Rachel Olivia Berg spent part of her childhood in Lead, South Dakota, and is returning as the 2026 Artist in Residence at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. In a sense, she grew up alongside the unfolding history of SURF.
On the evening of October 8, 2026, she will stand in the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center at 160 W. Main Street in Lead and give a preview of her fall art exhibit. Her talk, part of SURF's Deep Talks lecture series, is titled Kapemni: Twisting Between Worlds, and it explores intersections in art, science, and Lakota star knowledge. Deep Talks events begin at 5 p.m. Mountain Time with a social hour and light refreshments; the presentation itself starts at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public, and it is also livestreamed on SURF's Facebook and YouTube channels for those who cannot make it to Lead.
The word kapemni is the heart of the matter. In Lakota, it means twisting, and it names a symbol of the sun and earth: an inverted triangle at the top representing the stars and the sun, a lower triangle representing the earth, and a center marking the connection between them. The Lakota observed celestial and earthly changes around them and recognized that the earth mirrors the star world, a relationship often summarized as "as above, so below." The symbol appears on Lakota maps of constellations and of the land, where the shape of a star was understood as an inverted cone and the shape of the earth as a tipi.
That idea of mirrored worlds sits naturally in Lead, where the deepest underground laboratory in the United States occupies the former Homestake Gold Mine. SURF reaches 4,850 feet below the surface and houses experiments in physics, biology, geology, and engineering. Berg's residency is a homecoming to a town whose identity has been rewritten twice over, first by gold and then by physics.
Berg is an interdisciplinary Mnicoujou Lakota artist whose work is rooted in close observation of the natural world and Lakota values, using materials and visual storytelling to explore natural cycles, relationships, and Lakota ontologies. She now lives in upstate New York, and her work has drawn attention well beyond the Black Hills; Hyperallergic featured her in a 2024 roundup of shows to see in upstate New York.
She is the 2026 Artist in Residence at SURF, a program that provides opportunities for artists to create work inspired by the facility's unique science, location, and history. The residency is modeled after programs offered by government, science, and industry, including the National Park Service, CERN, and Fermilab, and it exists to leverage what is unusual about SURF, its depth, its experiments, its setting, in order to create awareness and encourage interdisciplinary work. In past seasons artists have presented on the program publicly, including at the Matthews Opera House and Art Center in Spearfish.
Deep Talks is SURF's long-running effort to usher scientific discussions into the public sphere. Past talks have covered nuclear and particle physics, algorithmic art, local history, and botany, and speakers have come from across South Dakota and around the world. The series is sponsored by Dakota Shivers Brewing, Edward Jones Financial Advisor Chris Mitchell, RCS Construction, and Charles and Jolene Lichtenwalner. Attendees can pre-register to join as a Zoom webinar, which allows for raising a hand, asking questions through chat, and responding to polls, or simply drop in on the livestream.
For Berg, the October talk is a preview of her fall art exhibit. Beneath Lead, physicists are asking where the universe came from. Berg's answer, drawn from a symbol that twists the star world and the earth into one another, is that those questions have been asked here for a very long time.