Standing Rock prairie
— grass that runs to the river and keeps going.
Not only on a wall.
Standing Rock prairie, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“The prairie on the South Dakota side of the Standing Rock Reservation rolls west from the Missouri River through Corson County in long, low waves of mixed grass. Big bluestem and western wheatgrass cure to gold by late summer; the sky carries weather you can watch arrive from forty miles out. This is Lakota and Dakota land, the homeland of Húŋkpapȟa and Sihásapa bands, and the country Sitting Bull lived and is remembered on. The wind moves through the grass constantly, the way water moves through the river it ends at. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Standing Rock Indian Reservation covers roughly 2.3 million acres across the border of North and South Dakota, with the South Dakota portion lying entirely within Corson County. It is the homeland of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, made up primarily of Húŋkpapȟa and Sihásapa (Blackfoot) Lakota and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna (Yanktonai) Dakota people. The reservation was established under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and reorganized by the Act of March 2, 1889. Its eastern boundary is the Missouri River; the tribal headquarters is at Fort Yates, North Dakota, and McLaughlin and McIntosh are the main South Dakota towns. The land is open mixed-grass prairie, broken by river breaks and shallow draws.
The prairie ecology here is northern mixed-grass: big bluestem, little bluestem, western wheatgrass, blue grama, and needle-and-thread, with patches of silver sage on the higher ground. The growing season is short and the weather is large — annual precipitation averages around 16 inches, most of it falling between May and August in convective storms that travel across open country. Pronghorn, mule deer, and white-tailed deer live on the reservation, and the Missouri River corridor is an important flyway for sandhill cranes and white pelicans during migration. The land tilts gradually from about 2,400 feet on the western divide to roughly 1,600 feet at the river.
There are very few people on this land. Corson County, the South Dakota portion of the reservation, has a population of roughly 4,000 across about 2,500 square miles — a density of fewer than two people per square mile, among the lowest in the lower 48. State Highway 63 runs north-south near the river and U.S. 12 cuts east-west through McLaughlin; otherwise the road grid is gravel section-lines crossing wheat, pasture, and unbroken native prairie. Sitting Bull, the Húŋkpapȟa leader, was killed at his cabin on the Grand River in this country on December 15, 1890, and is memorialized at a site near Mobridge on the South Dakota side of the river.
