May 19, 2021
"I'm Still Here: Changed, Growing, Healing"
The latest exhibit at The Journey Museum and Learning Center is from Evans Flammond Sr., titled, “I’m Still Here: Changed, Growing, Healing.” This exhibit contains various mediums featuring ledger art, paintings, a painted buffalo hide, and a painted buffalo skull.
Over the past year, Evans lost family and friends, but he chooses to continue on his path. In describing his work, he says it’s a message to other artists in every stage of their career not to hold themselves back. “The sky is the limit with whatever you want to do and create with your own two hands to share with the world.”
The Steinway Piano
August 4 - September 30, 2021
SEE THIS HISTORIC PIANO FOR A LIMITED TIME!
The Journey Museum and Learning Center has been chosen by Historic Rapid City to display a piano originally owned by the Halley family. The piano will be on display at the museum during the months of August and September 2021.
The following statements come from Terry Tullis, whose family purchased the piano.
This upright Steinway piano was manufactured in 1885 and came to Rapid City by oxcart soon thereafter, about a year before the railroad. It was owned by the Halley family.
Edward L. Tullis and his wife Lucy Meryl Fogle Tullis purchased it from the Halleys sometime after Ed and Meryl came to Rapid City in 1934. Ed was chairman of the Geology and Geological Engineering department at the SD School of Mines, and Meryl was a psychologist who taught some courses at the School of Mines and also did private counseling.
The piano is being donated in August 2021 by the two sons of Ed and Meryl, Terry E. Tullis and Alan L. Tullis, and Terry’s former wife Jan Tullis. Ed played the piano occasionally and Terry and Alan used it for their piano lessons as children in the 1950’s. They remember it being tuned by Mr. William E. Snyder who was blind. There is a sticker inside the piano saying that one of the times he worked on it was September 8, 1933, namely while it was still owned by the Halleys. Alan now lives in Aurora, CO, and Terry and Jan each live in Providence, RI. In 1970 Terry and Jan moved the piano by rental truck from Rapid City to Providence, adding it to a load of furniture they were moving from Los Angeles to Providence. After 50 years in Providence, the piano has once again come to the Black Hills, this time by commercial movers.
In July 2021 the piano was appraised by the Avery Piano Company of Providence, RI. The appraiser was surprised at what good condition the piano was in, 136 years after its manufacture. Among other observations was the fact that there is no rust on the strings or tuning pegs and the soundboard has no cracks.
The Tullis and Halley families are so pleased with this outcome and are most grateful to Historic Rapid City and the Journey Museum for receiving it.
Sept. 22, 2021 to Jan. 16, 2022
The Sioux Indian Museum, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, features an exhibit of watercolor paintings by Arthur Short Bull. Mr. Short Bull has spent much of the last decade studying and painting the birds native to the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires) homeland. As part of this project, he researches and collects the original Lakota names of these birds, and the origin stories behind those names. The exhibition is free and open to the public.
Arthur Short Bull was raised in a traditional family on the Pine Ridge Reservation. His great-grandfather was Grant Short Bull, uncle to famed artist and historian, Amos Bad Heart Bull and younger brother of He Dog, a companion of Crazy Horses’. Driven by a desire to help his people, he attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and became a substance abuse counselor. He worked as a counselor for 14 years until he left the field to pursue his career as an artist.
It was Oglala Lakota artist Andrew Standing Soldier who first told young Mr. Short Bull that being an artist and painter could be a viable career. Unsure of his talent, he began to experiment with different media, and to seek the advice of more established artists in the Omaha area, where he lived at the time. After experimenting with acrylic and oil painting, drawing in various media, and clay sculpting, Mr. Short Bull eventually found his voice in watercolor painting.
Searching for a subject to paint, he settled on a theme of the Wounded Knee Massacre, inspired by the Oscar Howe painting, Bigfoot at Wounded Knee. During a visit to the site of Wounded Knee for the 100th anniversary of the massacre, Mr. Short Bull realized that these victims were not nameless people, and that each had a story to tell. He decided to do a painting and poem for each person who had been there, those that died as well as those who survived. The project is ongoing, he has documented over 171 people to date, however it has taken a heavy emotional and mental toll on Mr. Short Bull. He realized that to make it through this project he would have to learn how to paint other subjects.
In 2006, the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark expedition led Mr. Short Bull to research the expedition and read William Clark’s journals. He learned that the expedition had killed thousands of animals in the name of science as they “discovered” new species. This made him angry since he knew these animals were already known to Lakotas, who also had names for them. It was this knowledge, along with an innate love of nature, that led him to begin painting birds and animals. Using Father Buechel’s Lakota dictionary, Mr. Short Bull began learning the Lakota names of animals. This led to a rediscovery of his own culture and language, as well as an awareness of how much of the language was lost. During his research he learned of a story about a man who could understand the songs of the birds, and that they spoke in Lakota. For this reason, Mr. Short Bull titles all his artwork in English and Lakota and tries to share the stories behind the Lakota names to preserve that knowledge.
Mr. Short Bull has received numerous honors and recognitions including: a 2021 Artist in Residency Fellowship at Crazy Horse Monument, a 2009 First Peoples Fund Business in Leadership Fellowship recipient, and a 2006 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Program Fellowship, for a project that utilized his Wounded Knee series of paintings and poems as a vehicle to promote Lakota culture and history. Agate Fossil Beds National Monument selected Mr. Short Bull to paint one of the official White House ornaments for the 2007 Christmas tree used in the Blue Room.
Prices for the artwork can be obtained by contacting The Journey Museum Store at (605) 394-2201. To purchase artwork after the exhibit closes, please contact Arthur Short Bull through his website at http://dawnhawk.org/index.html.
No Child's Play
November 8-12
The Journey Museum and Learning Center will host a traveling exhibit, “No Child’s Play” from Nov. 8-12, 2021.
The public is invited to the opening reception sponsored by the “Jewish Interfaith Council” on Monday, Nov. 8 at 5 p.m. Enjoy light appetizers and a discussion about the exhibit. Guests may tour the exhibit at no charge through Nov. 12. On Thursday, Nov. 11, the exhibit will be available from 1:30-5 p.m. This exhibit is curated and developed by Yad Vashem and on loan from the American Society for Yad Vashem.
Schools and other groups may also register for a Zoom educational program about the exhibit, presented by Marlene W. Yahalom, PhD, Director of Education for the American Society for Yad Vashem.
This powerful exhibit opens a window into the world of children during the Holocaust. It does not focus on history, statistics, or descriptions of physical violence. Instead, images of toys, games, artwork, diaries, and poems highlight personal stories. Children held onto their youth by creating a different reality from that which surrounded them. Approximately 1.5 million Jewish children perished in the Holocaust, and this exhibit is a testimony to their creativity and emotional resiliency.
The title “No Child’s Play” is taken from a quote by the renowned pediatrician and educator Dr. Janusz Korczak, director of Warsaw’s progressive and democratic orphanage, whose declarations of children’s rights were posthumously adopted by the United Nations as “Rights of the Child.” Korczak took care of hundreds of children before and during the war and recognized the value of games and play to children. In 1942, refusing to leave his wards, he was sent with them to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp.
