verbal language of gesture- a universal language of the human experience.
Kristofer Parker was raised on a multigenerational farm outside of Moundridge, KS, with their sibling, Tim Parker. Kris’s artistic passion was music, which began at an early age. He began violin lessons at the age of four. Later, Kris fell in love with the piano, studying that and the saxophone until he graduated from high school. Kristofer’s musical compositions also began at an early age and became his primary focus. Kristofer has composed the musical scores for the award-winning independent films, “The Basics of Love” (2022), “The Golden Years (2022). He also composed the musical scores for “The Dreams of Rene Sendam.”
Tim Parker grew up on a multigenerational farm outside of Moundridge, KS. They grew up playing with clay in their mom’s sculpture studio, becoming an assistant artist on many of her commissioned works. Throughout their life, they have maintained a passion for art, a reverence for the natural world, and a fascination with building relationships across differences. Over the past 8 years, Tim has focused artistic energy on large-scale sculptural collaborations with their parents. This ongoing, prairie-based, ephemeral sculpture series focuses on large-scale sculptures created with natural materials and community participation. Tim Parker currently lives with their family in Lander, Wyoming.
Ernesto Pujol is a social choreographer of public group performances, poetically enacting the untold stories of people & places under threat, pursuing the healing of historically embedded trauma across the land. He’s the author of two critical books: Sited Body, Public Visions (2012) and Walking Art Practice (2018). Currently, Pujol artfully assists biologists & horticulturists in bringing attention to compromised natural spaces. In Kansas, he worked with curator Saralyn Reece Hardy in Becoming the Land (2003) at the Salina Art Center, and Visitation (2011) at the Spencer Museum of Art, and he collaborated with writer Lori Brack in Farmers Dream (2010) and Redreaming Kansas (2011).
Sean Whalen is an artist focused on building natural and sustainable architecture using clay, wood, and other onsite materials. His work is rooted in community practices, pulling from long-standing traditions of community-led building, repair, and caretaking. Through the use of clay, Sean invites communities to consider the impact of building with their own hands, removing the alienation between them and many of the structures they occupy. Sean received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, with a focus in Ceramics and Social Practice.
Prairie Festival creates space for people, ideas, and relationships to grow and allows us to gather around the values of creativity and a shared sense of place. Immersive experiences like music and poetry, which have shaped The Land Institute and Prairie Festival since their origins, will return this year to inspire guests as we imagine and co-create a perennial future.
Traci Brimhall is a university distinguished professor of creative writing at Kansas State University, as well as the 2025 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). Known for her poems that often marry the ordinary with the surreal, Brimhall’s work has appeared widely in journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Orion, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the current poet laureate of Kansas, where her initiatives have centered on uniting the state’s agricultural roots with the literary arts.
Jim Scott has made it a priority to create music that celebrates the Earth with lyrical melodies and memorable verses. He has created an extensive repertoire, recording 9 albums of original music and publishing a growing line of choral music. Jim has been an Artist-in-Residence or visiting faculty member at prestigious schools such as Oberlin College and is a tireless activist, performing many benefit concerts. Years of activism are reflected in his creations, addressing issues of ecology, justice, and peace with insight and gentle wit. Jim was also awarded an NEA grant to create and perform his multimedia concert “The Year to Save the Earth” and is taking it everywhere he can.
The Land Band, named for its origins playing at The Land Institute’s Prairie Festivals, includes musicians from several popular Kansas musical acts who now come together on special occasions: featuring Lauralyn Bodle on fiddle, Lisa Grossman on bass, Matt Kirby on hammer dulcimer & accordion, Frank Martin on Irish flute and banjo, Chris Martin on accordion, Annie Wilson on guitar, and Ann Zimmerman on keyboard.
The Little Miss is the moniker of Southern California-based artist Hayley Johnson. With the addition of her bandmates, “The Cactus Kissers,” she blends the old with the new, focusing on maintaining vintage western flair while introducing more contemporary existential and comedic elements. Johnson has been featured as a contestant on Season 22 of The Voice on NBC, and songs from her debut EP, American Dream, have appeared on KCRW, Billboard, Wide Open Country, Tidal’s Country Rising playlist, and the FX television show Better Things. Her latest single, “The Plow that Broke the Plains,” was inspired by the work of Wes Jackson and is featured in the documentary Prairie Prophecy, which is now streaming nationally on PBS.
Ann Zimmerman is from Salina, Kansas, and is a former intern of The Land Institute who sings the prairie into universal language and works magic from songs of life on the windy plains. She turns audiences into her backup choir, singing together songs they never knew but won’t soon forget. Her confident Kansas style, clear, strong voice, and award-winning songs have taken her across the U.S., telling surprising stories, painting vivid portraits. When not singing, she works as a lawyer, mediator, and Salina school board member. Ann also holds an elementary education degree from K-State and a law degree from Harvard.
This year, Prairie Festival will celebrate the legacy of artists with a special exhibition at the Salina Art Center curated by Cori Sherman North and Kelly Yarbrough, and a companion conversation exploring the role of artists at The Land Institute. The exhibit features work by 20 artists whose engagement with The Land Institute spans five decades, including Terry Evans, Jim Richardson, Bill McBride, Claire Pentecost, Dornith Doherty, and Wes Jackson. Register for Prairie Festival 2026 today to stay up to date on how to RSVP for the Salina Art Center special program.
