Those unable to attend may bid on-line at www.proxibid.com beginning March 17. You may also bid on live auction items in “real time.” Visit www.proxibid.com for details.

BIG: Art on a Grand Scale
January 28 – March 19, 2006 Teliza Rodriguez, Curator

John Sparagana
Falling Out
oil, c. 1990-1991
Gift of the Artist

This exhibition features large-scale paintings, drawings, and sculpture on view in the great expanse of the Museum’s East Gallery. Two recent acquisitions are included: Joan Waltemath’s Hagal and Shirley Shaneyfelt’s Freedom March.

Waltemath, a New York-based artist, was born in North Platte, Nebraska. From 1971-1973, she attended the University of Nebraska and, in 1976, received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1993, she received an M.F.A. from Hunter College at The City University of New York. Now, a full-time artist with not only a national but international exhibiting career behind her, she is also a Professor at Chanin School of Art at Cooper Union, New York and has taught at Princeton University, New Jersey. Her large scale painting Hagal measures over 11 feet in size and is painted on a free hanging canvas sewn together by the artist. The “wall-hanging” contains cross patterns that were devised through a mathematical study where Waltemath concentrated on the vestments of St. Nicholas of Byzantine icons. The artist discovered that in a number of these icons, the proportions were expressed as a square root of two progressions. She then developed these progressions and utilized this in combination with other number series (the Fibonacci) into the underlying syntax of all her paintings. The end result is a painting with an architectural base that is supremely highlighted in the classical architectural surroundings of the East Gallery. Hagal was a gift from the artist’s mother, Patricia Waltemath.

Shirley Shaneyfelt’s Freedom March is one of the “smallest” large paintings included in the Big exhibition measuring 42 x 50 inches. Created in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement, the black and white painting depicts an outline of an African American man marching with his arms raised, with the floor where he had just walked showing through behind him. Freedom March is an excellent example of naïve art as the perspective within the composition is awkward, contains a forceful use of pattern and color, but nonetheless shows a charming and honest approach reflecting social issues of that era. Shaneyfelt, born in Hastings, Nebraska, was considered a seasoned artist at the time of her death in 2004 in the Washington, D.C. area. While she did not have the opportunity to complete her formal art training, she sought out instruction in art as opportunities presented themselves and made the most out of her artistic career by becoming a full time artist, art advocate, and art instructor. Freedom March was a recent gift from her husband, Lyndal Shaneyfelt.

Additional works included among the 16 total are Edgar Jerin’s drawing Tom in His Mother’s House, Joseph Ruffo’s photograph Moment in Time, Susan Knight’s painting Look Earthward Angel: Portrait of Fritz Bally, and the sculptures of Richard Helzer, Michael C. Todd, and Peter Worth’s Vertical Creature, also a recent acquisition. The artworks that comprise this exhibition are juxtaposed in such a way as to highlight and cast a new perspective on the large works from the collection.

What’s the Matter?
August 30, 2005 – August 27, 2006 Susan Reiber, Director of Education

Dan Howard
Soliloquium II
oil on linen canvas, 2003 Museum Purchase made possible by TierOne Bank
Museum of Nebraska Art Collection

What’s the Matter? is an exhibition selected from MONA’a permanent collection demonstrating art and science connections. Organized by Susan Reiber, MONA’s Director of Education, and Julie D. Hehnke, Grand Island Barr Middle School Integration Specialist, the show is on view in the Hitchcock Education Gallery.

Art and science help us understand ourselves and the world around us. Early in history humankind connected art and science naturally. There was little in life that did not intrigue. Leonardo da Vinci’s curiosity stimulated him to pursue the explanation of how natural laws of science operate. A “Renaissance Man,” Leonardo was learned in the arts and sciences. His paintings were masterpieces of great beauty and spiritual content, while his scientific investigations of geology, botany, anatomy, hydraulics, and mechanics demonstrated his scientific genius. His exploration of the universe about him is recorded in his sketchbooks – a combination of the arts and sciences.

Although the integration of art and science in the 16th century when Leonardo lived was quite apparent, the focus of What’s the Matter? is to provide evidence that this important link still exists today. Both artists and scientists explore and synthesize ideas. They help us to make more sense of our existence. Both art and science are based on fundamental human awe of nature and the desire to question. Creative thinking combines artistic imagination and scientific methodology in order to transform commonplace and familiar elements into new and unusual structures.

