Taking in some art in Lindsborg, Kansas is always a delightful way to spend a day, and my recent visit to the Smoky Valley Arts & Folklife Center reminded me of all the best qualities this community has to offer. SVAFC has a warm, accessible vibe. It functions as a community center among the shops and restaurants on Main Street in downtown Lindsborg, and its small gallery features exceptional regional artistic talent. 

The cozy presentation is as comfortable as viewing art in a friend’s living room. SVAFC’s current exhibition "In Connection With," on view through July 27, features the work of Geraldine Craig and Nelson Smith, two artists who are both deeply anchored in the creative communities of central Kansas and connected across the globe through their practices and travels.

Geraldine “Gerry” Craig’s mixed media work takes many different formats, but “is rooted to textiles, memory, and the visual language of traditional cloth,” according to her artist statement. She creates various series based on in-depth research of communities, movements, geographies, and dates. For instance, she explores the American suffrage movement across a number of works in the exhibition. 

In “Suffrage: Statehood,” Craig uses her collage aesthetic, layering the facts of her subject and expertly manipulating materials. This small tapestry maps one slice of northeast Kansas. The plane is punctuated with graphics from historic suffrage campaigns and flower motifs. Dates and snatches of headlines overlap and intersect at all angles, inviting non-linear, free-floating reading. She creates depth by layering high and low contrast techniques and surfaces — printing, piecing, embroidery, neutral and bold colors — with words and numbers revealing themselves slowly. With this approach, the artist seems more interested in generating curiosity for her subject, Kansas’ suffrage history, than in following a specific narrative thread.

Another of Craig’s series on exhibit is titled “Earl Project,” named for a relative who was a World War II veteran and suffered from PTSD. This exhibition contains “Normandy 1, 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3,” which are excerpts from this larger project. According to the artist's website, in these pieces she uses “photocopy, fire, and simple printing techniques” to tell “indirect stories colored by trauma and dark memories.” She memorializes personal contributions to the larger war effort by stitching and printing names, snatches of stories, and dates on small squares of cotton in a stream-of-conscious layering. Each of these cotton squares retains the patterns of folding and staining with sharp contours that are burned into the cloth like dark scars against the bleached white ground. Here — and in many other works — Craig capitalizes masterfully on fabric’s ability to transport the viewer as a holder of intimate memory, but also through associations based on colors, textures, and techniques.

Nelson Smith also displays artwork from several different series in the gallery. In his artist statement he explains how he uses a variety of approaches and media, blending “diagrammatic imagery with natural and man-made forms” as he finds connections and order among complicated and randomized subjects. Sometimes these themes are explored in a diptych format, utilizing contrasting twin panels. 

In “The Shape of Risk,” Smith tackles a reoccurring subject: an overwhelming tangle of communication wires mounted to a telephone pole. According to the artist's website, these pieces are “based on wire configurations in Southeast Asia” that Smith photographed during his many trips there. This piece features meticulous graphite drawing in one panel and gestural abstract diagrams in metallic paint in the other. The connections between the two panels are revealed slowly, and the artist seems to invite you to study his mapped structure as one possible circuit in the chaos. His purposeful use of conductive materials — including graphite and metallic paint — also hints at his faith in transmission across difficult divides.

The show also contains small, concise pieces. In “Shelter in Place,” Smith layers delicate rendering and hypothetical diagrams in one diminutive panel. In this painting, the subject reads as a hollow of dried grass, radiating out in a loose nest formation. This random structure is overlayed with dashed lines, spirals, and cloud formations that could almost be seen as graphics in a weather forecast. Throughout this nest he stashes fragments of language. Some are broken conversation: “IN SO FAR AS,” “IN NO Time.” Others are clever mishmashes of word play: “STRUGGLE/SNUGGLE,” “HUNKER/BUNKER.” The specific connection to navigating the COVID-19 pandemic is there, of course. But I get the sense that Smith sees the pandemic as just one of the many precarious entanglements we must negotiate in our globally tethered and layered lives.

These two artists’ work complements each other in many ways. They use similar color schemes, techniques, and presentation, and have a similar curiosity about media. Both have an underlying interest in mapping subjects and paying attention to language, fonts, facts, and figures.

But with contrasting approaches, Gerry Craig and Nelson Smith highlight two ways of knowing the histories and relationships of our environment. A keen observer can research very specific source material, working outward with materials towards intersecting relationships. Or one might start with mundane layers and tease apart associations that are personal. In both cases, Craig and Smith arrive at poignant locations. Give yourself plenty of time with these thoughtful explorations.

The Details

"In Connection With," an exhibition of works by Geraldine Craig and Nelson Smith
July 4-27, 2025, at the Smoky Valley Arts & Folklife Center, 114 1/2 S. Main Street in Lindsborg, Kansas

The Smoky Valley Arts and Folklife Center will host a closing reception for “In Connection With” at 2 p.m. on Sunday, July 27.

Learn more about Geraldine Craig and Nelson Smith.

Kevin Kelly is an artist and educator. He lives and paints in Wichita and teaches art at Butler County Community College in El Dorado, Kansas.

Support Kansas arts writing

The SHOUT is a Wichita-based independent newsroom focused on artists living and working in Kansas. We're partly supported by the generosity of our readers, and every dollar we receive goes directly into the pocket of a contributing writer, editor, or photographer. Click here to support our work with a tax-deductible donation.