Kelly Yarbrough is a multi-faceted artist whose abilities will be on full display as an organizer and creator at the Prairie Festival. Her first encounter with the event was in 2014.
“I often credit Prairie Festival with one of the big reasons why I could see myself making a home in Kansas and staying here as a creative,” Yarbrough said. “It was that inspiring to me. So it's kind of a dream come true to be working with them on this project."
Yarbrough runs the Tallgrass Artist Residency, which also invites artists to Kansas and to the Tallgrass prairie.
Located in Salina, at the Land Institute, the Prairie Festival is a gathering hosted by the organization. Yarbrough said the institute works to transform agriculture through exploring the connections between food and the land that it grows out of.
“They are developing new food crops that don't require the same sort of soil inputs and tillage that traditional annual agriculture requires,” Yarbrough said.
The Prairie Festival got its start four years after the Land Institute was established.
“[The festival is] this all-encompassing celebration of …. why this work matters and why we do this,” Yarbrough said. “[It’s] a three-day-long event, and I kind of like to think of it as sort of an outdoor, very Kansas-y conference. It is a festival in the way that there will be music and food and laughter and fun, but there are really high-quality international speakers that come to this event as keynotes.
“Kate Marval is a climate scientist, most recently with NASA and her book ‘Human Nature’ came out earlier this year. She will also be speaking on Sunday morning.”
The event will be familiar to those who’ve been before, but it's also new in a lot of ways.
They’re activating an adjacent field, still Land Institute property, but developing many of the spaces from the ground up.
“We are actually working with artist teams from the region this year to create temporary outdoor installations that will serve as gathering spaces for breakout session activities that are happening throughout the weekend.”
KC-based artists Raina Dietrich and Karen McCoy have collaborated for the first time for the festival.
“They're creating this installation that involves this really beautiful weaving to create this large 20-foot bench sculpture,” Yarbrough said. “And it has these feet that kind of reach out like roots and they end in these tendrils in the ground.”
The artists are harvesting material off the land to construct the bench.
“They're harvesting these saplings,” Yarbrough said, “and then having to strip the twigs and the leaves off, and then they're weaving them through.”
Attendees staying in Salina can go gallery hopping around events; there are several exhibits in Salina celebrating Prairie Festival.
“There's a show called Land and Alliance,” Yarbrough said, “which is curated by Taiomah Rutledge in collaboration with the Salina Art Center, that will actually be on display at the same time as an exhibit that I worked with Cori Sherman North to curate. Cori is a curator at the Berger Sandsane Gallery in Lindsburg, Kansas. I also have a piece in a self-portrait show there right now.”
Cori Sherman North has a long history programming artists for Prairie Festival. North and Yarbrough teamed up to celebrate the history of those exhibiting artists.
“We actually worked together to do this invitational group exhibition from past Prairie Festival artists,” Yarbrough said, “and that show is actually also up right now at the Salina Art Center. So it just opened this week. We have 20 different artists in that show who have been involved in Prairie Festival at some point in the past.”
There will also be opportunities for attendees to learn more about the Land Institute.
“If folks are interested in … how crops are grown,” Yarbrough said, “how the research is conducted, there will be plot tours available on Saturday afternoon that folks can sign up for.
“It's a very beautiful, idyllic place. You know, we've let the grasses grow tall, so folks are going to get a nice flavor of the prairie.”
