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Jun Kaneko: Drawings & Prints Although now primarily known for his large ceramic forms, Jun Kaneko began with drawings in his youth. MONA’s exhibition highlights the medium that first drew this internationally renowned artist into the world of visual creativity by showing some never-before displayed drawings and prints in the Museum’s Rohman Gallery. Created in Kauai, Hawaii in the winter of 1995, the abstracted and gestural works are inspired by the flora and fauna of the island. Born in Nagoya, Japan in 1942, Jun Kaneko is one of the most important living visual artists working today. Beginning at an early age and throughout his life, the pull towards visual creation and the challenge that entails, along with a bit of providence, are what have made this man the justifiably famous artist that he now is. While a teenager, Kaneko “rebelled against Japan’s rigid educational system” and began to create numerous drawings of figures, landscapes, and still lifes. Eventually his mother found the drawings and took them to artist friends for comment. This led to the decision to have the young Kaneko take classes daily in drawing and painting from a private instructor, Satoshi Ogawa, and go to high school in the evenings. This connection with Ogawa is what eventually took Kaneko to the United States at what was one of the most pivotal periods in American ceramic arts. Ogawa was acquainted with the American ceramicist, Jerry Rothman, and made plans for Kaneko to meet him in California. Once there, Kaneko lived with Fred and Mary Marer, avid collectors of some of the most influential artists in the American clay movement. While ceramic eventually became the main artistic avenue for Kaneko, drawing and painting have never been far removed and are the backbone of his work. Always returning to these primary media, in 1995 Kaneko was forced to fully focus on this means of expression. He contracted an ear infection that turned into a protracted viral illness. To help with his recuperation, Kaneko was advised to get away from the cold winters in Nebraska. So, along with his wife Ree Schonlau, he spent some of the winter in Kauai, where he drew and painted. The 12 oilstick drawings on paper in this exhibition come from that first year in Kauai, a place where the artist has returned numerous times to work. The four monotypes, also completed later that year, were created at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Large, abstract, full of motion and depth, this body of work by Kaneko highlights the intrinsic sense of immediacy found in drawing. In Jun Kaneko, a 2001 book by Susan Peterson, the artist remarks, “Ceramic materials have certain rules and rhythms involved in the creating of a piece. It is impossible to build up ten feet of clay in one day and glaze and fire it the next. It does not allow the kind of continuous rhythm and freedom of making that drawing affords. This is the difference I enjoy, when I draw.” This difference is apparent in this group of drawings. While they contain many of the loose, expressive, yet controlled strokes and marks found in his ceramic forms, there is nonetheless a disparity between the two. A “lightness of being” pervades the works on paper as well as a sense of depth that, while they exist within the ceramic forms, are free from the effects of protracted time and heat, creating a very “present” experience that is both perfectly tangible and clear. Jun Kaneko lives and works primarily in Omaha, Nebraska but has studios in Hawaii and Mexico, among other locales. In 1964, Kaneko attended the Chouinard Art Institute and the California Institute of Art, Los Angeles. In 1966, he studied under Peter Voulkos at the University of California in Berkeley and five years later, with Paul Soldner at Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California. He has received Honorary Doctorates from both the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the Royal College of Art in London. Additionally, he was a Fellow of the American Craft Council in 1996, an Honorary Member of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts in 1994; received an Archie Bray Foundation Fellowship in 1967; and twice received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship – in 1979 and 1985. Also, Kaneko taught at the University of New Hampshire, Scripps College, Rhode Island School of Design, and at Cranbrook Academy of Art. The artist’s career includes over 150 solo exhibitions and nearly 200 group ones. His work is included in the collections of the American Crafts Museum, New York; European Ceramic Work Centre, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington, DC; and The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan, among others.
