Cady Rutter
Rourke Art Gallery + Museum

Native plants on the micro prairie on the grounds of the Rourke Art Gallery.

(ABOVE) “Gallery in Bloom” exhibit at the Rourke, 2024.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Appreciation of the native prairie is coming to the Rourke Art Gallery + Museum in coming months, thanks to a newly forged partnership between the Moorhead art facility and the Longspur Prairie Fund.
The Red River Valley prairie has already taken root at the museum at the corner of Main Avenue and Fifth Street. Three small tracts of ground – micro-prairies – have bloomed on the east side of east of the 110-year-old former federal courthouse and post office each summer since 2018, thanks to past collaboration of the two nonprofit organizations. The new partnership promises both funding for related exhibits and education at the museum and a prominent venue for the fund’s programming, aimed at fostering the experiences, insights and pleasures found in the native landscapes of the region.
“The Rourke will host Longspur Prairie Fund’s work by way of exhibits, educational activities, grants and sustainability initiatives,” Cady explains. “We’ll be exploring and amplifying the common ground between the arts and our shared ecology.” The fund dates back to 2009.
Museum director Jonathan Rutter suggests that the collaboration is a chance to help in the public conversation of the environment and climate: “Those topics have been treated lately as purely a political matter. One thing art can do is appreciate them as a human, not a partisan, issue.”
The Longspur Prairie effect has been seeded throughout coming events and exhibitions. Among the art/prairie subjects in coming months: Artist Chris Mortenson’s upcoming exhibition, “The Air, thin and eager like this,” opening April 11; the Rourke’s Gallery in Bloom event April 26, with floral installations by Botanica Floristry; and the theme of the 66th annual Midwestern Exhibition – “To Make a Prairie.” Opening June 18, it includes a prairie exhibit in the children’s gallery drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and a workshop and other events throughout the exhibition.
“Art makes the environmental message more relatable,” Cady notes. “It’s another way for our community to understand the importance of our landscape … to become engaged in the fund’s mission in a more relatable.”
To learn more about the collaboration, visit https://www.therourke.org/longspur.html/