AMES, Iowa — Over the past thirty years, artist John Preston has watched Iowa's landscape change from his own backyard.
"Around me, there used to be other people. And those houses and stuff have gone away, and they've been knocked down," Preston said.
From his point of view, much of the reason why has been the state's evolving agriculture industry.
"It's just scale of it huge. It's different," he said.
His perspective is just one of many reflected at an art exhibit at the Brunnier Art Museum at Iowa State University. The exhibit called Compelling Ground: Landscapes, Environments, and Peoples of Iowa, features more than a dozen different artists from across the state.
Museum curator Adrienne Gennett said she designed the exhibit to help capture how Iowa's landscape is changing.
"It's a very visual representation of what's happening to the land through a work of art, which is really unique and kind of interesting way to go about it," she said.
She hopes the art will drive what she says is a much-needed conversation about the environment.
"I wanted to really talk about what that means for Iowa, and how the arts can open up conversations and have discourse about these, these issues that Iowa faces today and will continue to face if we don't start to talk about them a little bit," Gennett said. "There's a lot of conversation about the change, but also what's going to happen in the future."
Science writer Connie Mutel, who participated in a similar exhibit 25 years ago which focused on Iowa’s Loess Hills, believes art can help make tough scientific conversations easier to have.
"This exhibit was an attempt to use art to reach a diverse, a much broader audience than you would normally reach with just scientific outreach," Mutel said.
That's what Preston is hoping for too, who, these days, says he feels like a visitor in his own community.
"I feel like I'm sort of camping out in the middle of their parking lot, and I'm sort of in the way, but, you know, that's what it is today," he said.
The exhibit runs through July 23 at the Brunnier Art Museum at Iowa State University.
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