This exhibition brings art and science together using the themes of natural elements of the environment – air, earth, water, fire, and light. Views of biological and botanical matter, the molecular states of matter – solid, liquid, and gaseous, and the art elements of line, color, shape, form, and texture informed the art selected. Dan Howard’s painting Soliloquium: II shows the motion of the air and the growth of cellular plant structures in an expressionistic style. In Earthscape, an assemblage by Tom Bartek, the organic shapes of an actual animal skull bone are contrasted against a linear background. The pattern and texture found in nature is recorded in Reinhold Marxhausen’s photograph Painted Wood and Wendy Mues’ painting of reptile scales in Bravery Counts.

Art and science are both needed to view the world in depth. The artist keeps alive the sense of wonder and awe that balances the scientist’s measurements. The scientist opens new discoveries and aspects of order which the artist expresses visually and aesthetically. The same adventurous imagination is necessary for both.

What’s the Matter? served as the inspiration for art and science activities at MONA’s annual Kids Fun Day on January 28.

Kim Doner: Story Illustrations
February 7 – July 19, 2006 Susan Reiber, Director of Education

Continuing the art and science theme of the exhibition What’s the Matter?, Kim Doner: Story Illustrations presents images from five childrens books: Buffalo Dreams, The Green Snake Ceremony, Q is For Quark, Cryptomania, and The Philosophers Club. Doner’s illustrations are on view in the Hitchcock Corridor, adjacent to the Hitchock Education Gallery on MONA’s lower level.

Kim Doner, from Tulsa, Oklahoma, knows how to draw a good story – whether it’s for a poster, magazine illustration, or book. Her second illustrated book, The Green Snake Ceremony, won the Oklahoma Book Award for Best Illustrated Book. Her latest book, Buffalo Dreams, marks her debut as writer as well as illustrator. She is a member of the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Graphic Artist’s Guild, Oklahoma Center for the Book, and the International Reading Association. Presented in collaboration with the Nebraska State Reading Association, the artist gave a public talk for children and adults on February 16.

Images of Land from MONA’s Collection
October 25, 2005 – March 19, 2006 Teliza V. Rodriguez, Curator

Ernest Ochsner
Lincoln Creek, Summer Storm
oil on linen, 1996
Gift in memory of Robert Wright Cook & Ottelie Leona Louisa Schmidt Cook from their family & friends
Museum of Nebraska Art Collection

Drawn from our permanent collection, Images of Land showcases some of the finest reinterpretations of the Nebraska landscape through the eyes of a number of the most prolific and noted Nebraska artists. Each work brings varying impressions of the land that, throughout history and even to this day, has been sometimes perceived as a “wasteland.” The show tells a different story of the seeming simplicity of our state’s geography and depicts the interesting visual variety and complexities that exist within it.

Included among the 29 paintings, drawings, and photographs are images of beauty that emphasize the vastness, peace, and solitude of the Nebraska land such as Keith Jacobhagen’s Six O’clock News, Farm Lights in late November 1993 Second Study; Hal Holoun’s Hill; and Keith Lowry’s Late August Evening. Others highlight the drama of the land as well as people’s interaction and dependence on it as seen in Kady Faulkner’s Will It Never Rain? depicting a farmer’s wife looking longingly to the skies for relief, Wright Morris’s photograph Cracked Earth, Nebraska; and Lamont Richard’s Hills and Storm, Southwest Cherry County that celebrates the often intense and foreboding skies of Nebraska.

Nebraska Now: David Harvey, Drawings
January 14 – April 9, 2006 Teliza V. Rodriguez, Curator

David Harvey Studio

David Harvey’s large and small scale drawings fill and transform the space of MONA’s Yanney Skylight Gallery in his first showing at the Museum of Nebraska Art. Numerous sketches on paper are pinned to the gallery walls and sketch journals are on display – creating a studio-like atmosphere throughout the exhibition, giving a sense of immediacy and spontaneity found in the artist’s work.

Harvey’s manner of working is one that is rapid, reactionary, pensive, and often frenzied. The results are drawings that contain marks, strokes, and smudges that are indicative of the artist’s interest and fascination with the petroglyphs of the Southwest landscape. Petroglyphs are marks carved into the surface of stone and sometimes petrified wood. Harvey physically approaches paper in much the same way. His use of media on the paper is so intense that it often leaves impressions on the papers underneath. Echoes of previous drawings are “etched” in subsequent drawings and the process is then repeated, over and over again. Each work is a completed piece in and of itself, but also part of a greater whole as they build upon each other to create physical resonance and a definitive connectivity throughout the body of work. He spoke about his work at a talk on January 14.