A Divergent Experience: Therman Statom In 1971, just north of Seattle, Washington, artist Dale Chihuly and benefactors John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg, co-founded the Pilchuck School of Art – the first educational center to fully focus on the burgeoning artistic medium of that time – glass. One of the first students to benefit from the Chihuly and Hauberg endeavor was Therman Statom, who attended Pilchuck in its commencement year. Now, over 35 years later, Statom has become one of the leading glass artists of our time and has recently relocated to Omaha. MONA is proud to host the artist’s first major exhibition in Nebraska. Focusing on the Native American experience, Statom fills MONA’s grand East Gallery with a full-room installation consisting of a Native American village constructed of glass, mirrors, paintings, and audio/visual effects. Statom is known as the Studio Glass Movement’s “harbringer of the wild and unconventional” due to his innovative use of the glass medium. Often, the artist utilizes both blown glass forms alongside or within plate glass sheets or mirrors. Rooms and doorways are sometimes created out of the plate glass sheets. On the glass “walls” or forms created, whether blown or assembled, Statom frequently crosses the line of what is traditionally viewed as glass techniques by painting imagery on the items he constructs or placing objects within or on them. The results of such a loose but focused and well-planned mode of creativity are rooms filled with glass constructs that tell a sometimes fantastical but purposeful story. In the case of Statom’s full-scale installation at MONA, the artist concentrates on bringing attention to a time in our state’s history – more specifically, an often overlooked viewpoint of Native Americans of the Nebraska Plains and the changes in their lives and culture when “the West was won.” The process of creating the exhibition consists of a week-long installation when the public views a “working artist.” This exhibition also coincides with MONA’s Jun Kaneko: Drawings & Prints show, located in the Rohman Gallery, drawing attention to Statom and Kaneko’s longtime friendship and professional relationship which played a major role in the glass artist’s move to Omaha – as Kaneko did several decades earlier. Therman Statom was born in Winter Haven, Florida in 1953. As a young boy, he was influenced by the American abstract painter, Kenneth Noland, whose daughter was a good friend of Statom. The artist’s eventual leap into creating works with glass started when he entered Pilchuck in 1971. Afterwards, he attended the Rhode Island School of Design and received a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1974. Four years later, Statom completed a Master of Fine Art at Pratt Institute of Art and Design in Brooklyn, New York. He since has taught art classes at Pilchuck; the University of California in Los Angeles; Penland School of Crafts, Penland, North Carolina; Bild-Werk Frauenau, Frauenau, Germany; California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California; and the National University of Australia, Canberra, Australia. Numerous awards for the artist include the American Craft Council Award, two National Endowments for the Arts Fellowships, a Pratt Institute Fellowship, Ford Foundation Fellowship, and the City of Los Angeles Cultural Grant. The artist has had over 60 solo exhibitions and 100 group ones including those at such prestigious venues as the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Pratt Institute of Art and Design, Brooklyn, New York; Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; Galleria Diverto, Gergamo, Italy; and the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. Statom’s work is part of numerous museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the American Craft Museum, New York City; and Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France. Noted for his public commissions, Statom has completed over 20 including those at the Toledo Museum of Art; New York State Arts Commission, Concourse Village Day Care Center and East Village Daycare Center, both in the Bronx, New York; and the City of Beverly Hills, California. 
A Divergent Experience: Therman Statom gallery installation
Catlin Chronicles Inspired by an Indian delegation that passed through Pennsylvania in 1824, self-taught artist George Catlin (1796-1872) embraced the mission of “rescuing from oblivion the primitive looks and customs of the vanishing races of native men in America.” Catlin Chronicles celebrates this endeavor by pairing selected prints from Catlin’s North American Indian Portfolio of Hunting Scenes and Amusements with artifacts on loan from the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer. Catlin traveled to St. Louis in 1830 and befriended General William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame), who allowed him to sketch and paint the Indians who visited Clark’s office. Catlin was in Nebraska twice. In 1831 the artist navigated the Missouri River with Major Jean Dougherty, and some historians believe that the men may have traveled up the Platte River deep into Nebraska Territory. En route Catlin sketched area natives – the Pawnee, Oto, Missouri, Omaha, and Iowa tribes. The following year Catlin traveled by steamboat up the Missouri River, returning by canoe and creating images of the Sioux, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Mandan, and Hidatsa. Catlin hoped that Congress would purchase and preserve his depictions, but the idea was rejected. In 1839 he turned to Europe where his work was met with initial enthusiasm that unfortunately waned over several years. In an effort to revive the public’s interest in his mission, Catlin published his first portfolio of lithographs. Based on his paintings and titled North American Indian Portfolio of Hunting Scenes and Amusements, the series of twenty-five views made their debut 1844. The lithographs proved very popular and six additional editions were printed that same year. Acquired in 1977, MONA’s 36 Catlin lithographs are an important and impressive part of the Museum’s collection of works created by Artist-Explorers. Loans from the Stuhr Museum are equally prestigious, and include a cradleboard and a ledger book of Native American artwork. This exhibition is presented with the generous support of Pamela and John Kabalin, Scottsbluff.
