Finding Home in the Tallgrass: Art, Place, and the Prairie with Kelly Yarbrough

This week on Chronically Candid, Morgan sits down with artist and arts leader Kelly Yarbrough for a rich, wide-ranging conversation about what it means to truly belong to a place — and how art, curiosity, and a willingness to be a forever student can completely reshape the way you move through the world.Kelly — painter, drawer, MFA graduate of Kansas State University, and founder of the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Matfield Green, Kansas — grew up in Plano, Texas, a rapidly expanding suburb of Dallas where roots ran shallow and the land felt more like backdrop than home. Morgan, who grew up in Olathe, Kansas, finds immediate kinship in that suburban experience: both women lived alongside prairie their whole lives before they ever truly saw it.The conversation explores what it actually takes to become "prairie aware" — and why it's so easy to drive straight through the Flint Hills your entire life and never register what you're looking at. Kelly traces her own awakening to relationships and volunteer work in Kansas City, where people introduced her to grasslands not as the absence of something, but as a rich and irreplaceable ecosystem in its own right. That curiosity eventually led her to K-State for her MFA and, ultimately, to the tallgrass prairie itself.Morgan and Kelly dig into what it means to find your intersection — that overlap of passion, skill, and calling that shapes the work you're meant to do. For Kelly, that intersection is art and prairie: using drawing and painting to pull viewers into an intimate, visceral experience of landscape rather than offering them a neat, conquerable view of it. Her work resists the tradition of early American landscape painting — the Thomas Moran-style epic vistas that functioned as visual propaganda for manifest destiny — instead putting the viewer in the middle of the experience, disoriented and present, forced to reckon with a place rather than pass through it.That thread leads to a genuinely moving discussion about colonization — of land, of perception, of beauty itself. Kelly shares how her MFA show grew out of a desire to unlearn inherited narratives about place and find a more honest, intuitive relationship with land that was taken. The conversation holds space for the weight of that history without collapsing into shame — both women arrive at something more generative: the idea that letting go of systems that don't serve us can actually be a beautiful, life-giving act.Along the way, there's warmth and laughter too — composting disasters, coyotes, and the meditative magic of sitting by a pond at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve with a journal on Mother's Day.Kelly also opens up about building the Tallgrass Artist Residency from scratch as a grad student in 2016 — a program she describes as simply connecting dots between people who cared — and what it's meant to watch artists from across prairie regions arrive in a town of 50 people and leave transformed. Now in its 11th year, the residency is the thing she's most proud of, and it shows.The episode closes with a "fun" (read: Morgan needs to rename this section) Q&A and a reminder that wherever you live, magic is available if you slow down enough to look for it.Learn more about Kelly:"Tallgrass Prairie & the Power of Perenniality" | Kelly Yarbrough | TEDxAustinCollege: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha_HKlNTMQAKelly's studio work, including the painting Survivor (watercolor featuring a coyote in prairie grass): https://www.kellyyarbrough.com/studio-workSupport my work by reading & subscribing to Chronically Candid on Substack at morgannbarrett.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.