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The Bison: American Icon
“The Bison: American Icon,” exhibited at Kauffman Museum Sept. 1-Oct. 24, centers on a mystery: Why and how did an animal that roamed the Great Plains of North America by the tens of millions for thousands of years come to number barely 300 by 1889?
The traveling exhibit, which originated at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont., came about through NEH on the Road, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Flint Hills Design of North Newton, which cooperates closely with Kauffman Museum, designed the Bison exhibit, on contract to ExhibitsUSA, a division of Kansas City-based Mid-America Arts Alliance.
Flint Hills Design was founded by Joel Gaeddert ’06 and currently employs Evan Fast ’10 and Abe Regier ’07. Gaeddert, Regier and Joel Krehbiel ’06 (now pursuing further graduate studies) were part of the design team for the Bison exhibit, along with Chuck Regier ’81, curator of exhibits at Kauffman Museum, and Mark Schmidt Andres ’83, proprietor of Osage Woodworks in rural Newton.
Their challenge was to take a large, permanent exhibit and create one that would be comprehensive, yet small and simple enough to travel well (the exhibit will be on the road through 2015) and be easily installed by a handful of people in widely varying spaces.
The exhibit uses artifacts to tell three overlapping stories. A full-size bison hide painted in the “winter coup” tradition by Blackfeet artist Darrell Norman illustrates the relationship between Native Americans and the bison. A Winchester rifle, machine-shop belting and bone china represent the impact of sport hunting and use of hide and bone in industry. A three-dimensional infographic especially created for this exhibition by the Kauffman Museum-Flint Hills Design-Osage Woodworks collaboration shows the decline in Great Plains bison herds and the results of conservation efforts.
“At the beginning of the 19th century, some 30 million bison roamed the Great Plains,” says Gaeddert. “By 1884, there were only 325 bison left. If those 325 bison are represented by a one-inch bar on a two-dimensional graph, the bar for 30 million bison would be 7,692 feet tall – obviously something that can’t be accommodated in an exhibit gallery with a ten-foot ceiling.
“Mathematical calculations enabled us to configure this massive decline as three-dimensional volume,” he continues, “which both fits into a museum display and packs away neatly in our custom crating system.”
From Kauffman Museum, the Bison exhibit traveled to the Hastings (Neb.) Museum of Natural and Cultural History, where it will be on display through Jan. 7, 2011. To see a schedule, go to www.nehontheroad.org, click the “Exhibitions” button and choose “Bison.”
Left photo: The entrance to “The Bison: American Icon” at Kauffman Museum
Right, top and bottom: Scenes from the exhibit (bottom right shows a bison hide painted using traditional methods by contemporary Blackfeet artist Darrell Norman).