Rachel Olivia Berg grew up in the shadow of the headframes that dominate the skyline of Lead, South Dakota. She lived in the northern Black Hills as a child and spent her formative years in Lead-Deadwood, Central City, and her hometown of Eagle Butte, the seat of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, where she was born. When the Homestake Mine stopped being a gold mine and started being a physics laboratory, she was paying attention.
"When the mine became a research facility it was so exciting to me to think about the kind of science happening underground right here where I grew up," Berg said.
On October 8, 2026, Berg returns to Lead as the Sanford Underground Research Facility's 2026 Artist in Residence. She will give a Deep Talks lecture at the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center at 160 W. Main Street, sharing her project, "Kapemni: Twisting Between Worlds." The evening begins at 5 p.m. Mountain Time with a social hour and light refreshments; the talk itself starts at 6 p.m. Admission is free and open to the public.
The title is not decoration. In Dakota and Lakota star knowledge, kapemni describes the mirroring of the sky and the earth: as it is above, it is below. The pairing is often depicted as two tipis lined up vertically, their tops touching. Lakota constellations are understood to correspond to specific places on the land. During the week surrounding the winter solstice, the kapemni constellation pairs of the Black Hills reach their zenith, a time set aside for remembering the traditions and stories of the stars and passing them to the next generation.
It is a concept that maps onto SURF with unusual precision. The facility is the deepest underground laboratory in the United States, occupying the former Homestake Gold Mine at 4,850 feet below the surface, where experiments in physics, biology, geology, and engineering run in the dark. Above that same ground, for thousands of years, people read the sky. Berg's residency work asks what happens when those two ways of looking at the universe are placed side by side.
"The questions being asked at SURF: the nature of the universe, questions of where and why we exist, these really, deeply important physical questions, are all things that, as an artist, I think about all the time," she said.
Berg is an interdisciplinary Mnicoujou Lakota artist whose work is rooted in observation of the natural world and Lakota values. She is also Mexican-American and German-American, and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. She earned a bachelor's degree in visual arts and American studies at Princeton University and a master's degree in art and art education at Columbia University Teachers College. Her career spans more than 20 years and includes gallery exhibitions, awards, public lectures and workshops, community art projects, and commercial commissions. Her work is held in corporate collections including Virgin Hotels, Spotify, Jane Street, and The Ritz Carlton, and in health care spaces such as Cohen's Children's Hospital in New York and the Oyate Health Center for Indian Health Services in Rapid City, South Dakota. She was a 2023 Emerging Artist Fellow with the Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh, New York. She now lives and works in the Hudson River Valley in New York and in HeSapa, the Black Hills, with her husband, son, dogs, and cat.
She has thought carefully about what the word "art" even means in her tradition. "In Lakota language, there is no distinct word for 'art,'" she has written. "I believe this to be because the act of creating is like being. Our human experience is in a constant state of becoming. I understand art as a lived practice — an expression of vision, relationship, and responsibility to the world."
Berg's fall visit is the second half of the SURF Artist in Residence program, which brings an artist to Lead for a four-week on-site visit in the summer and a one-week art installation and guest lecture visit in the fall. The residency provides transportation, housing, a per diem, studio space, and tours of both the surface and underground areas of the facility. It is modeled after residencies run by the National Park Service, CERN, and Fermilab — institutions that have long treated artists as legitimate interpreters of scientific work.
The program is younger than it might seem. Gina Gibson, a multimedia artist and professor of digital communication at Black Hills State University, became Sanford Lab's first-ever artist-in-residence in 2019. Gibson spent her visits photographing LUX-ZEPLIN's titanium cryostat, recording the sound of a jackleg drill echoing through a drift, and filling field journals. "Throughout Sanford Lab's history, we've leveraged the arts to help tell the story of the science at Sanford Lab and the experience of working nearly a mile underground," said Mike Headley, executive director of Sanford Lab, when the program launched. "We're expanding our outreach efforts through the new Artist-in-Residence program to work directly with a regional artist to develop a collection inspired by our facility."
That phrase — "regional artist" — is doing real work in Berg's case. She is not an outsider parachuting into the Black Hills to make work about a mine. She is a woman who grew up watching the headframes and wondering what was happening beneath them, and who carries both the scientific curiosity and the star knowledge of the place.
The Deep Talks series itself has become a fixture in Lead, ushering scientific discussion into the public sphere with past topics ranging from nuclear and particle physics to algorithmic art, local history, and botany. The October installment is sponsored by Dakota Shivers Brewing, Edward Jones financial advisor Chris Mitchell, RCS Construction, and Charles and Jolene Lichtenwalner.
For anyone who has driven past the Homestake Visitor Center and wondered what a nearly mile-deep laboratory has to do with the sky overhead, this is the hour that answers it. A physicist measures the universe from the bottom of a hole in the Black Hills. A Lakota artist measures it from the stars that mirror the hills themselves. Kapemni says those are the same measurement, taken from two ends.
Berg's talk is free, requires no ticket, and begins with refreshments. The doors of the visitor center open onto a view of the same headframes she grew up beneath — and, on a clear October night, the same sky the constellations have always been read from.