Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers
Regnier Hall, Edwards Campus, Overland Park, Kansas
Larry Schwarm, Combines and oil wells, Ellsworth County, Kansas, June 2011, 2011
In Kansas Farmers, Larry Schwarm (born 1944, Greensburg, Kansas) conveys the lives of farmers to viewers who are largely disconnected from agriculture through geographic distance and increasingly mechanized modes of production. From 2010 to 2015, Schwarm and KU’s Spencer Museum of Art collaborated with a Kansas-based National Science Foundation research project studying farmer land use decisions. Schwarm (BFA, MFA, University of Kansas) turned his lens toward the Kansas landscape to reveal farmers’ actions, the visual outcomes of those choices, and the conditions under which the decisions were made. Kansas Farmers celebrates artistic research within a major interdisciplinary research project that investigated humans’ environmentally based actions.
Kansas Farmers emphasizes the work and world of farmers. Schwarm, a child of farmers, highlights the horizontality of a Kansas skyline, the monotony of monocultures, and the sparseness of rural populations to tell vivid stories about Kansas’s farmers, its resources, and its cultural landscape. These stories are part of the larger research effort conducted by scientists working at Kansas universities. The Spencer Museum of Art’s exhibition of Kansas Farmers, refreshed at Edwards Campus, seeks to reveal aspects of that research and collaboration.
Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers is accompanied by a catalogue of the same title that provides supplemental context and interpretation for each photograph. A reader’s copy of the catalogue is available in Regnier Hall’s main office.