George Catlin
Nebraska Now: Jess Benjamin, Ceramics Over 80 years ago, the great novelist Willa Cather said that it was not until she returned to the scenes of her childhood in Nebraska that she found herself a writer. Years later, emerging ceramic artist Jess Benjamin has done just that by immersing herself in the flora and fauna of the prairies and reinterpreting those objects within the ceramic medium. Growing up in central Nebraska, the terrain of the Plains became acutely familiar to Benjamin. On her family farm in Cozad, the artist’s main job was to rid the land of the persistent musk thistles that grew so abundantly. Later, after moving to Omaha, far from the tasks and solitude of the farm, these pesky plants found their way into Benjamin’s life, but this time, along with other flora and fauna of the Plains, they became a beguiling source of inspiration for her intricate, bold, abstracted ceramic forms. Over the course of four years living in Omaha, Benjamin found herself confronted with the plants of the prairies. As she observed and was drawn to the musk thistle that even concrete and bricks could not abate, she soon became mesmerized at the plant’s persistent and adaptable nature if not overabundance within an urban environment. This resonated and she soon found a sense of “comfort in the musk thistle’s strength and survival, seeing in its endurance a metaphor” for her “own personal and artistic growth.” The result of that comfort and interest can be seen in the numerous organic and abstracted ceramic works that entail her first one-person exhibition at an art museum. The artist creates small- to medium-sized organic forms that reinterpret the objects of the Plains that left such an indelible mark on the artist. The small forms appear to be pods with mouths gaping wide open. They can fit in the palm of a hand and are all at once “raw” and almost harmful looking but yet tactile and highly beckoning. The small forms are glazed with controlled color that includes greens, reds, browns, and blues and bring to mind objects that riddle the flat lands of the prairies. Larger forms are abstracted thistles and dried weeds that also have a raw feeling to them but again are also tactile and range from white, monolithic objects to colorful, twisted, darkly colored plant and snakelike forms. While yet at the beginning stages of a career, Jess Benjamin has had the opportunity to be around some of the leading international ceramicists and artists working today. From 2001 to 2005, she served as a studio assistant to world-renowned ceramic artist Jun Kaneko. While working for Kaneko, Benjamin was provided chances to listen to and view artists working, including Therman Statom, John Balistreri, Paul Soldner, Conrad Snider, and Ken Little. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art in Studio Art from Hastings College, Hastings, Nebraska, she began to work at Kaneko’s studio. Benjamin has exhibited in 12 solo and group exhibitions and was recently highlighted in Ceramics Monthly, New York Arts Magazine, Nebraska Life Magazine as well as a spotlight interview on Nebraska Public Television’s Statewide Program.
Jess Benjamin
Nebraska Now: Deb Oden, Prints From small to large-scale, this exhibition features textural, ethereal prints by Lincoln artist Deb Oden. Her extensive teaching experience includes Adjunct Professor at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln; Instructor of collograph, etching, and monotype at University Place Art Center (now Lux Center for the Arts), Lincoln; and a visiting Instructor for 2005-2006 at the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The artist states, “I am interested in pushing the traditional boundaries of printmaking. My current work consists of intaglio and screen-printed images that exemplify physical over-kill in the printing process, straining the paper's capacity and strength. In my desire to create more atmospheric prints and images that relate to my personal scale and environment, I am exploring methods of printing on large sheets of paper. The large-scale works range from 5’-12’ in width. I am interested in harnessing the print process’ ability to repeat a mark or an image and in the multiple as it applies to language. The representational and narrative nature of the print language is natural for my explorations in memory/history and lack/desire. Is the act of printing a manifestation of our longing to recreate the past? Or is the print, due to its connection to the matrix and the very serial nature of the medium, a link from the past to the future, a building block for creation? Interest in the fluidity and expansive nature of this visual communication leads me to acceptance of the insistent language born of the print process. Image: Artist Studio
Winter Forecast Predicts Snow at MONA If your holiday season’s not complete without a layer of snow on the ground, visit MONA for scenes of winter’s most spectacular advertisement. Bring your boots – the Cope Gallery is knee-deep in snow scenes until February 4. Selections include figurative works by Hal Holoun, Dwight Kirsch, Gladys Lux, Dale Nichols, and Grant Reynard as well as abstractions by Don Beardsley, Anne Burkholder, and Mary Lierley Wulf.
