Don Pollack
b. 1958, Chicago, IL
East of the Yellowstone: Opening May 10, 2024
Over a hundred years ago, my grandfather registered as a homesteader with the department of the Interior Land office in Buffalo, Wyoming. Building a cabin on a remote 640-acre plat, he worked as a ranch hand at the neighboring Tipperary Ranch thirty miles east of the Big Horn Mountains. My father would also inherit this love of the west and he too would venture into the landscapes along with his father. They both dreamed of staying in Wyoming, but both ended up in living and working in Chicago.
Several years ago I found a set of architectural floor plans from 1959 that my father drew up for a house he intended to build in the area. The landscape was carefully surveyed, and a set of renderings were made that including structural diagrams, heating duct work routes, ventilation plans, and plumbing diagrams.
The house was never realized and the drawings sat undisturbed as an unrealized conceptual space for sixty years. As an homage to my inherited passion for design and the love of wild places, I undertook a collaborative drawing project with my father’s renderings and grandfather’s maps. I added the animals as well as others native to the Homestead, North America, Yellowstone National Park, and the Cloud Peak Wilderness region of Wyoming. I believe there is an urgency to build new relationships to our natural spaces and the beings that inhabit them. This project is also a reconciliation between the generations of peoples that have struggled, dreamed, and worked the landscapes that we all inhabit and must share.
