Terry Evans
1944 - Present
For a large portion of her career, Terry Evans has photographed the prairie, from its natural, untouched state to its care, development, use, and abandonment. Photographing from both ground and aerial perspectives, she focuses on the issues of specific places and how ecological, economic, agricultural, and cultural patterns physically shape the landscape. As her documentation ranges from responsible land management like cattle rotation and erosion prevention to careless industrial pollution in her aerial pictures, Evans is consistently interested in the tension between specificity and abstraction. The distanced perspective offers a wide-reaching, detached, and revealing view of the landscape. Her images clearly articulate this duality inherent in the relationship between the landscape and those who live in it. Around the turn of the century, Evans began to photograph animal and plant specimens, examining the relationship between science and art and once again challenging us to define our place in nature.
Terry Evans was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1944. Her solo exhibition In Place of Prairie appeared at the Art Institute of Chicago in late 1998, and she has exhibited other works at the National Audubon Society Headquarters, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, Missouri, among others. Her work is included in many permanent collections, such as those at the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Baltimore Museum of Art. The recipient of a 1997 Guggenheim Fellowship, Evans currently lives and works in Chicago and frequently guest lectures at Columbia College Chicago.
Text © Museum of Contemporary Photography, 2018
