Another View. A&M Building, Big Springs, Nebraska. Exhibition. 2024.
In summer 2024, M12 Studio launched its first exhibit at the A&M Building in Big Springs, Colorado. On view were two installations: Wright Morris: Another View and Blackbear Bosin: Wolf Creek.
Wright Morris: Another View presented an archival photograph by Wright Morris (1910–1998), the renowned American writer and photographer born in Nebraska. Morris is celebrated for his powerful images and evocative storytelling, which capture the textures of rural American life through its landscapes and inhabitants. The adobe church at Rancho de Taos—depicted in this photograph—has become an iconic subject in American art, rendered by numerous painters and photographers, perhaps most famously by Georgia O’Keeffe. Offering a counterpoint to these more familiar representations, Morris’s image shows the backside of the Mission Church, photographed through a fence. The work invites viewers to consider what can be revealed when we seek out another view—one that looks beyond neglected spaces, forgotten communities, and overly romantic narratives.
Blackbear Bosin: Wolf Creek focused on work by Blackbear Bosin (1921–1980), a Native American artist of Kiowa and Comanche descent, born in Oklahoma and later based in Kansas. The exhibition highlighted Bosin’s hand-drawn logo for the Wolf Creek Generating Station, a nuclear power plant in Kansas. The station is fed by the Neosho River, a tributary of the Arkansas River, which—along with the Platte River—forms one of the major waterways of the northern Ogallala region. Best known for paintings that depict Indigenous spiritual motifs and natural landscapes, Bosin brings the same sensibility to the Wolf Creek logo. Its delicate attention to the wolf evokes the cultural heritage of Plains tribes and their deep reverence for the natural world. The creation of such a logo for a nuclear power plant represents a complex and compelling intersection of art, public infrastructure, and the utilities industry.
The opening of these exhibitions was celebrated during M12 Studio’s inaugural Midsummer Social—a street-fair–style event featuring food, a stamp station for kids, the Black Hornet show car on display, and artist talks with Dana Fritz and Kelly Yarborough at the Big Springs Public Library.
