Bismarck, North Dakota - News

It’s a tired house shaking off its white paint next to a junkyard in Driscoll while weeds try to have their way with the dirt yard.

Some might think this spot doesn’t look like a new start. Or a big dream. Or a place that anyone lives.

But it’s not like that inside.

Inside the about 80-year-old house, which once was home for several teachers who taught at the nearby school, there’s another side.

It’s part art gallery and part treasured family items and part family dwelling. There are her abstract paintings on the wall, and his cello, and her trays of jewelry, and a canvas with her painting under way. And there’s their buckskin and beaded American Indian cradleboards and beaded clothing and antiques, a hulk of dark-wood dining room table and soft carpeting. And it’s warm in there, like that kind of warmth when people in love smile at each other.

Love rays bounce around between house renters Benjamin Fricke and his wife, Shawna Andrea Fricke, and their 5-month-old son, Keeneeh. The baby’s name means “red-tailed hawk” in the Piaute language, a bird of spiritual significance for the family.

He’s from Oregon. She’s from California. And now they’re here.

He’s trying to learn the livestock business with an uncle, while she’s pursuing motherhood and her art career — a pursuit since childhood and into college. She  graduated with a degree from Santa Fe, N.M.’s Institute of American Indian Arts.

Benjamin Fricke, who had gone to college for film and television production, and ended up working for the U.S. Forest Service for a while, was living in Oregon a year ago. Shawna Fricke, then his girlfriend, whom he met in college, lived in California.

And long-distance was not serving well the three-year relationship, despite daily phone calls and numerous trips.

“There was stress,” said Shawna Fricke. “I knew I loved him ... and we had to do something or lose (the relationship).”

 So when Fricke got the chance to move to Driscoll and become kind of an apprentice, learning the livestock business with a relative, he made a telephone call to Shawna.

“Come with me to North Dakota,” he remembers saying to her.

Benjamin Fricke said there was the option of starting life with her in Big Pine, Calif. Shawna had a plot of land where they could build a house. “But I felt we needed a new chapter,” he said. “it was time.”

He said he knew it probably would be a tough decision for her. Shawna, who in addition to an art degree has degrees in social work and American Indian studies from Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, was working as an interim director at a Head Start program in her hometown of Big Pine. But he also thought Shawna could make a go of her art career here.

She said yes.

“I was ready to leave and try something different,” she said.

They loaded up a U-Haul trailer and headed for who know’s what.

Actually, Benjamin Fricke knew something about the what.

When he was a child, he spent parts of summers here helping his his great aunt and her husband, Gene Pfennig, with farm work, bailing hay and so on. And pretty much everyone in town knows little “Benny,” as he was called over the years.

But this year in Driscoll, he’s adult Benny and there’s marriage, a baby, being away from most of their family, new careers.

Keeneeh isn’t crying this particular morning. But there’s crying, or rather bleating, in the house. The house — rented from Pfennig in exchange for farm work that includes working with sheep, a joint project for uncle and nephew at Pfennig’s nearby farm — has an enclosure in the basement, and a designated box in the kitchen. Those spots are periodically home to a couple of the lambs who need extra help or need to come in from the cold. Benjamin Fricke hasn’t had much sleep in the last couple days. There was a sick lamb and a late visit to the vet in Steele, and feedings every four hours. He smiles as he cradles a lamb, but acknowledges it’s a challenging lifestyle.

“He wants to be his own boss,” Pfennig said. “I’m trying to establish that for him.”

Pfennig, whose German dad moved into Driscoll to farm in 1943 and was unfairly seen by some in the Norwegian and English community as a Hitler advocate, knows about hard times. The kids at school would stand in line to beat him up, he said.

He said he wants to help Benjamin Fricke through this challenging attempt, even though he sees him as more academic than the farming type. “His intentions are good and he’d like to help as much as possible,” Pfennig said. “He thinks he wants to live on a farm.”

Meanwhile, his wife’s focus is Keeneeh. She can be seen around little Driscoll, population of maybe 150, sometimes carrying him in the beaded and buckskin cradleboard made by an elder in her tribe. The plan is she’ll wait to get full-time employment until the baby is 2 years old, and then Benjamin Fricke will watch him. “We don’t want day care. We want to keep him in the family,” she said. But besides raising her son, she’s trying to establish herself as an artist here.

So far, she has displayed and sold work at such events as last summer’s Urban Harvest and Pride of Dakota, and local events in the Steele and Driscoll area.

Shawna Fricke, an abstract painter whose art hero is sculptor and painter Allan Houser, wants viewers to decide for themselves what they see in a painting. Although she does drop in pieces of recognizable things, at least to her — segments of traditional basketry designs from her Piaute tribe, and pieces of landscape. When there is human form, it’s spare lines and shades of colored shadow in charcoal, pastels — sometimes acrylics.

She likes oranges and the color brown, sometimes mixing earth and sand into her paint to create texture. “I like to identify myself with the earth,” she said.

She calls her business, Mook Ku Uv, which in the Paiute language means “Heart-Spirit-Soul.” Another thing she makes is jewelry, one-of-a-kind pieces, using sinew and shells, things like pearl, long macroni-shaped dentalium shells, heishi and abalone, although abalone is getting rare, she said.

“I’m a big fan,” said Jo Pfennig about Shawna Fricke’s artwork. Jo Pfennig is a stained-glass artist who has shared a booth with Shawna Fricke at a Pride of Dakota event and also is a pastor of St. Luke Lutheran Church in Wishek.

Jo Pfennig, who married widower Gene Pfenning in 2002, said she thinks Shawna would do better selling her art if she were in Santa Fe or “another artsy area.”

“She needs to be persistent, but I have no doubt she’ll be successful,” said Pfennig, who recalls that Shawna Fricke’s creations sold better than hers at Pride of Dakota. “She’s young, and she has strategies,” Pfennig said.

But Pfennig also mused about what success really is: “She’s doing pretty much what she wants to do (now), and isn’t that a success?”

Pfennig said she thinks this is a good time for the couple, young as they are, to try something like this.

“I remember when I was their age and did crazy things,” she said. “I went to Florida. ... It’s a good time for experimentation.”

And she said both of them have strong family support, as well as having the Pfennigs close by, if they have a problem.

Benjamin Fricke’s dad, Herb Fricke, an engineer who was involved with the creation of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and Shawna Fricke’s family members have careers in various fields — graphic artist, jewelry maker and her brother is a traditional hoop dancer who travels the world performing his art.

For this couple, it’s art and sheep, right now.

And taking chances.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or virginia.grantier@bismarcktribune.com.)