Landscapes and Livestock

During the last few weeks, our friend Jonathan Rutter stopped by (twice, actually) to say hello and share some of the insights gained from his recent MFA program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Jonathan was in town for the installation of James O’Rourke’s memorial in the Prairie Home Cemetery in Moorhead. If you should find yourself driving on South Eighth Street, please detour through the gate and visit the site—toward the east or back edge of the cemetery and about in the middle latitude. You can’t, as they say, miss it.

While Jonathan was hereabouts we talked at some length about another, second Agincourt exhibit and especially about the show-within-the-show “Landscapes & Livestock” that will be a loan exhibit from the Tennant Memorial Gallery in Agincourt. What I had hoped might be 25-30 works, ostensibly representing a community-generated collection—the sort of grass roots point of view that resonates with a child of the 60s like me—has grown in the last few years and now amounts to more than fifty pieces, each of which will add to the story of the fictional place that is Agincourt. Today, to break my long silence and test the waters of my old self for reasons that many of your will know, I want to share the latest addition to the “Landscapes & Livestock” roster: an urban rather than a rural landscape by New York artist Edmund E. Niemann [1909-2005], a work of 1956 titled “Stop on Red” and untypical of the collection as a whole. It will be a challenge to weave it in to the story.

Wish me luck.