"Three Ways Home" - ​Photography by Lewis Ableidinger, Sarah Christianson, and Chris Franz 
On view in the Main and East Galleries from 11 Sep – 25 Oct 2026

Member Preview
          6:30 to 8 p.m. Friday 11 September 2026

Public Opening
          1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Saturday 12 September 2026
          Artist gallery talk at 2 p.m.

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     Sarah Christianson says goodbye to four generations on a family farm; Chris Franz looks back to his formative years in the town of his childhood; and Lewis Ableidinger lives in the present in an open space among a population that is dwindling—this is the work you’ll be seeing as you visually travel with Sarah, Chris, and Lewis as they consider their way home.
     Through their introductory photographs, they offer a starting point for your journey.
     Sarah presents the iconic farm structure, the regal Dutch style barn, set so comfortably under a procession of fluffy, pristine clouds that, in part, soften the emotional pain of loss.
     The jagged stark tree centered in the frame, sits like father time, partially shielding Chris with the passage of time from the place and name of his home. The car leaving may well belong to Chris.
     The dusk light in Lewis’s image signals the end of one day and one’s days, yet a glimmer of light shines from the elevator suggesting the presence of life and hope within that place.
​     All three of these fine photographers generate their own symbols and metaphors to illuminate their stories of home.

     Enjoy.

Wayne Gudmundson
Bad Medicine Lake 
Minnesota

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Lewis Ableidinger, 'Abandoned House, Oliver County, ND,' Archival Inkjet Print, 2023

     Lewis Ableidinger (b. 1983) grew up on a farm near Kensal, ND. He attended Minnesota State University Moorhead where he was able to study with photographer Wayne Gudmundson and graduated in 2007 with a BS in Graphic Communications and a Bachelor of Music. In 2023, Lewis published his first monograph, Driving Through Flyover Country, which documented the landscape and people of the Midwest. Lewis has had his photography appear in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Lewis lives in Harvey, ND, where he works as a locomotive engineer and freelance photographer.

Artist Statement

     When I tell people I’m from North Dakota they usually either comment about the movie Fargo (which is set almost entirely in Minnesota), or ask about Mt. Rushmore, which I have to remind them is in South Dakota. Eric Sevareid, a correspondent and commentator for CBS News, was a North Dakota native, having grown up in Velva, about twenty miles southeast of Minot, and had similar experiences. Sevareid devoted a few paragraphs to Velva in his autobiography Not So Wild A Dream and described what usually happened when someone would ask where he was from: “‘North Dakota,’ [and] they would merely nod politely and change the subject, having no point of common reference.” He described North Dakota as a “large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind.” Sevareid, as a child looking through a geography book, related that there were pictures of Chicago’s skyline, Florida’s palms, and the redwoods of California; for North Dakota there was one small snapshot of a waving wheat field. Sevareid asked of that photo, “Was that all there was, all we had?” He continued, “I acquired a sense of having no identity in the world, of inhabiting, by some cruel mistake, an outland, a lost and forgotten place upon the far horizon of my country. Where is [North Dakota’s] written chapter in the long and varied American story?”


     Even today, North Dakota remains a large, rectangular blank spot among most people. With my photography I’m trying to fill in that rectangular blank spot and write some of the chapter on North Dakota’s place in the American story. The waving wheat field Sevareid described as a “snapshot” is just that, a snapshot. Beyond the frame of that photo is so much more, a varied landscape dotted with unique communities and inhabited by people with hopes and dreams, troubles and sorrows. My photography documents the state as a whole, from corner to corner,
from the flat farmland of the Red River Valley to the rough grazing lands in the west, and everything in between, with a particular focus on small communities that make up the majority of North Dakota. While it would be impossible to fully photograph every part of the state, the images presented here give a sense of place, of what North Dakota is really like through the land and the people who inhabit it.

     — Lewis Ableidinger, 2026

Lewis Ableidinger, 'Blackbirds near Upham, ND,' Archival Inkjet Print, 2021

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Sarah Christianson, 'Christianson Farm, August 2007,' Gelatin Silver Print, 2007

     Sarah Christianson (b. 1982) is a visual artist and educator whose work is rooted in rural North Dakota. She grew up on a four-generation family farm near Cummings (an hour north of Fargo) and developed a lifelong affinity for the stark beauty and vast scale of the Great Plains. Despite moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009, Christianson continues to document the Midwest through long-term photographic projects and artist books. She uses aerial photography, analog processes, and her family’s archive to evoke a strong sense of place, history, and time in her work.
     Christianson earned a BFA from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2005 and an MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2009 (both in photography). Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in the collections of Duke University, the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen, and several institutions in the Midwest. She has received grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and the Center for Photographic Art. Her first monograph, Homeplace, was published by Daylight Books in 2013.  
     Since 2011, Christianson has been an adjunct professor of photography at City College of San Francisco. She currently lives in Oakland, CA, with her husband Jesse Mullan and their three cats. 

Artist Statement

     "The search for homeplace is the mythical search for the axis mundi, for a center, for some place to stand, for something to hang on to."
          —Lucy Lippard, from The Lure of the Local
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     Home, for me, is a 1,200-acre farm near Cummings, in the Red River Valley of eastern North Dakota. Its original 160 acres were homesteaded (on the traditional lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe) in 1884 by my great-great-grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant. Over time, the farm grew, and it passed down the family line from father to son. My parents were the fourth—and last—generation to farm our land, as my siblings and I chose other careers. When my parents retired in 2018, they auctioned off all the equipment and leased out the fields to other local farmers.
     What happens to this history and our legacy on the land now that we are no longer farming? How does one reconcile the weight of the past and its traditions when new, diverging paths are being forged? What will we remember about this place? What will the land remember about us? For the land is a palimpsest upon which our stories are marked and erased, over and over again.  
     I have grappled with these questions for the better part of twenty years, searching for answers through photography. I thought I was documenting the familiar landmarks of barns and shelterbelts, the never-ending fields of crops, the cycles of the seasons, the patterns of our family life. But all along, I was composing a love letter—to the past, the present, and the future: no matter what, the farm will always be my center, my homeplace.

     — Sarah Christianson, 2026

Sarah Christianson, 'Barn, Christianson Farm, June 2007,' Silver Gelatin, 2007

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Chris Franz, 'Practice field behind the high school,' Archival Pigment Print, 2023

     Chris Franz was born in Mandan, North Dakota, in 1985. Working primarily in the Upper Midwest, he creates long-term documentary projects that explore place, landscape, and the passage of time.
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     Franz received his BA in Photojournalism from Minnesota State Moorhead and his MA in Photojournalism from Ohio University. He taught photography and visual communication at the University of Mary for ten years and now lives in Moorhead, Minnesota, with his wife and fellow artist, Bev, and their dog, Jo.

Artist Statement

Here is Where the Map Should Fold

     Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart.
          ― John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)
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     In 2015, I moved back to my hometown of Mandan, North Dakota, after spending ten years away. I began photographing almost immediately, while the memories of my childhood were still vivid. The experience was uncanny, as if I had walked into my family's photo album.
     Over time my memories began to compete with the place in front of me, because it was not exactly as I remembered it. I realized I was photographing two places simultaneously, the Mandan I knew and the Mandan I was rediscovering.
     Change came incrementally. Riverbanks eroded. A tree was cut down next to the pond. A bus stop was removed on Sunset Drive, but a slab of cement remained. It wasn't until I began looking back through the photographs, years into the project, that I realized how much had changed.
     I have now spent as much time photographing Mandan as I once spent away from it.

     — Chris Franz, 2026

Chris Franz, 'Lewis Rd NW,' Archival Pigment Print, 2016