Rebecca Norris Webb

My Dakota

February 5–March 1, 2015

“Does loss have its own geography?”

In 2005, Rebecca Norris Webb began photographing her home state of South Dakota, a place of complexity that she describes as having “more buffalo, pronghorn, coyotes, mule deer, and prairie dogs than people.” A year into the project, her brother died unexpectedly of heart failure. At this point, Webb found herself continuing to photograph while driving on the prairie roads as a way of processing her grief. The resulting exhibition, My Dakota, takes viewers on this elegiac journey, combining luminous color prints of the South Dakota landscape with the artist’s poetry penciled onto the gallery walls.

My Dakota will continue in exhibition form from Blue Sky to The Cleveland Museum of Art this summer.

Rebecca Norris Webb has published numerous photography books, including Memory City with Alex Webb, and Alex Webb and Rebecca Webb on Street Photography and the Poetic Image. Originally a poet, she often interweaves her text and photographs in her books, most notably with her third book, My Dakota, which features works from this exhibition. Additionally Webb’s work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston and Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York, and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, George Eastman House, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Le Monde Magazine.