The Great Open: Photographs from North Dakota

This collection of photographs from Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris probes the essence of North Dakota’s current landscape, people, and way of life.

As a fellow Dakotan, Rebecca Norris Webb takes a poetic and intimate look at the natural world of North Dakota. Her work often explores those places where the natural world and one’s inner landscape meet, especially during times of change, upheaval, and shifting weathers—both meteorological and metaphysical. Her storytelling serves as a map for when one’s loss seems to have its own geography.

Alex Webb takes a more global and often urban approach to North Dakota. He photographed in the parks, neighborhoods, and flea markets of the more populated cities and towns of the state, including Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, and Williston. He also photographed at various festivals and other events across the state, including the Icelandic Festival in Mountain, the Spirit Lake Professional Bull Riders on the Spirit Lake Reservation, the Morton County Fair and Rodeo in New Salem, and the Twin Buttes Powwow south of the Missouri River on the Fort Berthold Reservation.

To create a more multi-layered portrait of North Dakota, the creative couple have interwoven their work in this exhibition—powwows and sunflower fields, rodeos and buffalo herds, twilight street scenes and badlands nightscapes. The Great Open is their seventh collaboration.

This collection is on loan from the North Dakota Museum of Art.