12th Annual Art Auction
Saturday, November 6, 2010 | 8:00 PM Central
Auction closed.
12th Annual Art Auction
Saturday, November 6, 2010 | 8:00 PM Central
Auction closed.
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Description
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts 12th Annual Art Auction is a celebration of contemporary art that helps support the Bemis Center’s exceptional artists, innovative programs and public projects.
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Fletcher Benton<br/><i>Folded Square Alphabet T Marquette</i>
Lot # 1 (Sale Order: 1 of 27)
Fletcher Benton is known as a leader in the kinetic sculpture movement of the 1960's, for his geometric metal sculpture, and for cutting, folding, and realigning two-dimensional sheets of steel into three-dimensional objects that seem to defy gravity. In 2008, he was recognized by the International Sculpture Center with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture. In 1979, he received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stanford Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum. When asked about his aspirations in reaching people through his art he said, "Yes, it is the mind and it is the soul. But it's an uncluttered mind that I'm trying to reach. In a way it's an untarnished soul. I find children respond very directly to my work. They respond to the color, they respond to the shape, they respond with a kind of interest that asks, ‘Oh does that really move, that circle hanging there on that thing?' Maybe what I'm trying to reach in everybody is innocence."
Keith Jacobshagen<br/><i>2 Evenings in November, 2 Evenings in December</i>
Lot # 2 (Sale Order: 2 of 27)
Keith Jacobshagen is one of the preeminent American landscape painters. Instantly recognizable for their signature relationship of sky to land, Jacobshagen's paintings grant viewers spaces of intense introspection within the spectacular expanse of the midwestern sky. Working both in his studio and en plein air, he has focused
particularly on the sixty-mile radius surrounding Lincoln, Nebraska to make pictures that capture the spiritual vastness of Nebraska's landscape. Trained as a graphic designer and illustrator at the Kansas City Art Institute, Keith Jacobshagen
has been painting the light and space of the Midwest for close to four decades.
Jacobshagen's work has been shown in galleries and museums throughout the
United States and, since the late 1960s, he has had close to 80 one-person exhibitions. His work is also included in many public, corporate and private collections nationwide.
Aaron Storck<br/><i>Poetics and Dramatization: Still Life with Disconnects</i>
Lot # 3 (Sale Order: 3 of 27)
Storck divides his time between New York and
the Midwest and is currently a studio resident in
Kansas City at the Charlotte Street Foundation's
Urban Culture Project. There he is working in a
combination of performance, installation, digital
media, inkjet printing and painting endeavors.
He earned a BFA in printmaking at the
University of Kansas and has exhibited
extensively in the Midwest, New York and
Berlin.Storck�s Wizard House and the Garden of the Spirits installation was a part of the Bemis Center�s recent Hopey Changey Things exhibition. Storck will be in residence at the Bemis Center in the spring of 2011. The Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri represents his work.
Michele Grabner<br/><i>Untitled</i>
Lot # 4 (Sale Order: 4 of 27)
Grabner is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois. She is a professor and chair of the Painting and Drawing department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is the co-editor of the newly released The Studio Reader, an anthology published by the University of Chicago Press. Grabner and her husband Brad Killiam run The Suburban, an artists’ project space in Oak Park, IL and The Poor Farm, a not-for-profit art space in rural Wisconsin. The Suburban participated at the Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary No Soul for Sale project in May 2010 and The Poor Farm recently hosted art historian Moira Roth’s Festschrift exhibition.
John Buck<br/><i>War Eagle</i>
Lot # 5 (Sale Order: 5 of 27)
Sculptor and printmaker John Buck works with two interrelated bodies of work: carved wood, assemblage and bronze sculptures and large, multicolored woodblock prints. The Tandem Press of the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes Buck's work as one with "an exceptional insight and perspective on the social and political realities of the day. It often explores the enormity and complexity of conflict, yet his figures are whimsical and resilient.” Buck, who resides in both Montana and Hawaii, has received numerous awards, including an Individual Artist Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art. The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco also organized a major retrospective of his work in 1993 in a show that then traveled the nation.
Tony Berlant<br/><i>Barbara Ann</i>
Lot # 6 (Sale Order: 6 of 27)
Tony Berlant has been creating vivid metal collages since the early 1960s. He projects images of flora and fauna and common household objects onto tin shapes in quilt-like patterns that are both visually and conceptually rich. The artist received his BA, MA and MFA from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has shown his work at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles, California and the Centro Cultural del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, Mexico. Today, Berlant�s work is included in private, corporate and public collections, including the Smithsonian Institution�s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Hung Liu <br/><i>The Last Dynasty: Empress</i>
Lot # 7 (Sale Order: 7 of 27)
Hung Liu grew up in China and came of age during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. She spent four years in the countryside as a laborer, studied painting at the Central Academy of Art and in 1984 received permission to attend the University of California-San Diego where she earned an M.F.A.
