Wichita-based Marth Wherry ’88 is a multimedia artist whose paintings and drawings often show a wacky narrative or contemporary look at everyday life.
Her media include assemblage, photography, jewelry, glassblowing, torchwork, handmade books and fiber as well as drawing and painting. Nationally recognized for her work in various media, Wherry’s hallmark is her sought-after abstract landscapes.
Among her awards are being selected in 2006 as a finalist in Paint America Top 100 National and nabbing first-place honors in the mixed media category at Prairie Art Plein Air in Cottonwood Falls, Kan., also in 2006.
Wherry holds a number of university degrees, including a master’s degree in painting from Wichita State and two bachelor’s degrees from Kansas State, one in drawing, the other in art education. As an artist, she has been described as having “great energy, insight and creative consequence.”
In addition, it’s noted that throughout her career she has remained “truly connected to her upbringing as a Kansan — and more importantly as an example of the pioneer spirit.” The exhibition “Martha Wherry, New Works” runs through Oct. 28 at Gallery XII, 412 E. Douglas, Wichita.
Just East of Liberal, Kansas
A sarcophagus, of sorts,
this truck-shell has set
for forty years,
claimed by the dry creek bed
of my childhood.
Up the hill,
the house I raided
like a pyramid,
pillaging bottles
of blue glass, newspapers
and tins
for my museum,
a room within my room,
six shelves full.
No road leads here now.
Never has, not since
I was old enough to come
up the creek by myself,
always warned, always wary
of flashfloods
in this desert of slim grass and cactus.
I’ve seen water here only twice.
But it must come.
The bed never shows weeds,
and the hard walls
I once called a canyon are always
a little different,
the truck a little more
or less buried.
And from this ridge
I can see the Mighty Sampson,
the largest trestle of its day,
spanning the river
this creek is tributary to.
Like all great bridges,
there is a man still encased
in a concrete pillar, a sacrifice,
buried alive
so people can pass through
this land without stopping.
It is, of course,
the man with the truck,
saved, he believed, by the WPA
as his dirt farm
dried and died and his family
blew away like dust.
When he saw that first cloud coming,
he pulled his bandanna
up over his nose,
never knowing that years later
his farm would be famous,
marked on maps in museums:
the geographic center of a land
that got up and moved itself.
I sit on what’s left of the truck bed
and tell him it’s the same:
years of drought
have sent the river
underground and the wind’s picking up.
No one even tries to farm.
At night, though,
you can see them from here,
working in the plant
that shines with towers and lights.
And none of us have really done
what we came here to do.
I am overtaken by a gust of sand.
Perhaps it will rain, I think,
looking to the tall
thunderheads in the west.
Maybe there’ll be a flood.
I should make tracks
before it’s too late.
— Randy Phillis ’80/85
