On a September morning in Lindsborg, Kansas, the door of a converted barn on South Main Street opens onto a room that is itself a work of art. The walls are painted in deep greens, reds, and yellows. Mosaics and brickwork climb the surfaces. Two-story rooms give way to intimate nooks, and everywhere there are paintings, prints, ceramics, carvings, and toys — the accumulated handiwork of Lester Raymer, the artist who lived and worked here for four decades. In the middle of it all, a visitor will usually find Rodger Gerberding, brush in hand, working on something new.
Gerberding, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, returns to the Red Barn Studio Museum as its Artist-in-Residence from September 22 through October 9, 2026. It is a homecoming he has made for nearly three decades. The museum's own announcement describes him as a painter, illustrator, writer, and actor who finds "endless inspiration in the people, places, and everyday moments" of the town. During the residency, visitors are invited to stop by the studio, see works in progress, and talk with the artist as he develops new paintings drawn from his surroundings.
His process is deliberately unhurried. Gerberding often begins with sketches and observations gathered while wandering Lindsborg, then transforms them into finished works. He works primarily in painting, drawing, and mixed media, building expressive, layered compositions in which recognizable figures, landscapes, homes, and animals appear and disappear from loose, gestural brushmarks. The result balances observation with imagination — scenes that feel at once familiar and dreamlike. The museum notes that his annual return has become an important part of his creative practice, providing both inspiration and a chance to reconnect with a community that has shaped his work for years.
That community is an unusual one. Lindsborg, settled by Swedish immigrants in 1869 and known as "Little Sweden, USA," is a town of red-brick Main Street, Dala horses, and a deep folk-art tradition in the Smoky Valley. It is the kind of place where an artist can walk out the door and find material — a porch, a face, a rooster, a stretch of prairie light — within a few blocks. Gerberding has been doing exactly that since the 1990s.
The Red Barn Studio Museum is the reason the residency exists at all. Lester Wilton Raymer was born in Alva, Oklahoma, in 1907 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1930 to 1933, where he worked with the Russian painter Boris Anisfeld and the art historian Helen Gardner. He settled in Lindsborg and, starting from two small barns that he connected, built the studio where he worked from 1945 until his death in 1991. Raymer was a true polymath: paintings and prints were, by his own reckoning, his most important work, but he also made ceramics, metalwork, mosaics, jewelry, furniture, cast concrete, stained glass, stitchery, and woodcarving — including elaborate carvings on the handles of rifles.
He was also, as Kansas City's KCUR put it, "the ultimate upcycler." Raymer turned discarded pitchforks into a Swedish folk candelabra, painted intricate scenes on small jewelry boxes, and fashioned tin cans into star-shaped ornaments. "If Lester saw anything in a magazine or book or a catalog that he wanted, he could just make it," curator Marsha Howe told KCUR. "Forget that 'buying' business — that costs money. If he could make something, why not?" Much of the studio itself was made from recycled materials, and Raymer painted its doors, tucked carvings into its corners, and added ironwork to furniture bought at farm sales, so that the building became an evolving artwork in its own right.
Beginning in 1960, Raymer made a special Christmas gift for his wife, Ramona, every year — a tradition that produced 56 toys over three decades, including a carved Noah's Ark whose animals nod their heads when the wooden craft is rocked, and an elaborate Russian-themed nativity with an onion-domed manger. Many of those toys and gifts remain on display.
After Raymer's death, friends grew concerned about the future of the studio and his artwork. The Raymer Society was formed in 1988 with a mission to preserve the Red Barn Studio as a museum and to provide cultural programming. The building was restored and opened to the public as a museum in September 1997. It has since been named a finalist in the "8 Wonders of Kansas Art" competition.
The Artist-in-Residence program is central to that mission. It is open to visual artists and craftsmen, musicians, writers, and performers, and the Raymer Society offers selected artists the use of a small apartment and studio space for periods ranging from one week to several weeks. Residents live on site in Raymer's former home and work in the studio space he created for visiting friends and fellow artists, surrounded by his work while interacting with the visitors who come to tour the museum. Funding for the program comes in part from the Kansas Department of Commerce Creative Arts Industries Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gerberding fits the program's spirit closely. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, and the Goodman School of Drama, and was educated as an illustrator and an art historian. His creative life has ranged widely — magazine and book illustration, literary criticism, poetry, acting, and teaching. His magazine illustrations number in the high hundreds, appearing in domestic and international periodicals, and he has illustrated or decorated some eighty books across a variety of genres. His paintings, drawings, collages, and multimedia work have been exhibited throughout the Midwest and on both coasts and are represented by galleries including the Noyes Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work has been collected by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Minnesota Historical Society, and privately by figures including Stephen King, Dick Cavett, Judy Collins, and the late Patty Duke. In 2023 he was selected as an artist-in-residence at Waubonsie State Park in Iowa's Loess Hills.
At the Red Barn, his focus has consistently been Lindsborg itself. A museum announcement for an earlier residency described him continuing "his concentration on Lindsborg as image-matter, with reference to its people and places," and noted that he works mainly on portraiture, using memories and sketches from his wanderings to translate what he has seen into finished pieces. In one past residency he was joined by his grandson, Kellen Rief, a multimedia artist whose work centers on demons, mutants, machines, skeletons, and clowns.
For anyone in central Kansas this fall, the appeal is simple and rare: the chance to walk into a working studio, in a building that is itself a piece of art, and watch a painter turn a small town's everyday details into something layered and strange and familiar. The Red Barn Studio Museum is at 212 S Main Street in Lindsborg. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; all visitors receive a guided tour during regular hours, and a donation of $10 per person is suggested. The residency runs September 22 through October 9, 2026.