Originally from North Carolina, Harvey received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honors in 1987 from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. In 1988, he came to Lincoln to study painting at the University of Nebraska graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 1992. His work is in numerous private collections and has been featured in the Prairie Schooner literary journal, 2002, on the front and back covers. In 2001, he was one of four artists invited to participate in Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery’s Local Color series. He is a full-time artist who resides in Lincoln with his wife, Anne, and son, Jesse.

Science Fiction Mayhem
January 17 – March 12, 2006 Kristin Gebhardt, ARTreach Coordinator

Science Fiction Mayhem exhibition

Expect mayhem within the stately walls of MONA with the exhibition Science Fiction Mayhem. This show explores a universe where rules don’t apply and imaginations reign supreme. Bringing together a collection of unusual art’ifacts from the MONA collection and beyond, selections include works by the late Kent Bellows, Lynn Carlsgaard, Ray George, David Harvey, Jeanne Herron Richards, Leonard Thiessen, and Sam Dowd.

Is space really the final frontier? We think not. Discover the possibilities of Science Fiction Mayhem. It’s quite literally out of this world!

The Migration Stops Here: Birds of Nebraska
January 14 – May 14, 2006 Kristin Gebhardt, ARTreach Coordinator

John James Audubon
Whooping Crane
handcolored lithograph - double elephant folio size 1834
Museum Purchase made possible by
Carol Cope & MONA Museum of Nebrasaka Art Collection

Visitors to Central Nebraska are often amazed by the variety and beauty of the migratory birds that visit the Platte River in spring months. In honor of these feathered friends, MONA showcases a number of avian artworks that reflect the many types of birds in our region during this time of year. Works by John James Audubon, Myra Biggerstaff, Michael Forsberg, Cliff Hollestelle, Titan Ramsay Peale, among others, are included. A selection is also on view at the Calvin T. Ryan Library, University of Nebraska Kearney.

Wild by Design: 200 years of Innovation & Artistry in American Quilts
April 8 – July 30, 2006

Loaned from the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Wild by Design is a dynamic group of quilts ranging from the mid 1800s to the present day and illustrating the thread of originality that runs through American quilt history.

Dr. Janet Berlo, professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, New York, and fellow of the International Quilt Study Center, has written...
“ Many people think of quilts primarily as exercises in rigorously geometric repeat patterning. Yet a great free-wheeling tradition exists in quiltmaking in which improvisation, asymmetry, and experimentation are the norm…. This creative and original artistic impulse can be documented back to the early years of quiltmaking in this country. For at least 200 years, American women artists have made quilts in which off-beat color placement and manipulation of printed textile patterns have combined with bold experimentation in block formation and appliqué.

Yet one aspect of quilts has remained comparatively understudied since Jonathan Holstein first called attention to it in his ground-breaking exhibit Abstract Design in American Quilts at the Whitney Museum in 1971: their aesthetic dimensions. Holstein put forth the radical proposition that, in their quilts, 19th century American women were “painting with fabric” and that their works demonstrated “the highest degree of control for visual effects.”

For more than two centuries, American artists have steadfastly continued their explorations in piecework and appliqué, proving that fabric is an inexhaustible medium for innovation in color, abstraction, figuration, and other modes of expression. American quilt artists’ greatest aesthetic legacy is that their work is, in every sense of the term, wild by design.

”Under the Radar"
January 28 – May 7, 2006 Teliza V. Rodriguez, Curator

Jackie Abell
Parachutes
charcoal, 2005
Collection of the Artist

Comprised of photography, painting, installation, and multi-media work, this exhibition highlights four accomplished artists who are just under Nebraska’s “art scene” radar. Those invited to participate are: Jackie Abell, Ed Lowe, Rob Walters, and Jessica Witte. Sure to challenge and provide a glimpse of art influenced by modern and contemporary trends, this small exhibition questions and confronts large-scale theory, methods, conundrums, as well as offers simple enjoyment, fascination, and objects to ponder.

