Dana Fritz

Biography

Dana Fritz uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University. Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Fritz’s work has been exhibited in over 140 venues including the Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in the U.S. International venues include Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands, Château de Villandry in France, Xi’an Jiaotong University Art Museum in China, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Place M, and Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts in Japan. Her prints are held in several collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Pennsylvania; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona;the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Fritz’s artist books are held in collections including Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library; Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation at Colorado University Boulder; and Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.

Fritz has been awarded artist residencies at locations known for their significant cultural histories and gardens or unique landscapes including Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California; Château de Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany, France; Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona; PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon; Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, Nebraska; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; and Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska. Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, and Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. Her second trade book, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Fritz is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape & Re:forest Project Statements

The photographs in Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape make visible the forces that shaped the Nebraska National Forest at Halsey, once the world’s largest hand-planted forest. Wind, water, planting, thinning, burning, decomposing, and sowing all contribute to its unique environmental history. A conifer forest was overlaid onto a semi-arid grassland just west of the 100th meridian in an ambitious late 19th century idea to create a timber industry, and to change the local climate. At that time, tree-planting was not considered in terms of carbon sequestration, but a way to mitigate the wind and evaporation of moisture and to bring order to a disorderly landscape. While the planners seemed not to appreciate the particular grassland ecosystem of the Nebraska Sandhills that developed through grazing and fire until dispossession, they did recognize the reliable water from the Dismal and Middle Loup Rivers that bound the site. In 1902, the first federal nursery was founded to produce trees for the new forest and for plains homesteads. That same year a forest reserve was officially established in the grasslands where 31 square miles of trees would be planted.Historical fire suppression and misguided plantings, (some never taking hold, and others that have become invasive,) present ongoing management challenges for foresters. While afforestation is no longer in practice at Nebraska National Forest, the on-site Bessey Nursery now grows replacement seedlings for burned and beetle-damaged National Forests in the Rocky Mountain region as well as the Nebraska Conservation Trees Program. This unique experiment of row-crop trees that were protected from the natural cycle of fire for decades, yet never commercially harvested for timber, provides a rich metaphor for our current environmental predicaments. This hybrid landscape has evolved from a turn of the 20th century effort to reclaim with trees what was called “The Great American Desert” to a focus on 21st century conservation, grassland restoration, and native reforestation, all of which work to sequester carbon, maintain natural ecosystem balance, and mitigate large-scale climate change. The photographs mark a particular moment in time before two wildfires consumed half of the hand-planted forest in the extreme drought of 2022.

In Re: forest, my photographs from National Forests in the Platte River Basin are enclosed by details of historical photographs from the US Forest Service archives. I follow the circular path from where the seeds are sown in Bessey Nursery to where cones with seeds are gathered and seedlings are planted in Pike, Roosevelt, and Medicine Bow National Forests after catastrophic fire and beetle infestations. Ideas and actions regarding climate change, afforestation, and reforestation span the 19th and 21st centuries here, linking the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains along Platte River tributaries. While many of us may not live near National Forests, we all benefit from their oxygen production, air filtration, carbon sequestration, and watershed protection. We also have a hand in shaping them, whether it is our use of paper and wood, our careless fires, our carbon emissions, or our taxes that fund reforestation projects. This collection of photographs, looping from the nursery to the forests and back, reminds us that we are inextricably part of this process and that our work to maintain forests is ongoing.