Using anonymous historical photographs as the subject matter of her painting and prints, Liu reconstructs an unknown story. She embellishes the surfaces with lovely drawings of insects, flowers and birds, painterly drips and collage elements that create a veil of time and meaning over her subjects. "...between dissolving and preserving is the rich middle-ground where the meaning of an image is found... My paintings are metaphors for memory and history.”
Hung Liu has exhibited her work widely including the exhibition Hung Liu: A Ten Year Survey 1988-1998 that traveled to six US venues in 1998-2000. She has completed many public commissions and received many awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, and the International Art Critic's Award. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Mills College in Oakland.
Laurie Victor Kay<br/><i>Football 2, Bangkok</i>
Lot # 8 (Sale Order: 8 of 27)
Photographer Laurie Victor Kay studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College in Chicago where she received her BA in photography in 1995. After studying painting, art history and photography in Chicago, Italy and France, the artist settled in Omaha yet she continues to produce work through extensive international travel. For the past decade, Kay has focused on photographing public places and the people in them and views her work as part of an ongoing process. She and her husband Charles own Laurie and Charles Photographs in Omaha and their commissioned portraits hang in collections throughout the world.
Vera Mercer<br/><i>All Ducks, Omaha</i>
Lot # 9 (Sale Order: 9 of 27)
Once part of an artistic avant-garde in Paris that would become known as the "Nouveaux Réalistes,” Vera Mercer was first known for her portraits of visual artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Robert Filliou, Niki de Saint-Phalle Jean Tinguely, and Daniel Spoerri. It was in the Paris market halls where Mercer first encountered the theme of food, which is the subject of her January 2011 exhibition at the Bemis Center, her first ever solo exhibition in Omaha. Vera Mercer’s iconography revolves around an omnivores sense of food, from raw marketplace pork sides to classical compositions of flowers and vegetables composition. Mercer’s photographic still lifes are decadent and comical, grotesque and alluring. Mercer’s use of extreme scale and proportions in many of her still lifes pushes the subject matter into the realm of the absurd or surreal. Since moving to Omaha from Paris in 1970, Mercer has been an integral part of Omaha’s art and food communities.
Shaun Richards<br/><i>Love in the Fast Lane</i>
Lot # 10 (Sale Order: 10 of 27)
Shaun Richard’s large paintings are influenced by his upbringing in the Southeastern United States. The landscapes, history, idiosyncrasies and contradictions of this region helped to shape the interests, themes, and content of his work. With much of this recent work he has intentionally degraded the surfaces and images to create a sense of fleeting sentimentality, in the same way our experience of memories can become skewed or fictitious over time. Richards earned a BA in painting from The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Love in the Fast Lane was one of a series of works produced during his 2009 residency.
AIR 2009
Karen Kunc<br/><i>Hieroglyphics</i>
Lot # 11 (Sale Order: 11 of 27)
Karen Kunc is a Nebraska-based artist who also works in New York, Italy, Colorado and Helsinki. Her prints and artist's books have been shown recently in solo exhibitions in the United States, France and Poland. Her works are represented in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship. The artist received her BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her MFA from Ohio State University. She is a Cather Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Kunc has taught countless workshops around the world and has served as a visiting artist to over 100 institutions while also curating exhibitions of American art in Finland, France and Egypt.
Christina H Narwicz<br/><i>Monkey Fist</i>
Lot # 12 (Sale Order: 12 of 27)
Following her 1990 Bemis Center residency, Narwicz was awarded Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist's Fellowship Grants in 1992, 1993 and 1995. She was also the recipient of the Mid America Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship Grant. Most recently her work appeared in the May 2009 issue of Metropolitan Home, and in the 2009 edition of the Briar Cliff Review. Narwicz is a native New Yorker who currently resides in Omaha, Nebraska.
