Criss Library to Host UNO Print Workshop's Visiting Artist Permanent Collection, 1976-2006

The collection comes to the Osborne Family Gallery from the College of Communication, Fine Arts and Media's Permanent Collection from the UNO Print Workshop, which led a Visiting Artist Program from 1976 to 2006.

Click to download a brief history of the visiting artist program.

The exhibition features work from the following artists, who are listed below with their coordinating piece that will be on display:

Barry Carlsen

Lester Goldman

• Otto Buys New Boots
• 1993; color woodcut and chine collé on rice paper; sheet: 52 1/4 x 30 (132.71 x 76.2); edition of 15

In Omaha to mount an installation for the 1992 Midlands Invitational at the Joslyn Art Museum, he also installed an outdoor sculpture, a grouping of carved wooden totems, outside the Lou and Del Weber Fine Art Building (UNO) and produced a woodcut for the UNO Print Workshop. The print is related to “The Latest Blow to Mirth”, a three-part multimedia installation project in Kansas City, Missouri. Each of the “carnival-like, walkthrough events” featured Goldman’s characters, Otto and Lil. The couple drawn as if from a coloring book often exchange body parts or morph into “Lilotto,” a name meant to suggest “lotto, the lottery, a game of chance.”

Kenneth Hale

• Omaha Notes
• 1993; color lithograph and relief printing; sheet: 30 3/8 x 22 (76.2 x 55.88); unique edition V

“I want my art,” Hale observed, to be “a record of where I’ve been intellectually, emotionally, and physically.” Like other lithographs in this series, “Omaha Notes” contains place specific imagery like the Henningson Memorial Campanile Bell Tower on the UNO campus and recurring images such as a candle in the upper left and an open book, which are found for example in “Travel Notes”, a lithograph with linocut available through Flatbed Press.

John Himmelfarb

• Uzzle
• 2001; color intaglio on Bluff Rives; image: sheet: 23 3/4 x 20 (60.325 x 50.8); edition of 25

The Chicago-based artist John Himmelfarb is a master printmaker, working frequently and simultaneously with lithography, intaglio, serigraphy, and the computer. A distinctive calligraphic quality unites this work, and as John Brunetti has observed, it reflects his belief that drawing is “an extension of handwriting, closest to recording the immediacy of the artist’s observations and states of mind; a fusion of verbal and visual language.” Uzzle possesses the dense field of symbols and signs culled from Neolithic pictographs, Asian and Arabic alphabets and global religious symbols typically found in his prints. On February 16, 2001, the artist oversaw the printing using a plywood plate for the brown areas and zinc plates for the remaining colors.

Karl Hower

• Veil
• 2002; digital inkjet on Schollershamer Velvet; image: sheet: 16 x 44 (40.64 x 111.76); edition of 25

Robert Hower, who received his B.F.A. from UNO, whose work of traditional prints and interactive computer generated projects, has been exhibited the Joslyn Art Museum and Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Nebraska, as well as museums across the nation. His interactive pieces have also appeared at the Videotex National Conference in New York City and Imaging the Past with Computer Graphics at The British Museum in London.

Jun Kaneko

• Untitled 1
• 1995; sheet: 45 1/4 x 31 3/8 (114.3 x 78.74); unique, monotype

Before settling in Omaha, clay artist Jun Kaneko studied at the University of California at Berkeley (1966) under Peter Voulkos. Both artists are associated with the “American Clay Revolution” that emphasized sculptural approaches to ceramics rather than adherence to the traditional function bound uses of clay. The monotypes created as part of a Visiting Artist Program residency at UNO are similar to the “Hawaiian Series”, six large-scale oil-stick drawings on rice paper resulting from a trip to Kauai, Hawaii in the winter of 1995. The scribbling lines, areas of stripes, and other surface patterns are also found on his glazed ceramic sculptures, the dangos.

Lynwood Kreneck

• Earth’s Mysteries Solved / The Sphinx: Ice floe containing the Sphinx being melted by the heat of the Ancient Sun
• 1981; color serigraph, lithograph, screen and air stencil on Arches 88; image: 23 7/8 x 18 3/8 (58.42 x 45.72); sheet: 28 1/4 x 22 1/4 (71.12 x 55.88); edition of 44

Despite focusing his collegiate studies on lithography and etching, Lynwood Kreneck devoted his career to the silkscreen process. While on campus (September 28-October 2, 1981), he lectured on his development of non-toxic water-based inks as well as taught students how to build the wood frames needed to screen print. Students helped with the printing of “Earth’s Mysteries Solved”, a series revealing the influences of Pop art, advertising art, comic books, and very colorful cardboard toys. In this series, Kreneck portrayed the artist as an “archeologist” or sleuth intent on discovering the truth behind the building of the pyramids and Stonehenge, as well as curiosities like the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness monster, and flying saucers.

