Future Exhibitions
High Strangeness: Encounters with the Unexplained in Kansas and Beyond
May 28-August 31, 2025
The exhibition High Strangeness: Encounters with the Unexplained in Kansas and Beyond at the Salina Art Center features the audio-visual installation Witnessing (2000) by the pioneering artist Susan Hiller (1940-2019), one of the fist contemporary artists to engage seriously with the topic of the paranormal. Alongside her work, the show presents photographs and multi-media sculptures by Kansas artist Hugo Zelada Romero. While Hiller's audio recordings document encounters with the unexplained from all over the world, Zelada Romero's photographs track UFO sightings and unexplained incidents in Kansas, a hot spot for such phenomena. Zelada Romero's work also explores a history of uncommon metaphysical practices in the state and the role that pop cultural representations play in "high strangeness" lore. Both artists investigate in their immersive works what happens when we take first-person accounts of “high strangeness” incidents seriously, ultimately inviting visitors to interrogate our own ideas and approaches to trust, belief, and living with uncertainty.
Curated by independent curator Ksenya Gurshtein. Exhibition catalogue will be available for sale at the Salina Art Center.
Have YOU had an encounter with the unexplained? You can submit anonymously or use your real name. We will gather these accounts until JUNE 15, 2025. Afterwards, a selection of the submitted accounts will be presented in a stage reading at a Salina venue some time in July or August -- the details of the date, time, and venue are TBD, so stay tuned and please check back on this page or by following the Salina Art Center's social media.
Please include some details of your experience: What was the nature of the experience? What did you see, hear, feel, etc.? Where and when did it happen? How long did it last? How old were you? What impact did the experience have on you? Has your thinking about this experience changed over the years? Are there other things you think are important to share?
Thank you for your participation! Please click the button on your right to share it with us.
Hugo Zelada Romero, Untitled, 2023, digital photograph
Tales of Dakota Sandstone | Terry Evans
May 28-August 31, 2025
For sixty years I have known this pasture, but I didn’t really know it. I mainly ignored it, seeing it as rather boring overgrazed pasture being overtaken by Eastern red cedar trees. And besides, I was really only interested in photographing rich pure prairie that had never been grazed or changed in any way. A perfect ecosystem could be my teacher, but not this rough pasture. How preposterous. Here is this pasture, prairie grasses and forbs on top, grasses chewed off but returning after the burn, and underneath it and on top is Dakota Formation sandstone everywhere. We can see it now that the cedar trees are gone, cut, dragged into piles and burned..
Look at this rock! It is at least one hundred million years old. Dakota Formation in this pasture is part of what holds us up, part of the ground we stand on. There it is having displaced the earth’s surface, rocks scattered over the ground. I’d been looking at the surface of ground, prairie ecosystems, for almost fifty years. Even now, I could not see the ninety- five to one hundred- million- year old sandstone if it hadn’t shifted through the surface. Rex Buchanan, Kansas State Geologist emeritus, says that this land was at sea level at time of deposition. We are seeing an old beach surface river channel in the ripples of rock. Dakota dips slightly to the west and is underneath limestone and then comes back up as it gets near the Rocky Mountains, which are some twenty million years younger than this Dakota Formation sandstone.
My husband, Sam and Rex and Bud Sullivan, our friend for fifty years who knows this pasture well, and I look for Dakota Formation outcroppings. We drive over the rough pasture in Bud’s ancient jeep. Along with the coppers, browns, oranges and greens of ground and grasses and rock, I catch glimpses of white. Circles of white ash where piles of cut cedar trees were burned, an occasional sun- bleached white cattle bone, countless white golf balls hit into the pasture by the neighbor, a flock of white pelicans flying past overhead.
When I first started photographing a pristine prairie back in 1978, I thought that if only I could understand the biological structure of a prairie ecosystem, I might understand the structure of the universe. But now I wonder if looking at anything long enough and hard enough might reveal the structure of the universe? My friend, Chris Kempes, biophysicist at the Santa Fe Institute, and his colleagues are looking for equations that would describe everything from the tiniest cell to each star in the universe, Dakota sandstone included. We are all connected.
Terry Evans
March 31, 2025