Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours: Artist Talk by Elizabeth Burden

Great Plains Art Museum's 2026 Elizabeth Rubendall Artist in Residence Elizabeth Burden will deliver a talk about her practice which engages in artistic archive and blends multidisciplinary studio work with social practice to reflect on the past/present/future. She was born and raised in Lincoln; as the great-granddaughter of the first Black homesteaders (Henry and Mary Burden), she is a third-generation Nebraskan, now living in the Southwest.
Through the work of three artists, Elizabeth Burden, Willa Ahlschwede, and Marci Sue Black, the exhibition “Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours” positions the prairie as a site where stories are entangled across generations, geographies, and historical conditions. Situated within ongoing public debates about land, settlement, identity, and United States history, “Elsewhere” considers how the prairie functions as both material landscape and ideological terrain shaped by settler colonialism, migration, and inherited narratives of place.