Altman E. Studeny
Aurora Plains Academy, Plankinton
In honor of South Dakota’s 125th Anniversary of Statehood, artist Altman E. Studeny and the students of Aurora Plains Academy, a youth residential treatment facility in the community of Plankinton, viewed their ornament design commission as an opportunity to fabricate “place-capsules” to share the natural bounty of their State with the rest of the nation. With one design celebrating the unique geography found West of the Missouri River and another representing the more agricultural East, each ornament is filled with natural materials collected from significant sites from one corner of the State to the other. Agates from the badlands beds near Fairburn, pine needles from Black Hills National Forest, sweet grass and sage from the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, rose quartz from quarries near Sioux Falls, leaves from a four-hundred year old oak in Wessington Springs, and a satchel of soil collected and combined from each of South Dakota’s sixty-six counties come together to represent the cultural and geographic diversity of the State and recognize the powerful role that same diversity will continue to play in the health and vibrancy of our rural spaces in this generation and in generations to come.