Jackie Abell, born 1963 in Northern Ireland, creates drawings and paintings in charcoal, pastel, and oil that are lyrical, ethereal, sometimes haunting, and at times allegorical. Throughout her career and within her work, Abell has utilized imagery of windows and ladders, among others, that seek out a “sense of place” and “connection to the land.” While there is an aspect in her work that is telling of a childhood raised in Northern Ireland during “the Troubles” era, the totality of her work’s influences comes from a combination of her deep connection to her land and elements of Ireland, music she listened to while growing up, and her migration to the United States in 2003, living as an “alien” in this country and thus learning how to adapt. In 1986, Abell received a B.A. (equivalent to a B.F.A. in the United States) in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art and Design in Canterbury, England, a degree that was a full-time three-year course in Fine Art specializing only in painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, and the history of art. In 1988, she received a H.D.F.A. (equivalent to an M.F.A. in the United States) from one of the United Kingdom’s premier art schools – the Slade School of Art, University College in London, England. After receiving a Post-Graduate certificate in art education in 1994 from the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she went on to become an Associate Lecturer in Art and Design at Fermanagh College, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland from 1995-2003. She is currently an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska Kearney and resides in Kearney.

Ed Lowe, born 1949 in Denver, Colorado, is a multi-media artist who considers his main materials to be “ideas and light” and with which he investigates the origins of man’s existence, the evolutionary path of the mind, and what has both been gained and lost throughout time. In installation pieces such as Homo Habilis to Hubble, the artist places a rainbow hologram of a skull that “floats” atop a pedestal in front of a color photograph of the universe taken from the Hubble telescope that is on a semi-circular plane of plexiglass. An ambitious work at 96 x 84 x 60 inches, the scale, perspective, and placement of Homo Habilis is an attempt by the artist to force a viewer to ponder the relationship between man and the universe, his existence within, what has been discovered in the vastness, and what is yet out there to realize. As the artist states, “…my ideas and artworks merely suggest to the viewers some of the milestones and mysteries [of man] and ask only that the viewer perceive these works as they will, and share my sense of wonder.” In 1973, Lowe received a Bachelor of Fine Art and, in 1976, a Master of Fine Art both from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has had several teaching positions in art at Metropolitan State College of Denver, Colorado; University of Colorado; and the University of Denver. Selected exhibitions include those at the Denver Art Museum; Nexus Gallery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Moderna Museet Museum, Stockholm, Sweden; and Stiftung Ludwig Museum of Modern Art, Vienna, Austria. He is a full-time artist and resides in Gering, Nebraska.

The color photographic nude portraits of women taken by artist Rob Walters are confrontational and challenging. In 2002, Walters placed an ad on an internet bulletin board in the San Francisco Bay area asking for women subjects to pose in their home for art photographs. What followed was a flood of responses and then sessions in each woman’s home with the artist taking photographs of them partially or fully nude. Surprisingly, none of the women asked for credentials from Walters when they welcomed him into their homes. Measuring 30 x 40 inches, the photographs provide a multitude of questions and commentary about our society, the age of the internet, the artist/subject relationship, the “male-eye” in art, and can tell us a great deal about ourselves and our reactions to the women depicted and their reasoning for posing for the artist. Rob Walters is a photographer and filmmaker/documentarian. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1973, he grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1997, he received a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in 1999 from California College of Art in San Francisco where he studied with photographer Larry Sultan. In 2004, Walters returned to Omaha to complete the documentary Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek Records. He is currently an Adjunct Professor in photography at the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is working on two additional documentaries for CurrentTV.

University of Nebraska Kearney (UNK) alumna Jessica Witte “creates social commentary” through the use of materials ranging from cigarette butts to cherry-flavored soap to a video of a “drama queen” making up herself to look like a victim. The artist’s objective is to provide “a form for relating to violence, sexuality, and shifting power relationships within public and private space” and forces the viewer to interact with her work as in Cherry Flavored. This particular sculpture is a 3-foot tall pair of dark pink legs in nylons created out of cherry-flavored soap. The legs are innocently “standing” in a corner with toes pointing inward. When first created, the work was highly pungent and would sweat if in the proper conditions. After being handled, the nylons have been soiled and the legs seem to be worn and aging. The duality of the coy pose with the thigh-high worn stockings provides to the viewer what the artist seeks – “visual statements of neutrality, acquiescence, or contradiction.” In 2001, Witte received a Bachelor of Fine Art with honors from UNK and went on to receive a Master of Fine Art from Northern Illinois University in 2004. Her artwork has been included in over 17 group and solo exhibitions. She has taught at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois; Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, Nebraska; and is currently an Adjunct Instructor in Art at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois.

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