The Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Missouri, will host a retrospective exhibition titled "The Shape of the Prairie" for American landscape painter Keith Jacobshagen, opening May 16 and running through August 16. The show spans 50 years of Jacobshagen's career, featuring rarely exhibited sketchbook pages alongside finished oil and watercolor paintings that capture the skies and plains of his Nebraska home.
The exhibition matters because it offers a rare, in-depth look at the working process of a major regional landscape painter, showing how his detailed field sketches and notes evolve into finished works. Jacobshagen's ability to transform specific Midwestern weather and light into universal metaphors for human experience underscores the enduring power of place-based art, while the inclusion of sketchbooks provides insight into artistic practice rarely seen by the public.