Shield Ranch lies in the heart of Barton Creek watershed, critical to the Edwards Aquifer, a major water source for Central Texas. Blake Murden, the 6,400-acre property’s CEO and manager, was driving us over the expanse in his pickup, stopping to show me and two curators from Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Maggie Adler and Spencer Wigmore, clear turquoise streams teeming with Guadalupe bass and a vast habitat restoration in progress.
This was fall of 2020, my first exploratory trip for an exhibition commissioned by Adler and Wigmore, whom I had first met after lending work for a group show at the Carter. The museum has a history of engaging contemporary artists in projects related to Texas. Much of the state was at one time prairie, but most of it has been plowed, overgrazed, carved up, and developed. Remnants of that once-dominant ecosystem—complex communities of native grasses and wildflower species—are rare. In the Gulf Coast region, for instance, once several million acres of contiguous coastal tallgrass prairie where bison roamed, only a few hundred acres remain.
The exhibition they proposed, one focused on these grasslands, thrilled me. Over my decades as an artist,
