Keith Jacobshagen, “Late Spring Sky: Sequence, 2025,” 2025, Oil on canvas, 18 x 36 inches
This spring the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph will host a new retrospective exhibition of the work of Keith Jacobshagen, The Shape of the Prairie. The exhibition will explore 50 years of the artist’s career as one of the premier American landscape painters, and it will include rarely exhibited sketchbook pages containing detailed studies of the landscapes surrounding his Nebraska home. AKMA Executive Director Eric Fuson recalls his first experience with a Jacobshagen painting:
Seeing his paintings as a young artist in college had a profound effect. His handling of color and composition were unlike anything I had seen. Capturing the landscape at twilight with fires burning off the fields to make way for a new crop was a combination of timing, skill and observation. I could smell the smoke and feel the cool air as the sun went down. The experience stays with me over 40 years later.
“I’m a Midwesterner who has stayed put to make sense of where I live,” Jacobshagen says. A native of Wichita, Kansas, he studied art at KCAI and received an MFA from the University of Kansas. In 1968 he began teaching at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This region of Nebraska would become the home base and near-exclusive focus for his work. His paintings present the fields and vistas of the Midwestern plains with a low horizon that leaves room to fill the canvas with sky.
The landscapes are built on the specific weather, light, clouds, and shapes of the surrounding countryside, but the resulting paintings transfigure these expanses and skies into metaphors for universal human experiences, moods, and feelings. As Fuson explains, “His work is quietly powerful, tapping into our own personal experience to see the beauty of the landscape through the artist’s eyes.”
For over 50 years Jacobshagen has amassed documents of the constantly shifting beauty of the Midwest in his sketches and studies, often with notes about weather conditions, time of day, even news bulletins and current events written in the margins. These studies become canvases in his studio, where he combines the fleeting impressions from both paper and his mind into finished images that are timeless. This exhibition will allow viewers to see how these notes and sketches become large, finished paintings. The combination, additions, and subtractions from the sketchbooks leaves the viewer with an image that is at once familiar and real but also deeply personal and imaginative.
The Shape of the Prairie is on view from May 16 through August 16. Information about exhibitions and other upcoming events at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum can be found at albrecht-kemper.org.
Financial assistance for this project has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency, and the St. Joseph Convention and Visitors Bureau.
