The Great Open: Photographs from North Dakota

In 2019, the Museum commissioned Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb to create a body of photographs that probes the essence of North Dakota’s current landscape, people, and way of life. When the pandemic delayed the project, the artists returned to North Dakota in 2022 to complete the commission, which was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

As a fellow Dakotan, Rebecca Norris Webb takes a poetic and intimate look at the natural world of North Dakota. Her work often explores those places where the natural world and one’s inner landscape meet, especially during times of change, upheaval, and shifting weathers—both meteorological and metaphysical. Her storytelling serves as a map for when one’s loss seems to have its own geography, most notedly with her book and NDMOA exhibition, My Dakota: An Elegy for My Brother Who Died Unexpectedly. Drawn to the great openness of the mixed grass prairie and the broken, surreal beauty of the South Dakota badlands while grieving for her brother, Norris Webb began photographing in the North Dakota badlands.

Alex Webb, raised predominantly in New England, has been described as a “shadow sociologist” by writer Pico Iyer. The author of some 20 books—including Amazon, Istanbul, La Calle: Photographs from Mexico, and the collaborative book and NDMOA exhibition Violet Isle: A Duet of Photographs from Cuba with Rebecca Norris Webb—he has photographed in more than 50 countries and 200 cities around the world. Webb takes a more global and often urban approach to North Dakota.

To create a more multi-layered portrait of North Dakota, the creative couple have interwoven their work in this exhibition. The Great Open is their seventh collaboration, including projects about a country (Cuba), a city (Rochester, NY); a borough (Brooklyn); a town (Wellfleet, MA); and now a state (North Dakota).

The Walter Piehl Gallery is located in the Northwest Arts Center on the lower level of the Gordon B. Olson Library, with its own entrance on the south side of the library. It is open TWThF, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 1-5 p.m. and by special arrangement. It is closed holidays.

The Great Open is made possible through the North Dakota Museum of Art and the Rural Arts Initiative, with funding by the State of North Dakota. The Northwest Arts Center is supported in part by a grant from the North Dakota Council on the Arts, which receives funding from the state legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts. Exhibition and visiting artists are also supported by Minot State University’s Cultural and Intellectual Engagement Council, the Northwest Arts Center, Flat Tail Press and the Hartnett Hall Gallery.