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Agents Of Change: Mexican Muralists And New Deal Artists, Judy Zlotsky, Norman Zlotsky, Blana Salazar

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Agents of Change: Mexican Muralists and New Deal Artists features works by artists from Mexico and the United States and demonstrates the close ties between them in the 1930s and' 40s. The exhibition is organized into four sections to include Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA); the Mexican Muralist Movement; a mural study by WPA artist Lucienne Bloch; and the Taller de Grafica Popular.

Mexican muralism, a government public art initiative, sponsored after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, encouraged social change by depicting the ideals and struggles for independence, while elevating and glorifying the indigenous heritage of Mexico. The Mexican …

Dan Christensen: Forty Years Of Painting, Sharon L. Kennedy

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Art critic Clement Greenberg described Dan Christensen (1942-2007) as "one of the painters on whom the course of American Art depends." 1 This retrospective exhibition documents Christensen's life-long quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Though long associated with Color Field painting, Christensen's relentless experimentation with style and technique places him among this country's most ambitious abstract and gestural painters.

Christensen was born in Lexington, Nebraska and grew up outside of Cozad. As a teenager Christensen listened to music on radio stations from Shreveport and Little Rock and grew fond of soul, blues, and pop music. …

Voyage To Italia: Americans In Italy In The Nineteenth Century, Genevieve Ellerbee

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

ItalY had long been a destination for American travelers, but by the nineteenth century American tourists flooded into Rome and Florence, hunted for picturesque vistas on the Bay of Naples and roamed through ancient ruins in Paestum. Armed with Baedeker guidebooks or the Hand-Book for American Travellers in Europe, Collated from the Best Authorities, they sought the authentic spirit of Dante, Petrarch, and Virgil, and chronicled their lengthy tours in detailed journals and letters to friends. Americans traveled to Italy for various reasons: to gain social prestige, to pursue artistic and literary interests, or simply to enjoy a beautiful …

Flowers, Lies And Revolution: Contemporary Cuban Art, Jorge Daniel Veneciano, Sharon L. Kennedy, Britt-Marie Varisco

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Flowers, Lies and Revolution surveys some themes that emerge in contemporary Cuban art, as revealed in three private collections in Lincoln, Nebraska. What a landlocked state and a sea locked nation share are the desires, comforts, and complexities of the other. This exhibition celebrates the transnational scope and vision witnessed in the breadth and focus of the three local collections: those of Karen and Robert Duncan, Kathy and Marc LeBaron, and Lisa and Tom Smith.

The collections represent the dominant trends of a new generation of Cuban artists that emerged in the last 30 years. Their work continues a tradition …

Divine Abstractions: Spiritual Expressions In Art, Susan J. Soriente

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

In Northern Europe during the early 1800s, artists began departing from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the realism of traditional artwork. Their desire to express the mysterious and unseen essence of the divine through their artwork transformed the way we think about art. Called Romanticists, these artists valued subjective experience over reason and the individual experience rather than the collective. They abandoned conventional religious iconography and produced private, intensely meditative images, depicting the divine as something eternal and infinite. These artists believed that material reality hindered experiencing the divine. They sought to fracture the shell of physical reality to …

Parallel Starts Outsider Art Inside Collections, Sharon L. Kennedy

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

As the term implies, "outsider" artists tend to work in isolation with little interest in other artists' styles or methods. Such independence from the social and cultural norms that have shaped art history provides scholars with few clues from which to proceed.

Norman Geske, Sheldon Director Emeritus and exhibition curator, defines outsider art as follows:

Essentially, outsider art is the art that derives from the creative instinct, which is inherent in human beings who are entirely independent of any of the conventions of traditional art history. In these, works, subject matter, method, and technique are subsumed in the intrinsic impulse …

Women Artists In The Collection

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

This special exhibition of the permanent collection focuses exclusively on the contributions of American women artists. The fact of women's historical exclusion from the art world is part of the exploration, "Why have there been no great women artists?"-art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked in a 1971 essay. Her findings pointed to the past exclusion of women from working with male nude models, hence apprenticeships, then professions and academies, to which we add commercial gallery exhibitions, art criticism, and art history. Over the centuries this vicious cycle has shaped the current phenomenon: the predominance of male artists in museum collections …