How a Small Nebraska Town Became an Arts Destination

Nolan had just the place in mind, a former downtown plumbing shop she already owned. Now, it became not just a building, but a place to carry out a dream and a mission.

David City, a town of 3,026 located within Nebraska’s fertile Platte River Valley about an hour northwest of Lincoln, the state’s capital, is not your typical arts hub. But over the course of the16 years since its founding in 2007, the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art, or simply “Bone Creek” as many call it, has made David City an arts destination as the home of the nation’s only agrarian art museum.

If you want to celebrate the humanities, encourage visitors to recall their rural memories, inform people about our nation’s agrarian heritage and contemporary rural life, and, at the same time, showcase a small Nebraska town, Bone Creek is your place.

Agriculture has been at the center of Nebraska life for a long time—from the Great Plains’ Native Americans who began planting corn over a millennium ago, to the homesteaders who settled there when it was admitted to the Union in 1867. The founders’ idea was to celebrate and acquire agrarian artwork by nationally known artists as part of Bone Creek’s stated mission to “connect people to the land through art.”

At the heart of the museum’s early collection was the artwork of David City native Dale Nichols, a classically trained 20th century artist and illustrator whose work can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in private collections across the country. It helped that local art teacher Ruth Nichols, the late Dale Nichols’s niece, was an early supporter. Nolan originally thought the building she owned would be a place for Ruth Nichols to teach art lessons. But soon enough, Nolan had donated the building to become the art museum and, with Covault, formed the museum’s board.

They decided to name the museum after the ephemeral stream that runs north to the Platte through Covault’s childhood farmland a few miles away. They also wanted to make entry free; co-founder Nolan had not been able to enjoy visiting museums as a child. A native Californian, she grew up at a time when visiting art museums was a luxury, so she insisted that Bone Creek charge no admission.

What exactly is agrarian art? Until Moseman coined the term, such art was called “regional” or “rural,” a label often applied dismissively to denote an artwork’s status in relation to urban-centered artistic movements. Thanks to Moseman, the Smithsonian now recognizes agrarian art as a genre unto itself.

Whatever it’s called, agrarian art reveals humankind’s relationship to the land. It comes from many artists and in many forms. The Mosemans have amassed a large collection of this art, and they work closely with a variety of venues to educate audiences and spread appreciation for this art and the rural life it celebrates.

In 2011, the museum launched a major retrospective of Nichols’s work, complete with a book-length catalogue by Bone Creek’s curator Amanda Mobley Guenther. Dale Nichols: Transcending Regionalism attracted 2,800 visitors from around the nation. The exhibition also toured the nation, visiting the Georgia Art Museum in Athens, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City. Today, the Dale Nichols Collection remains the cornerstone of Bone Creek’s permanent collection and is the most significant collection of his work in the country.

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Dale Nichols, Morning Star, 1954, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″, Acquisition of Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art, 2007. (Courtesy of Bone Creek Museum)

Dale Nichols, Children of the Sun, 1944, 26 x 40 inches, oil on canvas. (Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc.)

Dale Nichols, January, 1943, 30 x 40 inches, oil on canvas. (Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc.)

Dale Nichols, Spring Plowing, Nebraska, 5 x 7 inches, gouache on paper. (Courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc.)

Many other important pieces of agrarian art, from across the United States and Europe, can be found there as well. The museum hosted its first international exhibition in 2014 with Canadian painter Denise Lemaster’s “Canadian Foothills.” Bone Creek’s European gallery currently displays many art works given by one of its major donors, the late collector Gerald Wempner, who learned about Bone Creek by reading about it in an arts magazine.

Among his many gifts are various artists’ depictions of draft horses, a subject to which he was especially partial. Another is a painting of a woman and child by German artist Karl Zopf (1858-1944), The Wheat Harvest. That painting was acquired in 2020, the fourth of 17 gifts to Bone Creek from Wempner that year alone. During his life, he donated more than 100 works of art to Bone Creek.

Nolan, who now serves as the museum board’s co-treasurer, likes to tell a story about an older farmer in overalls who one summer day came to sit on the museum’s steps, seemingly waiting for something. She invited him inside, where it was cooler. “I don’t go in places like this,” he told her. But he came in, looked around at “a lot of art” and remarked, “Well, this looks like something I would understand and enjoy.”

Many seem to agree. Bone Creek’s effort to connect land and people draws visitors from all 50 states and multiple countries. One visitor from England commented that he wanted to look at agrarian art because he “could see the Old Masters at home.”

In 2017, Bone Creek helped Nebraska celebrate 150 years of statehood with a show titled “150 Artists, 150 Artworks, 150 Years of Nebraska in Miniature.” Over 150 artists submitted original agrarian art honoring Nebraska. The exhibition and sale celebrated artists who had connections to Nebraska, either through having exhibited at Bone Creek or through family ties. It received support from local organizations like the Butler County Arts Council.

By the end of 2024, Bone Creek had hosted more than 50 exhibitions and averaged 1,700 visitors a year.

Bone Creek’s success might sound like what you hear about happening at a museum with wealthier donors in more densely populated areas, say, like the Nelson Atkins Museum of the West in Kansas City, Missouri or possibly Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

So why David City, Nebraska?

