Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship.

Before Dreams Are The Last Place We Find You will open at Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods on Sunday, September 7th. This exhibition is an ephemeral, site-specific installation by Cheshewalla, and will be created during her August residency at the Center for Humans & Naturein Libertyville, Illinois.

Once the work is created, it will be carefully transported to Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods for installation. Because this work is time and season reliant, what it will look like remains to be seen.

Cheshewalla’s practice is built on an ethos that views all beings as sacred, with their own agency, and with a right to complete their cycle of life and death. She works mainly with naturally shed material and seeds that are ready for collecting. At the end of installations, each being is returned to its original place in nature where it was gathered, closing the circle of creation.

A selection of Cheshewalla’s work will be published by the digital branch of Humans & Nature Press. The Digital Press celebrates diverse sources of wisdom about what it means to be human in an interconnected world.