Nate Hofer: Heartland Silos (Decommissioned)
September 13 – December 7 | 2025
Opening Reception | September 14 | 1 – 4pm
Presentation and Performance | 2pm
Nate Hofer, a “late stage Cold War kid,” was well aware of the looming threats surrounding him as he grew up in the 1980s.
As he describes in interviews and a TEDxKC presentation, Hofer lived close to the Sunflower Army Ammunition Plant outside of De Soto, KS. The high value target just down the road created unease for Hofer, just a first-grader then. The son of Mennonite conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War, Hofer was taught early in life about the abject violence war brings. His stepfather, after seeing Hofer’s proud sketches of WWII battles on his homework sheets, explained that war was ugly and that the conflicts of their time would be fought with nuclear bombs, instead of tanks and guns. In an article written by Steven Hill of Kansas Alumni Magazine, Hofer shared “I appreciated that, but he also kind of put my first existential fear into my head, and I think I was probably a little too young to have that.”
The détente of the late 1980s and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought Hofer, and the world, relief. Like many, Hofer moved on, seemingly freed from the Damoclean possibility of nuclear annihilation. In 2001, Hofer graduated from the University of Kansas with BFAs in Painting and Graphic Design.
In the time since 1991, however, the low hum of nuclear threats has grown to a cacophony. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock stands as a stark image of our perilous moment. The clock, which counts down to midnight, or nuclear war, has whittled down from 17 minutes in 1991 to 89 seconds in 2025. This year also marks the 80th anniversary of the United States’ atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Beginning in the mid-2010s, Nate Hofer came to see, and feel, the growing strife. A trip to Western Nebraska in 2015 brought Hofer near active Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) sites. This spurred the Overland Park-based artist to research the United States’ modern nuclear force. In the meantime, Hofer noticed the “‘fire and fury’ rhetoric was really heating up,” which reignited his Cold War-era anxieties and drove him further into his research.
During a monthlong sabbatical from work in 2019, Hofer began the project he was planning. With the assistance of a drone, and a slew of valuable information gleaned from online maps and land records, Hofer set out to document some of Missouri’s 150 decommissioned Minuteman Missile silo sites. Hofer’s images – quiet, unassuming and neatly composed – can be viewed in many ways. Despite their benign appearance, Hofer’s subjects hide relics of our violent past. The Minuteman, and single examples of Atlas F and Titan II, sites shown in Heartland Silos (Decommissioned) could strike nearly any corner of the planet. The sharp relief between global impact from a weapon stationed on a one and half acre plot is jarring. While the silo sites shown in the exhibition are all decommissioned, Hofer notes that hundreds of ICBM sites are still active in the northern Great Plains. But the main message of Hofer’s work is one of cautionary hope. These sites, once the launching pads for unimaginable destruction, now sit empty. In their place we can see nature returning and adaptive reuse. In 2021 Hofer was given a World Peace Photo Award for his work on decommissioned missile silos.
Reuse is another element in Heartland Silos (Decommissioned) worth noting. Along with his visual art practice, Nate Hofer is an avid pedal steel guitarist. At Volland, Hofer shares his 2024 project Decommissioned, an album meant to soothe listeners. The reverb effect in Hofer’s EP does not come from his pedals, however. It is the result of recording inside a deactivated Atlas F missile silo site near Wilson, KS. The 30-foot deep chamber created the echo effect. Hofer sat down with Frank Morris of KCUR in 2024 to talk about the project.
“The recording is called ‘Decommissioned.’ It’s ethereal, ambient music. Hofer layers pedal steel notes into the cavernous Cold War fortress and the heavily reinforced concrete walls keep the notes going and going. There are no other instruments and no effects, just the cathedral-like echo inside the almost impenetrable old missile base. It’s beautiful, and Hofer said that can take people by surprise.”
Listen to selections from “Decommissioned” below –
BIO
Nate Hofer (he/him) is an artist blending music and photography. Nate was born in Nigeria to Mennonite conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War, and his art reflects a deep commitment to peace. Inspired by his Cold War upbringing in the Midwest, Nate explores issues of arms control and disarmament through aerial photography of decommissioned missile silos and solo ambient performances on the pedal steel guitar. His work has been recognized with awards such as the 2021 Global Peace Photo Award and membership to the Atomic Photographer’s Guild. Nate’s 2024 debut album EP, “Decommissioned,” recorded in a former Kansas missile silo, has garnered recent national attention on NPR and has made him a TEDxKC speaker/performer.
ARTIST STATEMENT
We’ve managed to escape extinction so far. Perhaps by sheer luck.
I grew up in the American Midwest during the Cold War culture of the 1980s. My home was within sight of an ammunition plant, and—though I didn’t know it at the time—a short drive from 150 U.S. Air Force ‘Minuteman’ intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) silos. Locally, it was common knowledge that in the event of an attack, our town would be wiped out in an instant by Soviet Union ICBMs. This wasn’t just the stuff of movies I’d seen (like The Day After, which captured this very scenario unfolding and was actually filmed where we lived) – This was very real life. The threat of potential nuclear war was literally all around me and overwhelmingly clear: A frightening and compelling backdrop to my childhood.
The following years would bring major shifts in geopolitics. The Soviet Union ended in 1991 and in the same year, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), signed by the United States of America and the USSR, removed and destroyed our nearby 150 nukes. In 1992, the Army decommissioned the ammunition plant that neighbored my home.
Today, in my adult years, news of increasing nuclear armament and faltering nuclear treaties rekindled my childhood anxieties and intrigue. Chaotic Trump Administration rhetoric and foreign policies for Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have resurfaced uneasy feelings all too familiar from my youth.
This project helps process these emotions.
Ready access to online satellite imagery, paired with new technology in consumer aerial (drone) photography, allow me to explore in-person the former nuclear sites that occupied my imagination as a child and were the root of my anxieties and fascination.
This work investigates what occupies these former ICBM spaces today and in doing so, highlights what is obviously absent: the weapons themselves.
In a time of increasing nationalism and global instability, my work contemplates how we have so far avoided the existential threats from our past and provides a cautionary work about how we consider our collective future.