AIR 1989, 1990
Deborah Masuoka<br/><i>Bird Head</i>
Lot # 13 (Sale Order: 13 of 27)
Deborah Masuoka is well known for her large-scale rabbit heads — dynamic and powerfully reductive sculptures that are conceptually complex and visually compelling. She has been a visiting artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT as well as at the legendary Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel. Her work is in numerous private and public art collections, including the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Arizona State University. In 2005 the Art in State Buildings program in Iowa purchased three of her cast bronze rabbit head sculptures for the Stafford Arboretum in Iowa State University's Reiman Gardens. The Iowa West Foundation commissioned Masuoka to create a series of three large-scale bronze sculptures for it's public art program. She earned a BFA from Wayne State University and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. AIR 1989
Kent Bellows<br/><i>River Bank</i>
Lot # 14 (Sale Order: 14 of 27)
Kent Bellows has been recognized as one of America’s greatest masters of American Realism since first exhibiting in New York in 1985. The Nebraska-born artist, whose father was a commercial artist and watercolorist, began his career as a freelance science fiction illustrator in the late 1970s for publications such as Omni and Rolling Stone. He moved into commissioned portraiture and then figurative realism by the early 1980s, reaching national acclaim when he was discovered by the New York art market through Tatistcheff Gallery and then later Forum Gallery in New York. In memory of the artist and his legacy, The Kent Bellows Studio and Center for Visual Arts was established, which provides a creative outlet for high school art students, offering time, space and scholarship opportunities. Kent Bellows work is currently the subject of a retrospective on view at the Joslyn Art Museum.
AIR 1988
Christo<br/><i>Wrapped Snoopy Dodhouse, Project for the Charles M. Schulz Museum, Santa Rosa....</i>
Lot # 15 (Sale Order: 15 of 27)
The long-time Bemis Center board member has been known for the work he produced with his wife Jeanne-Claude, until her death last year. As one of the contemporary art world's most celebrated collaborative teams, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are particularly well-known for their environmental installation art, such as the highly acclaimed The Gates in New York City's Central Park in 2005. Although their artwork is visually striking and often controversial due to its size and scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to make the world a "more beautiful place" or to offer a new way of looking at an old landscape. Upcoming projects involve the wrapping of Colorado's Arkansas River and a large-scale piece entitled The Mastaba for the United Arab Emirates.
BC Board Member
Therman Statom<br/><i>House</i>
Lot # 16 (Sale Order: 16 of 27)
Therman Statom's works can be found in many major museum collections, including
the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Musee des Arts Decoratifs (Paris), the Toledo Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art (Atlanta) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Statom studied at the Pilchuck Glass School in
Stanwood, Washington, received a BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of
Design and completed an MFA in sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He exhibits widely in solo and group shows around the country, as well as internationally. Statom has been honored with two NEA Fellowships and a
Ford Foundation award. Statom's solo exhibition Nascita was presented at the Bemis Center throughout the spring of 2008. Recently, his major exhibition Stories of the New World was presented at The Orlando Museum of Art. Statom lives and works in Omaha.
Larry Ferguson<br/><i>#114-61-6 Bill Coffee's Hat Creek Ranch, Harrison, NE, U.S.A. 5-2001</i>
Lot # 17 (Sale Order: 17 of 27)
Photographer Larry Ferguson is an internationally known artist whose work has been exhibited in more than 400 galleries and museums. His black and white images of landscapes, cityscapes and people are widely collected by galleries, museums, private individuals and corporate collectors, including the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, A.C. Manuel Alvarez Bravo Collection in Mexico. Ferguson's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Art Institute of Chicago. A recipient of the Bemis Center's Community Artist Fellowship award, the artist had a one-person show, Antarctica: Journey & Destination here in 2006. Ferguson serves as Chairman of the Omaha Public Arts Commission.
Mary Zicafoose <br/><i>Slash & Burn #1</i>
Lot # 18 (Sale Order: 18 of 27)
Mary Zicafoose has spent the last 22 years in pursuit of visual surprises on the flat woven "rug" surface through dye processes, tapestry techniques and intriguing color play. Zicafoose blends cultural icons and symbols with a contemporary hand, creating powerful visual statements in fiber. She also translates these ethno-contemporary rugs into vibrant prints. The artist earned her BFA from St. Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana, and graduate studies include the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Nebraska. Her tapestries and rugs span the globe and are included in the collections of United States Embassies on three continents. Her work has been reviewed in publication such as The Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post and Fiberarts Magazine. Zicafoose lives and works in Omaha.
AIR 2008
Deborah Masuoka<br/><i>Rabbit Head"</i>
Lot # 19 (Sale Order: 19 of 27)
Deborah Masuoka is well known for her large-scale rabbit heads - dynamic and powerfully reductive sculptures that are conceptually complex and visually compelling. She has been a visiting artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT as well as at the legendary Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel. Her work is in numerous private and public art collections, including the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Arizona State University. In 2005 the Art in State Buildings program in Iowa purchased three of her cast bronze rabbit head sculptures for the Stafford Arboretum in Iowa State University's Reiman Gardens. The Iowa West Foundation commissioned Masuoka to create a series of three large-scale bronze sculptures for it's public art program. She earned a BFA from Wayne State University and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. AIR 1989
John Westmark<br/><i>The Three Brothers</i>
Lot # 20 (Sale Order: 20 of 27)
John Westmark is a painter who is interested in the metaphorical potential of unorthodox painting materials. The primary material used in his current work is store-bought paper sewing patterns applied directly to the canvas. Patterns and templates are the genesis of assembly, but once they are realized, they are tucked away or discarded. These paintings expose and liberate the patterns to become something new and lasting.
