[Detail] The David Hilton family near Weissert, Nebraska. 1887.
Collage
A collage is an artwork that is created by pasting materials—paper, newspaper clippings, photographs, or virtually anything of the artist's choosing—on a surface. Often a collage has a unifying theme, color, or line. In his book Sod Houses, or the Development of the Great American Plains, Solomon Butcher included the collage to the right. Look carefully at the images he selected:
- What unifying theme or line do you see in this collage?
- Why do you think Butcher selected these images?
- What idea or message, if any, does the collage convey?
Create a collage of pictures and quotations from the Prairie Settlement collection that conveys what it was like to homestead the Great Plains in the 1860s and 1870s. Imagine that you are creating the collage to appear on page 3 of a book you are writing about homesteading. What would you title the book? Does the collage convey the same idea as the title?
