For more information, contact David Barnes, 620-792-9342.

March 1, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
By David Barnes
Shafer Gallery Director

It was toward the end of a nearly perfect early spring day in the Pryor Mountains of Montana. I had spent most of it working on the ranch of my friends the Big Day family who had lived for centuries on land that is now called the Crow Indian Reservation. We were sitting on the ground, well broiled, in front of an igloo-shaped hut made from willow boughs and blankets. The little hut from which we had just emerged was a sweat lodge.

I had met Bill and his father about a year earlier. He was a student in an Art Appreciation class I had taught. After class, he would occasionally drop by my office to ask questions about the lectures or parts of the text he didn’t understand. After satisfying the initial excuse for his visit, Bill would invariably shift the conversation to his family and to the rich store of oral tradition handed down to him from his fathers. The next semester I was invited to visit Bill’s "little church" on the Crow reservation. The "little church" was the sweat lodge and, as its nickname implies, it is Bill’s primary place of prayer, meditation and communication with God. I became a regular member of the congregation.

“Hey, Billy,” Bill’s father elbowed him in the ribs,” I think maybe it’s time to tell the professor about your vision.”

Bill gave the ubiquitous native grunt in reply. He then explained that during his senior year in high school he had gone on a vision quest into the wilderness of the sacred Pryor Mountains. Bill’s father and grandfather are Crow medicine men. Unlike many Native American children, Bill had been raised in the traditional way. In his home, the Crow language was spoken almost exclusively. Bill and his parents knew that he would have a very difficult time succeeding in college. Bill went on his vision quest to find some hope and blaze a trail into the future. He was alone for three days and nights without food or water with only his red stone pipe and a woolen blanket.

“I prayed for a vision to ‘make a way’ for me. I prayed for three days and nights. Then I seen him, a white man, and the vision said, ‘he will make a way for you.’”

Bill looked a bit sheepish, and sporting an almost cherubic grin he said softly, “You are that man the vision showed me.”

“How can you be sure of that?” I replied. Bill touched my balding pate, my short beard and then pointed to my prominent front teeth.

“That man, he had kind eyes and a face like a beaver.” We all laughed. Then I fought away tears. For some time I had thought of teaching as a calling rather than a mere profession, but it was not until that moment that I had any inkling of what that calling meant. I have come to know that to the Crow “to make a way” implies a disciplined way of making an event or journey special. I have dedicated the Shafer Gallery to “making a way” for our students to experience the richness of our culture and traditions in a friendly, exciting, non-threatening environment.

Accessibility is one aspect of “making a way.” This month the Shafer Gallery is proud to sponsor an exhibit of the work of high school students from Barton County. Students from Claflin, Ellinwood, Great Bend and Hoisington High Schools will exhibit a variety of works created in art classes during the 2010-2011 school year.

The exhibition will include diverse mediums including paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and fiber art. As a gallery we hope to provide an opportunity for our students to experience firsthand and for the first time the process and excitement of being an exhibiting artist.

Our hope is to design special experiences that will give students the opportunity to create their own meanings and understandings of what it means to be an artist and contributing member of our community.

I hope, as Bill Big Day’s vision implied, to “make a way” for students to journey to unexamined places.

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