Bonny Fleming is a photographer and digital artist in the Black Hills. Her work includes landscapes and wildlife of the Black Hills and Badlands.
Think of a stand of ponderosa pine trees silhouetted against the vivid layered colors of a Black Hills sunset, or a lone bighorn sheep atop steep snow-filled gullies of the Badlands, or a close-up of a coiled prairie rattlesnake about to strike.
Her digital art includes composites of thousands of photos she has taken over the years that fill the space inside an animal. There is a raven that includes images of Yellowstone Lake, and a buffalo with a jagged ridge of pine trees that make up the arch of back, and a butterfly that includes images of a lightning bolt and the blue sky.
Some of her time lapse videos of swirling Black Hills super cell thunderstorms have been picked up by major TV networks after going viral on the internet.
Fleming is now switching gears, from doing her art to running a downtown gallery in Rapid City that features her work and a few other Black Hills artists.
She sat down with SDPB’s Charles Michael Ray to talk about the intersection of being an artist and running a business.