Homestead 1862 – 2020

Homestead 1862 – 2020

• Oil on Canvas
• 24″ x 24″
• Department of the Interior Museum
• Washington, DC

Giclée Print
Small, image size 10” x 10”, $150
Medium, image size 14” x 14”, $195
Large, image size 22” x 22”, $295
Taxes and shipping cost will be added to the price.
Other print sizes are available. Ask the artist. 

To order, go to the Contact page. Please use e-mail or phone. State the title of the
painting, the size of the desired print and I'll be in touch.

Homestead National Monument of America in Nebraska, a wonderful place
to visit,  was established in 1936. The Heritage Center and Education building
hold the stories of folks and the land from which they were displaced and on 
which they settled between 1862 and 1986. The stories are as varied as the landscapes. 
Surviving Native Americans, their communities decimated, were forcibly 
moved to reservations, displaced on their homelands by immigrants hoping 
for a better life for themselves and their families. Many settlers lost everything, 
never receiving patents on the land they worked. 

This  painting illustrates that improvement was often 
accomplished by tilling the deep rooted native plants and planting 
annual crops with shallow root systems. In dry years this made for the infamous 
Dust Bowl. Irrigation, once thought to solve drought issues, has created its own 
set of problems. Creative folks built businesses supplying homesteads with tools 
and equipment to make farming less labor intensive. After WWII, chemical farming
became the standard and farm policy was created, often with special interests in 
mind, encouraging production of certain annual crops and supporting industries. 
These practices are now recognized to have led to a national problem with obesity
and the dissolution of our rural communities.

Kansas Rural Center, The Berry Center and the Land Institute 
in Salina, KS, are working hard on some of agriculture's biggest problems: 
loss of top soil, clean water, dead zones from chemical run-offs, depletion of aquifers, 
restoration of community and re-connecting with the land, its varied life and growing 
food sustainably. The lower right side of the painting is a tribute to the Land Institute. 
The Kernza plant, a perennial grain and with a deep root system is shown opposed to 
wheat and it's root system on the industrial, left side. A young researcher, holding seeds
of life, sits with varied life under, over and around.

Aldo Leopold's oft quoted statement from A Sand County Almanac, is found on the 
prairie trail west of the Homestead Heritage Center. “We abuse land because we see it as a 
commodity  belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, 
we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

The U.S. Dept of the Interior Museum honored me in the #5WomenArtist initiative during #WomensHistoryMonth.

“Homestead 1862 – 2020” was presented on Facebook and Twitter along with the following copy.

Among the Interior Museum’s newest works is this oil on canvas piece by Kansas-based artist, illustrator and lifelong educator, Nancy Lehenbauer Marshall. “Homestead 1862-2020” draws upon her recent artist-in-residence experience at Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska.Her oil on canvas painting is inspired, in part, by an Aldo Leopold quote: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Through a series of interwoven vignettes, Marshall simultaneously tells the Homestead story and illustrates a farming future that is eco-friendly. Taken as a whole, the painted narrative encompasses generations of changing interactions with the land: as ancestral homeland, natural habitat, migration route, and agricultural provider. OSAC 07355