Landscape photographer Terry Evans is widely recognized for her views of the Midwest prairie, its people, and its artifacts. Her first retrospective, Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art highlights the beauty and complexity of a subtle and often overlooked landscape. Evans’s photographs prod us to think more deeply about things too often taken for granted. In recent years, Evans has made sustained explorations of other subjects from a variety of visual perspectives: natural history museum specimens, the city of Chicago, and the steel industry. Born in 1944 and raised in Kansas City, Evans lived for years in Salina, Kansas, before moving to Chicago in the early 1990s. Her love and concern for the prairie–her native landscape, the nation’s heartland–has inspired and informed her entire artistic career. Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans opens on Oct. 20 and runs through Jan. 20, 2013.