First Friday at the Great Plains Art Museum

The Great Plains Art Museum is open late Aug. 7, 5-7 p.m. with three exhibitions, light refreshments, and an insect and butterfly origami activity in the lower-level education studio.

On view:

“Jennifer Angus: Like a Moth to the Flame”
August 7-December 19, 2026 | First-Floor Galleries

Jennifer Angus creates site-specific, immersive art installations that utilize dead and dried insect specimens to create environments that are often described as otherworldly, magical, and sometimes uncomfortable. Over time, Angus’s work has evolved to consider issues related to the environment and the important role insects play within it.

“Like a Moth to the Flame” explores the Great Plains region, an ecosystem home to the Sandhill crane migration, American bison, mountain lions, foxes, badgers, and countless other mammals. Less visible, though no less essential, are the nearly 30,000 insect species that inhabit this landscape, most living unseen beneath leaves, within soil, and among grasses. This exhibition invites visitors into that hidden world, asking them to imagine themselves insect-sized, dwarfed by the sculptural works around them. Within this immersive environment, the extraordinary adaptability of insects becomes visible, revealing how these small creatures sustain the intricate balance of an interconnected ecosystem.

The opening reception for “Like a Moth to the Flame” will take place at the Great Plains Art Museum on Aug. 19, 6-8 p.m. with artist Jennifer Angus.

Angus is a professor of Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Described by “Art Daily” as “one of the top contemporary installation artists in the country,” Angus has exhibited widely across the United States, being one of nine artists selected for the landmark exhibition “WONDER” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in 2015.

This exhibition at the Great Plains Art Museum is presented in collaboration with CAREMI-the Community for Arthropod Research, Education, and Materials Innovation-a transdisciplinary initiative at UNL that brings together researchers, engineers, artists, educators, students, and community members to harness the diversity and resilience of arthropods as sources of knowledge, inspiration, and innovation. This exhibition is supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

“Moving with the Hydrocommons”
August 7-December 19, 2026 | Mezzanine Gallery

A commons is a shared resource that is vital to collective life and the relations such a resource instantiates. The “hydrocommons” extends this idea to water. “Moving with the Hydrocommons” is an exploration of water and bodies within, around, and beyond the Great Plains. Following the inquiry, “What does water teach?” and drawing from collected vignettes, personal reflections, and contextual research, a screendance was choreographed as an exploration of water across bodies-social, historical, geographic, sensorial. A companion zine shares the contributed narratives, movement and sensory scores, and other watery notations for moving with the hydrocommons.

“Moving with the Hydrocommons” is Mac Kelsey’s project as the Center for Great Plains Studies’ 2025-26 Student Storyteller in Residence. Kelsey is a teacher, artist, researcher, and PhD candidate in Educational Studies (Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education) at UNL. She focuses on developing curricula and pedagogies for technology/media studies, cultural theory, and somatic practices in education. The Student Storyteller in Residence program is funded by the Michael Farrell Fund for Student Storytelling, administered through the University of Nebraska Foundation.

“With a Little Help from Our Friends: New Perspectives on the Collection”
March 6-August 8, 2026 | Lower-level Gallery

Organized in honor of the Center for Great Plains Studies’ 50th anniversary in 2026, this exhibition highlights the important interdisciplinary focus of the Center and its core intellectual community, the Great Plains Fellows. The Fellows as a group are scholars and community members who are concerned with the past, present, and future of the Great Plains, and they support the Center and its mission in myriad ways.

For this exhibition, 20 Fellows representing diverse disciplines and all four University of Nebraska campuses were invited to select an artwork from the Great Plains Art Museum’s permanent collection and respond to it in any way they chose, whether that’s examining the work through their scholarly lens or through their own lived experiences.

https://plains.unl.edu/upcoming-exhibitions/