Mike Calway-Fagen (San Diego, CA) earned his BFA in Sculpture from the University Of Tennessee and his MFA from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including at the Hudson D. Walker Gallery (Provincetown, MA), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. He has also been a resident at the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA) and has received awards from both the Joan Mitchell and Jerome Foundations.  

Denise Chapman  earned her BA in theatre from Creighton University and an MFA in theatre from the Theatre Conservatory at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. Currently director of education and outreach at the Omaha Community Playhouse, she has performed with Qwest Educational Programs (now B.O.O.M) touring elementary and middle schools in the greater Chicago land area and worked as a solo performing artist.  

Devel Crisp is a creative consultant at the Clouds and Gutters of my Mind and a teaching artist at the Nebraska Writer's Collective, where he teaches poetry, spoken word and slam to students at public schools and coaches teams for the "Louder Than A Bomb" High School Poetry Competition. He is also a member of the Wordsmiths, spoken word edutainers based in Omaha, and a co-founder of Tapestries, a monthly spoken word showcase weaving the words and stories of poets, storytellers, spoken word artists and rappers from diverse backgrounds and styles.

Noah Doely (Cedar Falls, IA)  received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. He has exhibited at the Steve Turner, Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), the Des Moines Art Center and 12 Gallery (Berlin, Germany) Doely's work has also been covered by Juxtapoz Magazine, the Los Angeles Times and the Des Moines Register. He is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Northern Iowa.  

Angela Drakeford received her BFA in sculpture from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. A former fellow at the Union for Contemporary Arts,  she took part in the Market Place of Community Values group exhibition at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE and was featured in the solo show I Can Grow Tall at Carver Bank last year. She currently works as an artist mentor and leads many art workshops for Omaha youth.

Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis (Cincinnati, OH) maintain a studio collaboration through Future Retrieval, which draws on the artists' strong interest in ornamentation, detail, form and natural order. Both earned their BFAs from the Kansas City Art Institute and MFAs from Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. They are currently assistant professors of Fine Arts in Ceramics at the University of Cincinnati.   

earned his MFA from the University of Georgia in Athens and a BFA from the

University of Maryland Baltimore County in Baltimore. He has exhibited his work at the Mason Murer Gallery (Atlanta, GA), the American Visionary Museum (Baltimore, MD) and Zeitgeist Gallery (Nashville, TN). Plakas has also been a resident at the Hub City Arts Initiative (Spartanburg, SC) and is the recipient of a Wilson Center for the Humanities Grant.

We are pleased to announce that Thomas Lowell Edwards is the first recipient of our annual Bemis-UNL Prize. The prize is awarded to outstanding graduates from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Masters of Fine Arts Program and follows the same guidelines as our internationally recognized Artist-in-Residence program.  

Thomas has been a Windgate Fellow as an artist-in-residence in Jingdezhen, China and received the Baden Württemberg Stipend for Vocationally Qualified People for an internship program in Germany. In its current issue,  

Ceramics Monthly ranks him as Emerging Artist of note.   

We look forward to welcoming Thomas to the Bemis family! 

Calling all alumni! We love hearing from you. Keep us up-to-date on your latest exhibitions, fellowships, projects and publications - as well as any other news you'd like to share by emailing Holly Kranker at: hollyk@bemiscenter.org.  

Natasha Bowdoin (AIR 2012) is  featured in the group exhibition  PULP Contemporary Cut-Paper

on view through May 17th at Alfred University's Cohen Gallery in Alfred, NY.

On the heels of his solo show at VOLTA NY 2014 in the Jarmuschek + Partner gallery in March, Jürgen Wolf (1993) was featured in April's edition of Installation Magazine. Wolf records his manifold states of mind in a dadaist tradition, and one inspirations from this tradition was to mount his own texts and paintings into the "American Sunbather", a popular nudist magazine from the 1950s.  

We're looking forward to the opening of Alternation of Mood on Friday, May 2, at 6:00 pm. The exhibition features works by young artists in the Joslyn Museum's Kent Bellows Mentoring Program, and everyone is invited to view the show, meet the young artists and their mentors, and learn more about this fantastic program. The event takes place at the Kent Bellows Studio (3303 Leavenworth Street), and the evening also includes a fashion show and poetry performance. Congratulations to all these wonderful young artists! Alternation of Mood is open through May 24th. 