Westmark’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in collections worldwide. His work was featured in New American Paintings (2007, 2010), and he has been selected for the Vermont Studio Center Artist-in- Residence for the summer of 2011. John received an MFA from the University of Florida and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. He presently works and lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Christina West<br/><i>What a Doll</i>
Lot # 21 (Sale Order: 21 of 27)
Christina West works with the realistically rendered human figure, sculpted at a 3/4 life-size scale. Usually nude, but in some cases undressing, her figures — whether isolated, or grouped together in an installation — illustrate a playful narrative that often places them in seemingly childish situations, or freezes them in moments of awkwardness or uncertainty. West maintains her studio in Atlanta, GA where she is an assistant professor of ceramics at Georgia State University. She received her MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and her BFA from Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. She was an artist-in-residence at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts from 2006-07, where she was awarded the Lilian Fellowship. Additionally, her work has been supported by a grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the George Sugarman Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Artist Fund and the Southeastern College Art Conference. What a Doll was produced during her recent residency at the Bemis Center.
AIR 2010
Mary Ann Strandell<br/><i>Model Home</i>
Lot # 22 (Sale Order: 22 of 27)
Strandell’s works are a movable terrain between image, media and their myriad histories. She is represented in the collections of Hallmark Corporation, Sprint and H & R Block in Kansas City as well as at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, not to mention several museum collections. She has exhibited in national and international venues including the inaugural Art Paris Abu Dhabi Art Fair and has been reviewed in both the New Yorker and the Village Voice. The artist has taught at colleges throughout the Midwest and West. Strandell received her MA and MFA at the University of New Mexico.
AIR 1996
AIR 1996
Laurie Frick<br/><i>Everything You Forgot Yesterday</i>
Lot # 23 (Sale Order: 23 of 27)
Laurie Frick creates dynamic collages from found sources including contemporary art and culture magazines, postcards and found objects. She is interested in patterns, memory, and time, and her works radiate both a sense of history and movement. Frick studies neuroscience and is interested in the way past experiences influence the way the brain processes and interprets images and information. Frick is a former Bemis artist resident and was a 2009 recipient of the Emmy Gifford Fellowship. She lives and works in Austin, Texas and New York. She has also been awarded fellowships at YADDO, the Jentel Foundation and the American Academy in Rome. Formerly a corporate executive, Frick holds an MBA in addition to an MFA from the New York Studio School. She serves as an Associate Publisher for ArtCritical.com and exhibits her work at the Robert Steele Gallery in New York.
AIR 2009
AIR 2009
Matthew Kluber <br/><i>No Place Like Utopia</i>
Lot # 24 (Sale Order: 24 of 27)
Matthew Kluber mixes light and paint in his work and, by projecting software-based animations onto meticulously painted aluminum panels, he asks viewers to fuse static and active images into a singular visual experience. The artist is a professor of art at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and has shown his prints, drawings, paintings and digital work at galleries and museums including: 123 Watts Gallery in New York City, Klein Art Works in Chicago, Rudolph Poissant Gallery in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, the Austin Museum of Art in Texas, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Des Moines Art Center, the University of Iowa Museum of Art, and the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College. Kluber was part of the recent exhibition Borderland Abstraction at the Bemis Center.
Colin Smith<br/><i>CHILL</i>
Lot # 25 (Sale Order: 25 of 27)
Colin Smith's paintings and sculptures expand the conventions of painting. Beginning with the joys of material, color and the graphic image, Smith’s newest works are aggressive, buoyant and difficult to classify. The wall works reference minimal painting and expressionism, yet their colors and forms are fully contemporary. The floor sculptures are playful and casual, yet their offhandedness belies a rigorous process and intentional mark making. Smith is interested in making works that charge retinal and interior spaces. They move when you squint and can throw you off balance if you get too close. Smith’s abstractions have a liveliness and spirit that is rare in contemporary painting, particularly in works that contain such a restrained and focused bag of tricks. Smith received his BFA in 1988 from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and his MFA in 1992 from Drake University. Colin Smith recently produced several new works for the Bemis Center’s Borderland Abstraction exhibition.
