Watercolors by Joyce McJilton Dwyer
October 15 – November 15, 2025
Saturday, October 18, 5:00 – 7:00 pm
6 Bridges Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Grain Elevators” by Joyce McJilton Dwyer.
In this exhibit, watercolorist Joyce McJilton Dwyer turns her focus to grain elevators, a prominent fixture of farmland in the Midwest. She writes:
“Grain Elevators are a piece of agricultural architecture scattered across the midwestern landscape from the Great Lakes to the northwest up into Canada, often sticking up into the sky from tiny towns on the open prairie where one can see unobstructed across the landscape.
I grew up in Michigan on a family farm and our harvest went to our local grain elevator—to be dried, recorded and transported from there after my father decided, from the morning crop price report on the radio, that it was time to sell part of that crop. It was always a guess if the price would later go up or retreat. We’ve grown corn, navy beans, pinto beans, black beans, soybeans, wheat, oats and sugar beets. We also grew alfalfa when we had a dairy herd.
The elevators were busy at harvest time because all the farmers were trying to get their crops harvested when the weather was dry and the crops were dry and ripe. My grandfather would take a slow ride with a tractor and wagon full of the crop and wait in a long line for his turn to dump his load and return for another load. My father would stay at our farm to continue harvesting, sometimes into the night, to take other loads to the elevator or to back them into our large shed so no rain or dew would add to their moisture—or to put the wheat and oats into our own bins in our shed. We would put our corn harvest into long, tall, thin corncribs to dry out from the wind for animal food. It was always a relief to get all the crops harvested in September and October, securing our crop income for the year.
These structures have a lot of meaning for me, as I have traveled locally and further west. In preparation for this show, I started to look at them more closely and learn more about the progression of crop storage in the US and the changes in storage architecture over time—as well as the changes in agriculture with small farms disappearing and giving way to huge industrial agriculture, not the best answer for small farmers.
My question is, where do we think our food comes from?”
Pictured above:
Saginaw Grain Bin Murals (detail), 16×20 Watercolor, ©2025 by Joyce McJilton Dwyer