Because of vision, organization, professionalism and untiring support. As co-founders Covault and Nolan are the first to tell you, none of this happens simply because two retirees and an art teacher came up with a good idea and began to share their enthusiasm. These visionaries were able to recruit Moseman and find support in and around David City.

The museum is free to the public, and open regularly, which has allowed it to thrive as a community institution. The museum sponsors community-engaging activities, including summer art camps for children, which it coordinates with both public and parochial schools. It has hosted scavenger hunts for young children and taught older ones how to make ceramic bowls from which they eat ice cream together. On a few occasions, the museum has “become alive” when it hosts actors to appear as the living subjects of certain paintings who then answer questions from visitors.

Its staff teaches and supports summer art classes and, in 2014, began working with 4-H, by providing annual hands-on workshops with themes like “Prairie Grass Portraits,” “The Ballad of the Farm,” “Corn Matters” and “I am Nebraska, Nebraska is Me.” The 4-H children’s work is exhibited annually at the Butler County Fair.

Lifelong Butler County local Louise Niemann has childhood memories of seeing Dale Nichols around town. She has been involved with the museum for several years and joined Bone Creek’s Board of Directors in January 2020 to help with its next big project.

By 2020, the museum’s collection was continuing to grow, and curators and staff found themselves doing exhibits and other projects that required more space. The museum set its sights on a two-story downtown brick building built in 1917 as an assembly plant and showroom for Model-T Ford automobiles, which Covault already owned. As in other small towns, the old building had in years past become vacant and had fallen into disrepair. Plans were made for Bone Creek to expand by buying and renovating it.

The project had a $6.2 million price tag. Through a combination of concerted effort over four years of fundraising, including federal American Rescue Plan Act funding through the Nebraska Department of Economic Development and local matching funds, support from the Nebraska Arts Council and local governments, and the tireless effort of Bone Creek Board members, staff and others, Bone Creek managed to raise the money, renovate the building and do more by fostering the designation of a six-block area of downtown as an arts district.

In 2023, David City announced the creation of the “Destination David Creative District,” a five-year project to catalyze community and economic improvement. In a January 2024 press release, the city said projects like the restoration and renovation of the Ford Building and Bone Creek’s move to it acted “as the starting point and anchor for the entire Creative District. This project—preserving, enhancing, and repurposing a classic landmark that has stood for over a century—will serve as the District’s centerpiece … ”

On April 12, 2025, Bone Creek staged its grand reopening to a standing room only crowd of 450 people who came from near and far. There’s plenty of room for display. The museum’s size has increased tenfold to approximately 21,000 square feet. The space includes five galleries, storage, a catering kitchen, bathrooms, gift shop, a multipurpose room and a second floor not yet fully developed. It even includes the first Model-T Ford automobile manufactured at the original facility. (According to some, the ghost of a 1917 Ford mechanic, Winslow, also remains.)

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The front entrance of the newly renovated Ford building in David City, Nebraska, which now houses the Bone Creek Museum. (Courtesy of Nebraska Community Foundation)

Nebraska Senator Jared Storm speaks to a standing-room only crowd at the reopening of the Bone Creek Museum in April 2025. (Courtesy of Nebraska Community Foundation)

All of this was made possible by a professional staff of three (collections manager and education program head, curator, office manager), a board of nine, high-caliber volunteers, widespread community support and goodwill that sees Bone Creek as the cornerstone of David City’s creative district.

Minnesota artist Lark Gilmer’s show Le Bergère—Shepherdess runs until March 16, 2026.

New shows are continuously being planned by manager Gabrielle Comte. In 2026, the museum will host Nebraska batik artist Kristine Allphin and sponsor a project making Ukrainian eggs, or pysanky, a traditional art form using wax-resistance to create intricate designs. There is also talk of a future outdoor sculpture garden.

Since its reopening in April, Bone Creek has attracted more than 2,700 visitors.

The visionaries, the creatives and the workers who make the Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art a living reality are doing something right. When asked whether Bone Creek makes a positive economic impact, longtime resident and community booster Kent Clymer recounted a story about a carload of women recently driving an hour each way from Lincoln specifically to visit the museum, followed by a trip to the downtown floral and gift shop and lunch at El Centenario, a downtown Mexican restaurant. He sees that type of thing continuing to happen and doesn’t see why Bone Creek should not become part of a loop for international tourists wanting to see other Nebraska art museums and celebrate Nebraska author Willa Cather by visiting Red Cloud, Nebraska, two and a half hours south.

Dreams have paid off before for Bone Creek and for David City, whose slogan is “From East to West, There’s Only One.” Destination David has a lot to recommend it, and Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art is its very appealing cornerstone. That is just fine with Bone Creek co-founder Allen Covault, who says he wants to see the museum continue to grow, but also wants it to be an active contributor to the economy of his rural community.

Anna Nolan, another Bone Creek’s co-founder, is excited that the museum’s new size provides so much more space for educational programs and that the far larger galleries allow room for special exhibitions, while still being able to display many of the fine works in the museum’s growing collection. She adds, “[I]t is encouraging to see supporting memberships coming in from all over the United States.”

Who doesn’t need more knowledge of humanity’s connection to the land? Bone Creek and David City make acquiring that knowledge a delight.

Marion YoderMore by this author →

Marion Yoder, a Wyoming native, writes from Cheyenne, its capital, where she appreciates art as often as possible. Marion can be reached at mycolumn52@gmail.com.