The Mercer Gallery at Garden City Community College launches the new year with a dazzling exhibition by world-renowned, one-of-a-kind artist extraordinaire Erika Nelson.
Titled Highbrow / Lowbrow, the exhibition is on view now through February 27, transforming the Mercer Gallery into a place where academic research meets spectacle and the gallery flirts with the midway.
Nelson is an independent artist, educator, curator, writer, and rural arts activist based in the art-eclectic town of Lucas, Kansas.
Internationally celebrated for her work exploring contemporary art in the public realm, Nelson’s practice draws deeply from American vernacular culture, roadside attractions, and self-made visionary environments. Her work asks big questions through small wonders, inviting audiences to consider how belief, persuasion, delight, and spectacle shape cultural meaning.
Growing up not far from the Lake of the Ozarks, exploring roadside tourist traps as an escape from teen-hood, the construction of immersive environments designed to alter perception took hold, Nelson said in a news release.
“Sideshows, mirror mazes, wax museums, facades, fronts, all of the manipulations of perception that create awe and wonder on a developing mind, a developing aesthetic, were my museums,” she said.
While matriculating through the more expected life paths that followed, those early influences refused to subside, sneaking into Nelson’s ‘formal’ artwork in both form and concept.
“The bending of rules that such places expose me to, early on, the fast-and-loose word play and language’s intersection with truth/flimflam, informed my questioning of the institutions I was being ushered into as an artist,” she said. “I’ve explored the in-betweens of formal and informal, pushing into and out of spaces that, on the surface, are opposite ends of the spectrum, yet have such an overlap in their functions that they merge and intersect within the visual language I’ve adopted and the ideas I play with.”
In Highbrow / Lowbrow, Nelson brings together works that move between the personal and the public, the project-based and the play-based, the collaborative and the singular. Her practice navigates the liminal space where galleries meet midways, where academic rigor rubs elbows with spectacle, and where belief systems are revealed through humor, craft, and wonder.
Visitors may even encounter playful nods to regional landmarks and local curiosities, grounding the exhibition firmly in place while opening outward to larger cultural conversations.
“The work here is a combination of personal and public, project-based (culled from larger installations or site-specific works) and play-based, collaborative and singular. Oxymoronic, yet earnest at heart,” Nelson said.
A closing reception is scheduled for 6 p.m. Feb. 26, offering the public an opportunity to meet the artist, experience the work firsthand, and connect with others who share a passion for the visual arts.
On Friday, Feb. 27, Nelson will present a Sideshow Banner workshop and artist talk from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the art classrooms of the Joyce Fine Arts Building.
Space for the workshop is limited, and attendees are encouraged to RSVP to Michael Knutson at michael.knutson@gcccks.edu to reserve their spot.
The Mercer Gallery, located in the Pauline Joyce Fine Arts Building at Garden City Community College, is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
For more information, please contact Gallery Director Michael Knutson at michael.knutson@gcccks.edu.
About the Artist
While living in a vehicle for two years, Nelson traversed the highways, byways, and back roads of the United States, seeking out the odd, the unusual, and the extraordinary.
Along the way, she documented immersive art environments, roadside architecture, and the individuals who build entire worlds fueled by curiosity, obsession, and showmanship.
These travels gave rise to her best-known project, The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, a traveling roadside museum that functions simultaneously as an archive, a performance, a parody, and a love letter to American ingenuity.
Eventually, Nelson settled in Lucas, Kansas, in a home adjacent to S. P. Dinsmoor’s visionary artist-built site, The Garden of Eden, where her work continues to unfold at the intersection of preservation, participation, and playful provocation.
Nelson is widely recognized for her quirky, roadside-attraction–inspired aesthetic, her modified art cars and circus wagons, and her deep commitment to community-centered art projects. Her work has been presented in galleries, museums, festivals, and public spaces nationwide. It has reached broad audiences through popular media, including appearances on The Conan O’Brien Show and a feature cover story in Smithsonian magazine.
Nelson has led large-scale collaborative initiatives such as the Texas-Sized Road Trip Diorama of Wonder and has played an active role in the preservation of significant folk and visionary art environments, including The Garden of Eden and Pasaquan.
Whether constructing miniature monuments, arriving in town via art car, or orchestrating participatory spectacles, Nelson’s practice consistently blurs the boundary between high art and popular attraction, inviting curiosity, wonder, and critical engagement in equal measure.
Nelson’s travels and projects read like a tall tale stitched together from asphalt and spectacle: writing a graduate thesis titled Driving Around Looking at Big Things While Thinking About Spam; preparing a full meal using foil and an automobile’s radiator and heat manifold; standing atop a sideshow performer lying on a bed of nails alongside a Kansas cowboy at the last functioning ten-in-one sideshow in Coney Island; discovering “The Thing” in southern Arizona; drinking free ice water at Wall Drug; eating Rocky Mountain oysters; purchasing a genuine walnut bowl somewhere along I-70; visiting Rock City; and sitting in a traffic jam in Branson, Missouri, in front of Yakov Smirnoff. These experiences form both the content and cadence of her work, where earnest inquiry and carnival ballyhoo coexist comfortably.