Urban Design Lab

July 15th - August 1st, August 5th

The Bemis Center is proud to offer area teens an opportunity to participate in the new Urban Design Lab, an innovative summer program where participants work with national and local artists to deconstruct, decipher, and reimagine the urban landscape. In recognition of the important work that our teen urbanists will be performing, there is no fee to participate, and all students in the program will be paid minimum wage for their time in the Lab. Space is limited to 20 students, however, so interested teens are encouraged to apply soon.    

Based on a critically-acclaimed model developed at Eyebeam Atelier in New York City, the three-week Urban Design Lab will offer aspiring artists, architects, urban planners, and designers an opportunity to do fun and important research about the place(s) where they live.  

The Urban Design Lab will be led by New York artist Chloë Bass and Omaha artist Teal Gardner, with guest appearances by other artists and urban planning experts.  

Bass is a New York-based artist and public practitioner who past work includes, among other things, the investigation of the inadvertent living space created by a nine-day traffic jam in China.  She has taught at Parsons School of Design, Sotheby's Institute, the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, and Brooklyn College CUNY.   

Gardner is an artist and educator interested in playground design, play spaces, play objects and the environment. She has taught at local Montessori schools and was a 2013 Fellow at the Union Center for Contemporary Art in North Omaha. 

The Urban Design Lab is an intensive program that will run from 1:00 - 5:00 pm, every Tuesday - Friday between July 15th - August 1st, with a follow-on presentation of student work on August 5th. Students will be expected to be present at all times when the Lab is in session.

If you know teens who would be interested in applying for Urban Design Lab, please share this information and direct them to our online application, available at the link below.

The cost of student participation in the Urban Design Lab has been generously underwritten by Lincoln Financial Foundation.  

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Flock House Project: Omaha 

Design/Build Workshops Call for Participants 

May 9th | 5:30 - 7:00 pm

May 10th, 17th, 24th & 31st | 1:00 - 5:00 pm 

Have you ever dreamed of collaborating with an internationally-recognized artist to create new work? Then the Flock House Design/Build Workshops may be right for you!  

Community members have a unique opportunity to work alongside artist Mary Mattingly, whose work has been hailed by the New York Times, PBS's Art 21 and the BBC, to design and construct two Omaha Flock Houses as part of Mattingly's residency at the Bemis Center. For these high-level workshops, we are looking for participants with a diverse cross-section of skills, including artists, activists, urban planners, gardeners, designers, environmentalists, alternative energy experts and urban farmers.  

Participants may elect to attend one or more workshops in consultation with the artist. There is no fee for participation. The cost of the workshops has been generously underwritten by individual donors like you.   

that immerse the viewer in a space created with projected light and images. Due to the universally recognizable imagery of these spaces, (a sea-side village, a desert landscape) the installations seem to pivot between the personal memory of a place and the collective memory gained through cultural representation of a place.

Lossy

Through May 31st!   

What is "Lossy?" It's what happens when digital images are compressed or resized. Clarity drastically changes when compared to the original - usually for the worse. Sometimes, though, the lossy process can improve the quality in exceptional and unanticipated ways. Either way, it's a powerful means for affecting how we view images and objects that have been reinterpreted, and this exhibition of work by six former Artists-in-Residence allows viewers to experience the power of lossy in profound ways.    

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Through August 16th

Mary Mattingly uses her Flock Houses - migratory homes with autonomous systems for rainwater collection and food production - as ways to explore what a near future marked  by environmental distress and resource scarcity might look like. Throughout May, we're working with local environmentalists, urban planners, designers, architects and artists - plus a host of other contributors - to create two Omaha Flock Houses. We'll be installing them in early June outside the Bemis Center's Okada Sculpture Facility in the Old Market and Carver Bank in North Omaha, and individuals and organizations in the community will live and work from the Flock Houses as a way to explore the world's coming challenges. Don't miss the opportunity to see how Mary creates her groundbreaking project and watch how her Flock Houses unfold during the coming month.  

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