Journey Through Time: Art Tells the History of Nebraska Nebraska was once one of the largest territories of the United States, including all of present-day Nebraska and portions of South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. Although it has become smaller in size as a state, Nebraska’s intriguing history remains. The Journey Through Time exhibition addresses this rich past as well as the present, focusing on the Native Americans, the Artists-Explorers, the Early Nebraskans who established the first communities and learning institutions, the Regionalists of Thomas Hart Benton’s era, and finally the exciting frontiers explored by the Artists of Today. Prehistorically, Native Americans, including the Oto, Pawnee, Lakota, Omaha, and the Ponca, hunted and cultivated in Nebraska and the Great Plains region for hundreds of years maintaining significant cultures. In 1819 Major Stephen Long traveled up the Platte River with artists Titian Ramsay Peale and Samuel Seymour documenting the flora and fauna and establishing the concept of today’s Nebraska as “the Great American Desert.” In fact, the oldest piece of art in MONA’s collection, a Peale drawing of a stag, dates back to this expedition. Selections by Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, and John James Audubon, artist-explorers coming to this area between 1832 and 1843, are included in the exhibition. With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the Nebraska Territory was organized and opened for settlement by non Native Americans. The familiar early prairie structure of the sod house is documented by pioneer artist Solomon Butcher in his photographs and by contemporary artist David Routon in a more abstract representation, Sodhouse Family. Virginia Wattles and Wilma Shull record small town life. Wattles subject features local grocers George and Eli George singing in Zip-A-De-Do-Dah (Eli did not often sing since George was such an enthusiastic and outstanding singer). Schull looks at Main Street in Coming to Town for Saturday Night. Dwight Kirsch’s RFD Nebraska addresses rural life in the 1940s and ‘50s, as does William Schlaebitz’s drawing of a country school house entitled 4-Star School - Bladen, Nebraska. The team of Susan Reiber, MONA’s (now retired) Director of Education; Gary Zaruba, 19th century art specialist; and Roger Nyffeler, educator and school principal, curated the exhibition Journey Through Time. They invite the Museum’s visitors to travel in the footsteps of artists and view the history of Nebraska through selections from MONA’s permanent collection. Art truly does tell the story of Nebraska!  Virginia Wattles Zip-A-De-Do-Dah, pastel, 1992 Gift of Jim & Kathy George, Dave & Linda George, Debra (George) & Gary Phillips, Mary (George) Lange Museum of Nebraska Art Collection Seeing the Unseen: Photographs of Dr. Harold Edgerton Dr. Harold Edgerton, or “Doc” as he was known to his MIT students, was named one of the 15 most influential inventors of the 20th century. The modern electronic flash or Stroboscope that made rapid motion seem to stop in time was among his many inventions. Edgerton’s quest to reveal what the unaided eye could not see revolutionized photography. Some of his most famous photographs are a bullet shot through an apple and a milk drop forming a coronet. These stop-motion high-speed photographs are classics of modern art and science, and were achieved through the stroboscope. On loan from the Edgerton Explorit Center, Aurora, this selection of 14 photographs is on view in the Hitchcock Gallery Corridor on the lower level. Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska in 1903, grew up in Aurora, and received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska in 1925. After a year working in upstate New York, he enrolled at MIT to begin his graduate studies, beginning his long association with this prestigious university. The recipient of many awards and honors before his death at 86 in 1990, his photographs have been viewed in many museums – both those dedicated to science as well as those to art. Coupled with Journey Through Time in the adjoining Hitch-cock Education Gallery, Seeing the Unseen continues the theme of celebrating Nebraska’s history through an engineer whose photographs meld art and science.
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