Kirk art featured at senior center

By: 
Lois Wells

The Custer Senior Center’s open house will include its annual art show Saturday, Dec. 7, from 12:30-3:30 p.m.
Isa Kirk, co-owner with husband Jack Kirk of Plenty Star Ranch, will have a showing during the Holiday in the Hills weekend.
 How did Isa Kirk, born in Munich, Germany, in 1957 eventually find her way to a working ranch south of Custer?
Born only 12 years after the end of WWII, Isa heard stories of the war from a grandmother, about her then 24-year-old father, who had walked 1,000 miles, from the German defeat at Stalingrad back to Berlin. Her father would never talk about the war.
Fortunately, the family was placed in the American sector of Germany and could work with rebuilding their country.
Her family believed in education; the father, an architect, designed and engineered many of the new buildings in Germany. Isa trained in pharmacy, monitoring clinical trials.  
“I did not like that work.  I was always a ‘hands-on’ person, leading to my love of art,” she said. “I was 28 when my father gave me a box of pastel pencils. This led to many colored portraits, mostly of horses.  I had had 12 years of riding lessons and had ridden many horses for their owners. I like to portray the actual character of either an animal or a person.”
She experienced the change in Germany in 1989 when Gorbachev and Reagan worked at bringing the Berlin Wall down.  She says, “Many people left East Germany and then had a hard time adjusting to progressive West Germany.  They had had too many years of following Soviet rule, stagnating their country.  I think it took them a whole generation to begin to assimilate to West Germany’s way of life.”
Isa has a talent for learning languages easily.  She did spend one year in Canada, where she perfected her school English while working as a nanny.
The Germans have a special interest in the Lakota people, who had beaten General George Custer at the Battle of the Greasy Grass in 1876.  Experiencing the sites in Montana interested Isa.  Twice she traveled there and toured the area, including the Crow Reservation.
“I knew it was my time to move to America. At one art exhibit in Munich, a man who was fundraising for a school in Kyle, displayed some of Richard Red Owl’s paintings to intrigue the German public.  I had to ask him as to how I could get to the Black Hills.  He gave me a small piece of paper that said ‘Jack’ with an added fax number.
Later at a horseshow near Munich, another man, asked the same question, gave me another small piece of paper that also said ‘Jack’ with the same fax number. I also wanted to take my horse to America.  You don’t want to leave your best friend, especially someone who doesn’t talk back to you!
“I wanted to move the mare before it turned 2, an age where it would have been quarantined in America for six weeks, instead of only two days. A large Lufthansa transport plane could take as many as 90 horses across the Atlantic.  The day I was to leave, there were only 13 horses on the plane, leaving room for me.”
From Germany, Isa had faxed “Jack” and told him that she would be in Newark, N.J., on a certain date, with her horse on its required two-day quarantine.
Jack Kirk replied 20 minutes later and said, “Please, don’t call at three in the morning.”
He borrowed a pickup and horse trailer from Dolly Evans and was waiting for her in New Jersey.
“And then we began our journey to Custer,” Isa Kirk said.
Jack was in tune with the Lakota culture, having worked as a pilot, game warden and EMT in Pine Ridge, and he also had taught at Sinte Gleska University in Rosebud.  This appealed to Isa. Plus, she yearned for a stable home and being surrounded by nature and horses.
“We got married that same year of 1995 in Hot Springs. Then I found out I had to return to Germany and wait four months there to get a Visa, which is a permanent resident card,” she said.
Hard work at the ranch included helping Jack build up the ranch for campers, caring for 30 horses, hosting the horse camping guests, and organizing trail rides for tourists.
Jack has been the builder at the ranch: building cabins, fencing the 300-acres, and later creating unique barn-wood frames for her pastel paintings.
Their home, filled with Isa’s art, had its beginning when Jack combined two double-wide trailers. Now their operation includes seven RV sites, two cabins, and a retreat lodge.
And then, Isa encountered cancer. Radiation and chemotherapy led to a scarred back, which greatly reduced her strength for the required work.
“The ‘cure’ has damaged both my organs in the area of radiation and my spinal cord,  leaving me with long-term side effects. We even had to sell our horses,” she said.
She now enjoys painting the wildflowers found in the Black Hills, such as the pink Morning Glory Bush and the cream-colored Yucca.
Grateful for Julie Oswald’s assistance in organizing their property, the Kirks have created a beautiful and peaceful place, surrounded by nature, and filled with harmony for people and animals.
Isa’s creation of art is her life here in the Black Hills.
 

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