Karen Kunc

• Ancient Geology
• 1987; color woodcut on Kaji Natural 100% Kozo Paper; sheet: 24 1/2 x 39 (61.87 x 98.42); edition of 30

The Great Plains landscape in and around Nebraska-born artist, Karen Kunc's home in Avoca, Nebraska infiltrated her imagery and inspired her palette. Primeval geology, however, also intrigued the artist at the time of her residency when she worked with UNO student Wendy Wiggs on the first four runs of the edition. The recipient of the 2000 Governor’s Art Award, Kunc is known internationally for her color reduction woodcut process, which requires a single woodblock carved, inked, and printed in successive stages rather than one block for each color as required for a traditional color woodcut print.

Lloyd R. Menard

• Frogman Arrives in Nebraskaland
• 1978; color intaglio; image: 22 3/4 x 16 1/4 (57.785 x 42.545), sheet: 29 1/8 x 22 1/2 (73.964 x 57.15); edition 30

A Distinguished Alumni of UNO’s Art and Art History Department, Menard has contributed significantly to the collaborative press movement on university campuses through Frogman’s Print and Paper Workshops, an annual summer workshop attracting students and professors of printmaking from around the country since 1979, and through Frogman Press and Gallery, which he opened in Beresford, South Dakota in 1994. During his residency at UNO in 1978, Menard demonstrated his considerable skills as an intaglio specialist.

Frances Myers

• Taliesin West—Another View
• 1980; color intaglio on Newsprint Gray Rives; image: 13 3/4 x 19 3/4 (34.925 x 50.165), sheet: 21 3/4 x 29 7/8 (55.245 x 75.793); edition of 35

The resulting edition belongs thematically to a portfolio of aquatints and intaglios commissioned by Karen Johnson Boyd of the Perimeter Gallery in Chicago in 1977 and published in 1980. Myers used Wright’s designs as a “catalyst” for her own exploration of “flat shapes defining mass, and the rhythmic patterning of structural elements.” The published portfolio includes an intaglio titled “Taliesin West” (1979). Three aquatints and three intaglios, including the one editioned at UNO, are related to this theme but are not a part of the portfolio.

Steve Sorman

• Two Skyscrapers Decided To Have A Child and It Was A Very Fast Train
• 1983; color lithograph, stencil, and collage on Shibugami; sheet: 20 1/4 x 12 1/2; 12 1/2 x 20 1/4 (50.8 x 30.48; 30.48 x 50.8); edition of 40

“I feel that I am always on the same train, but waking up in different towns…I never know what’s coming up, but I do know that tomorrow I’ll be somewhere else and will have to adjust to what presents itself there.”

- Steven Sorman, 1991

The artist, who has a penchant for enigmatic titles and tends to avoid assigning meaning to his work, was on campus April 3-9, 1983. As Patricia Hampl observed in a 1986 exhibition catalog, the artist “approaches all media as an implicit collage. That is, as opportunities for improvisation and relationship.” After graduating from the University of Minnesota (B.F.A., 1971), Sorman began cutting up his own work to create collaged paintings with lush surfaces created by a complex layering of materials—canvas, Japanese tissue and German handmade papers—drawn upon with oils, gouache, charcoal, and pastel as well as embellished with metal leaf and beeswax.

Sandy Winters

• Darwin’s Break II
• 2004; color lithography and chine collé; sheet: 22 x 32 (45.72 x 60.96); edition of 30

Describing “Pretexts and Subtexts” as “part Loony Tunes, part Rube Goldberg,” critic Eleanor Heartney notes that Winter’s 2005 traveling installation “blends humor and anxiety in an irresistible mix.” The cartoon style imagery of plumbing pipes and seedpods was drawn on aluminum panels that stretched 85-feet in length. The drawing continually evolved as the artist reconfigured it to fit each new gallery space. Out of this installation came first a six-foot-long block print and then, a “new, larger composition” made by disassembling the blocks and reprinting them on various surfaces. Drawings in graphite and oil-crayon individualized each impression.