UIC Gallery 400 40th anniversary

This photograph documents Jackson Park’s 300-year-old bur oak tree on its Wooded Island. It's part of Evans’s series Ancient Prairies in which she expresses appreciation for the Midwest region’s prairie landscape and the human hands that preserve it. Evans, who has photographed the Midwestern prairie—from the lost to the recovered, from the inhabited to the ancient—for decades, notes that the bur oak conveys resilience, fortitude, and strength and is a “real inspiration in the midst of otherwise grief and anger around climate change.

Combining both aerial and ground photography, Terry Evans photographs the intricate and complex relationships between land and people, especially advocating for the land itself and with local people who experience environmental injustice. She has recently photographed a 300+ year old bur oak over several seasons. Evans is included in UIC Gallery 400’s current exhibition Earthly Visions: Inside the Climate Crisis.