Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art is located in David City, Nebraska (population 2,903). The only museum in North America exclusively devoted to Agrarian Art (work pertaining to fields, lands, or their tenure) it’s happily placed in the hometown of American Regionalist artist Dale Nichols (1904-1995). Nichols’ powerful rural landscape paintings of red barns during the Great Depression are right up there, in iconography status, with Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” and Thomas Hart Benton’s “America Today.” Bone Creek Museum recently organized a delightful exhibition “Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism” which is now on view at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
While small and large museums across the nation continue to struggle to stay open, Bone Creek has found a way to keep afloat by sharing its space (a former refrigeration and plumbing shop) and its volunteers with the Butler County Veterans Museum. Call it the agrarian spirit.
