Exhibition Opening Lecture: Knowing the West

Join us in the Great Hall for an opening conversation centered on the exhibition Knowing the West, the first major traveling exhibition to embrace and examine how people see the American West. Presented by co-curators Mindy Besaw and Jami Powell with invited guests, don’t miss the untold stories of the West. See you there!

Tickets are $15 ($10/members). Reserve your spot online or with Guest Services at (479) 657-2335 today.

Mindy N. Besaw, PhD, is the director of Research, Fellowships, and University Partnerships and curator of American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Prior to this post, Besaw was curator of art at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West.

Jami C. Powell (Osage), PhD, is the associate director of Curatorial Affairs and curator of Indigenous Art at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, where she also serves as a senior lecturer in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department.

Mr. Michael Grauer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of Kansas; the Master of Arts in art history from Southern Methodist University; and the Master of Arts in history from West Texas A&M University. He began his career at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1984 and has been a museum curator for 36 years. From 1987 to 2018 he was curator of art and Western heritage at Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, at Canyon, Texas. He has curated over 160 exhibitions on Western art, culture, and history, authored over 75 publications, and appeared in ten documentaries in the US and in Germany. He taught art history and Western American Studies at West Texas A&M University from 1999 to 2017.

He was the University of Kansas Kress Foundation Department of Art History’s distinguished alumnus for 2012. He authored Rounded Up in Glory: Frank Reaugh, Texas Renaissance Man in 2016, the biography of the only artist to paint the famous cattle drives while they were happening. In September 2021, his book, Making a Hand: The Art of H. D. Bugbee, received the Western Heritage Wrangler Award for Best Western Art Book for 2020. He was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame at Dodge City, Kansas, as Cowboy Historian for 2021. He is a member of the Charles M. Russell catalogue raisonne committee, president of the Western Cattle Trail Association, and is on the research committee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. In 2024 he received the William and Linda Reaves Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art (CASETA)and was image editor and co-author of Making the Unknown Known: Women in Early Texas Art, 1860s–1960s from Texas A&M University Press.

Chelsea M. Herr, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is the inaugural Jack & Maxine Zarrow Curator for Indigenous Art and Culture at Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work at Gilcrease is focused on advocacy, inclusion, and self-representation of Indigenous peoples and cultures in museum spaces. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Seattle Pacific University and a Master of Arts in Art History with an emphasis on Native studies from the University of California, Riverside. In 2020, Herr earned a doctorate in Native American Art History from the University of Oklahoma, writing a dissertation on Indigenous Futurisms in the work of Native North American artists. She recently guest curated Past Forward: Indigenous Art from Gilcrease Museum with co-curator Janet Berlo, which is traveling across the country through 2025.

Kirsten Pai Buick is a Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches in the areas of the visual culture of the first British Empire; U.S. art to 1940; African American art; representations of the American landscape and representations of enslavement; and the history of women as patrons and collectors of the arts. She has published extensively on African American art and been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellowship at Williams College. In 2015, she was chosen as the eleventh recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for excellence in African American Art. In 2022, she was named College Art Association Distinguished Scholar. Her book, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the ‘Problem’ of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject, is published by Duke University Press. Her second book, In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism is in progress.