Kansas artists support benefit exhibit

Tourists receive a guided tour of natural prairie grasses before the Symphony in the Flint Hills concert just north of Strong City in the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. The Nature Conservancy on Friday announced the donation of a conservation easement in the Flint Hills encompassing 10,000 acres.

An exhibit of nearly 130 works by Kansas artists to benefit the Kansas Park Trust, which maintains the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, opens Friday at Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan.

This will be the largest exhibit of its kind, according to Don Lambert, who curated the six-week exhibit.

“It is fitting that so many Kansas artists are lending their support to the tallgrass prairie,” he said, “because so many of them feature the prairie in their works, and those who do not share a respect for the native prairie.”

For Lambert, who has promoted Kansas artists for 30 years, the exhibit and sale are an outgrowth of a project he began five years ago. “Homage to the Flint Hills,” an exhibit by 37 artists depicting the Flint Hills, toured Kansas for two years and was seen last summer in the nation’ s Capitol. A book of the same name accompanied that exhibit.

Among the artists featured in the new exhibit, from Lawrence, are Colette Bangert, Nancy Bjorge, Jon Blumb, Vernon Brejcha, John Gary Brown, Constance Ehrlich, Ralph Fontenot, Lisa Grossman, Stan Herd, Ron Hinton, Paul Hotvedt, John Hulsey, Stephen Johnson, Judith Burns McCrea, Roger Shimomura, Robert Sudlow and Ann Trusty.

Area artists include Inge Balch, Zak Barnes, Chris Wolf Edmonds, Edward Robison, Jon Swindell, Rodney Troth and Louis Copt.