David Owsley Museum of Art Exhibitions

Indiana Pastoral: The Photography of Lamar Richcreek

September 18 – December 19, 2025

Please note: DOMA will be closed October 4–7 for Ball State's Fall Break, and November 26–December 1 for Thanksgiving.

Ball State alumnus Lamar Richcreek (1947–2018) earned a degree in business administration in 1969. After a 24-year career in banking, he launched a second career in photography. In his 50s, he returned to school, earned an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and taught for 20 years as an adjunct professor of photography at the Herron School of Art + Design in Indianapolis. His success as a fine art photographer resulted in a solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2002.

Like the pastoral genre in literature, art, and music, Lamar Richcreek’s photographs often present nostalgic visual stories of Indiana’s agricultural landscape inflected by his business perspective. He once wrote in an artist’s statement, “My views of the landscape, agriculture and the family farm are romanticized ones, originating from childhood experiences and visits to my grandfather’s farm in Central Indiana. In the aftermath of World War II and during the Cold War years, the Midwest saw the creation of global markets for farm products and the development of technological advances that were invented to increase production for improved and insured profitability, all of which transformed American farming. These transformations favored agri-businesses and multi-national corporations, thereby altering the viability of the traditional family farm. This change occurred over time without my realizing its impact.”

Lamar Richcreek’s photography testifies to the effects of the post-war economic-agricultural boom in the Midwest through his images with surreal settings, witty juxtapositions, and sublime scenery. A recent donation of art from his wife, Jean Richcreek (1948–2025), to the David Owsley Museum of Art allows subsequent generations to view the corporatization of farming in Indiana through Lamar Richcreek’s creative lens. We are also grateful to Ball State alumnus Thomas Murphy (‘69) for his recent philanthropic investment in DOMA in memory of Lamar and Jean Richcreek.  

Image: Lamar Richcreek (American, 1947–2018), Untitled from the Series Ideal Farm, 2004, chromogenic color print, gift of Jean Richcreek, 2024.006.011.

Nora Krug: Belonging

February 19 – June 3, 2026

Please note: DOMA will be closed February 28 – March 9 for Ball State's Spring Break.

“Images have political power, and they can change the way we think. Illustrating is also an act of witnessing: images compel us to notice and investigate, and at their best, they shed light on and at the same time critically confront the subjects they engage with.”

—Nora Krug

Award-winning artist Nora Krug’s powerful graphic memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home, and her more recent book publication, an illustrated edition of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, are the focus of an exhibition at the David Owsley Museum of Art. Each book takes inspiration from the artist’s personal experiences as well as the events of history through engagement with deep topical research, museum artifacts and flea market finds, vintage photography, oral histories, and personal conversations, with the goal of trying to understand, reckon with, and depict the past in order to take something revelatory and useful away from it.

The exhibition was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, and curated by Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, Chief Curator.

Image: Cover illustration for Belonging, by Nora Krug © 2018 Nora Krug. All Rights Reserved.

The David Owsley Museum of Art has proudly hosted engaging exhibitions over the years for our University community and other diverse audiences to enjoy.

View Past Exhibitions