Catherland by Shane Booth

“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.” – Willa Cather

Using his 1867 studio camera and Voightlander lens to capture photographs, Shane Booth completed a summer residency with the Willa Cather Foundation in 2016. The resulting work, a new exhibit entitled Catherland, documents the area surrounding Red Cloud and the ideology of the Nebraska landscape. The photographs that make up the exhibit evoke a sense of place and remind viewers of Cather’s magical stories of the land and its people. Booth is a native Nebraskan and an associate professor of visual arts at Fayetteville State University. Please join us to meet the artist at a reception on Friday, June 2, from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. The reception is open to the public as part of the 62nd annual Spring Conference.

Booth notes, "Growing up in central Nebraska it was easy to get lost in the land and the stories it told. With every thunderstorm that rumbles across the fields, to the wind that never stops blowing and scars everything it caresses, I call this place home. I have always been enamored by its emptiness and ferociousness. I see ghosts working the land, hands stained black from rich soil, and visions of black bonnets bobbing in the fields while monumental horses pull plows breaking lines of sod. If only the isolated trees that sit in the middle of fields like guardians could tell their stories. This body of work documents "Catherland" and the ideology of the Nebraska landscape. Located in Red Cloud Nebraska, "Catherland" is where the author Willa Cather grew up, and where she based several of her novels describing life on the prairie in the early 19th century. My photographs evoke a sense of place, and remind us of the stories the great Willa Cather told about this magical land, and the people who tamed it.