Brookings: The Museum Quietly Corrects the Word “Flyover”

The South Dakota Art Museum has chosen a loaded word for its current exhibition. “Flyover” borrows the coastal insult, the phrase that reduces the entire middle of the country to airspace you cross on your way somewhere else. The show gathers Susan Turnbull, Bill Fleming and Roger Broer, three artists whose work depicts landscapes, people and experiences of the Northern Plains and Midwest, and by naming itself after the slight, it seems to want to answer it: look down, the title suggests, there is something here worth seeing. That is a familiar and honorable move for regional art institutions. It is also, on its own, an incomplete answer, and the museum's fall calendar quietly admits as much.

A few weeks either side of the Flyover reception, the museum's America in Art lecture series brings Dr. Ashley Howard, a historian from the University of Iowa, to speak on Black Midwestern histories and their connections to race, class, gender and racial violence. Read the two events side by side and something becomes visible that neither program states outright: landscape painting, as a genre, has its own way of flying over things. A field, a grain elevator, a stretch of prairie sky rendered in careful light, tends to present land as backdrop rather than as a place where specific people lived, worked, were excluded, or were driven out. The tradition Turnbull, Fleming and Broer work within is capacious enough to hold human figures, certainly, but it is not a tradition built to hold the kind of history Howard studies. Racial violence does not compose well. It resists the horizon line.

This is not a criticism of the artists, who are doing what regional landscape painting has always done well: making the ordinary visible, insisting that the middle of the continent deserves the same careful attention as a coastline or a mountain range. But it is worth noticing what the genre quietly leaves out, and worth noticing that the museum's own programming this season, whether by design or by the ordinary accumulation of a lecture series and an exhibition schedule, supplies the missing piece almost by accident. South Dakota's public memory of itself as empty, rural and racially uncomplicated is not a neutral fact of demographics. It is a story that had to be maintained, and one way it gets maintained is through the kind of art that photographs beautifully and asks nothing uncomfortable. Howard's talk, arriving on the same museum walls, functions less like a footnote to the exhibition and more like a rebuttal placed conveniently nearby.

Brookings is a useful place to watch this tension play out precisely because it is small enough that the museum's calendar is the whole conversation. There is no competing gallery scene, no parallel institution offering a counter-narrative down the street. What the South Dakota Art Museum chooses to hang and what it chooses to say from its lecture podium functions, for a season, as the region's available self-portrait. That is a heavier responsibility than a single exhibition title can carry, and it is one reason the pairing this fall matters more than either event would on its own. A visitor who attends the Flyover reception in September and skips the November lecture, or the reverse, gets half a picture: either land without the people history left out of it, or history without the visual tradition that has spent a century quietly deciding whose experience counts as scenery.

None of this requires cynicism about the artists' intentions or the museum's motives. It requires only noticing that “flyover” is a richer word than the exhibition perhaps means it to be. It describes coastal condescension, yes, but it also describes what regional self-representation has often done to its own uncomfortable chapters: flown over them, kept them at altitude, let the ground blur into a pleasant abstraction. A museum that hosts both the landscape show and the history lecture in the same season is not necessarily resolving that tension. It is holding it open, which is arguably more useful. The task for anyone in Brookings paying attention this fall is to read the two programs as one continuous argument rather than as separate items on an events calendar, because the exhibition asks to be looked at, and the lecture insists on being listened to, and the region they are both describing does not come into focus until both things happen at once.