Jan. 11, 2024
The Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art, David City, Nebr., received a major gift of art late in 2023. The Overland Gallery of Minneapolis gifted 24 paintings by American artist Gary Ernest Smith (1942- ). A handful of paintings from this new collection are on display now in an exhibition called, “Gary Ernest Smith: Elemental Landscapes.”
Smith grew up in rural Oregon and worked with his father and grandfather in the fields. After serving in the military and earning a degree in fine art, Smith first started his career as a muralist, completing many large-scale projects for the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Highlights of his professional career include three terms as director of the Brigham Young University art gallery, more than forty one-man shows and traveling exhibits such as the “Third Western States Traveling Exhibit,” sponsored by the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibit of Smith’s series, “Journeys in Search of Lost Images,” traveled to twenty-two museums around the United States, and his one-man exhibit, “Fields,” showed both at The Museum of Fine Art at Brigham Young University and the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis.
“The foundation of all my painting is the rural experience, because that is who I am,” Smith said in the book, Holding Ground (1999). The museum’s curator says that Smith is unafraid to portray the most elemental of landscape forms or the most basic of agrarian tasks on a very large scale. In this exhibition, visitors are encouraged to consider the visual elements—the tools in the artist’s toolkit—and the symbolic elements—the meaning behind the agrarian experience.
This major donation was possible because of the expansion of the current museum. Bone Creek is in the final stages of fundraising for the $6.2 million dollar campaign to expand its popular offerings in the historical Ford building in downtown David City. Bone Creek is renovating and renewing this amazing space into a beautiful state-of-the-art national venue. This renovation allows Bone Creek to expand space for youth education, create more functional areas for displaying and preserving agrarian art, supply accessible community gathering and classroom spaces, and broaden art education for patrons of all ages, inspiring them to think creatively. For more information or to donate, visit Campaign.BoneCreek.org.
“Because we have embarked on this new expansion, we can now accept major acquisitions like this Gary Ernest Smith portfolio and continue to collect important agrarian artwork that shape the narrative of our shared history,” said Board Chair Ruth Thoendel.