Open Studios
Our next Open Studio will be held in conjunction with Arbor Day Celebration, April 25-27, 2008. Artists-in-residence will include writer Allicia Shandra Holmes, composer Karen Siegel, and visual artists Martin Brief, and David Linneweh. That will be the final weekend to view The Laurine Kimmel High School Art Exhibition. The Center will be open April 25-27 from 1-4 p.m.
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Gallery Receptions
Reception on Saturday, May 31, 1-3 for Randy Waln, Machinations (digital prints). Exhibit runs Mon, May 5 - Thurs, June 19, 2008,
Community Outreach
The public is invited to the dedication of a unique artwork on Monday, April 28, 2008, at 12:30 p.m. at the Nebraska Center for the Education of Children who are Blind or Visually Impaired (NCECBVI) located at 824 Central Avenue, Nebraska City
Beginning Monday, September 10, 2007, students served by the Nebraska Center for the Education of Children who are Blind or Visually Impaired (NCECBVI) and students served by People United for Families (PUFF) created a unique tactile artwork. Participating students from the two programs worked with artist Ann Cunningham at the NCECBVI September 10 through September 14.
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Ann Cunningham, from Colorado, is an experienced artist/teacher who has exhibited nationally and completed several sculptural commissions. Her sculpture, “Reading by Moonlight” sits on the lawn west of the Morton Public Library, and she is currently completing a sculpture of Caroline Morton for Arbor Lodge State Park in Nebraska City.
Ann developed this workshop to provide an art project that involves both sighted and visually impaired students. The ceramic high relief artwork concept is designed specifically for NCECBVI and will have tactile and visual appeal. It will be installed inside the vocational education room with a corresponding ceramic landmark installed in the hallway (for orientation mobility for the visually impaired).
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Over the winter months, the tiles have been fired, glazed at the Nebraska City Middle School art department. The full mural will be permanently installed following the dedication ceremony on April 28. The finished artwork is a tactile/visual "village" that includes a tactile letter/word game to reinforce learning the alphabet and Braille.
This project, developed and supported by the NCECBVI, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the PUFF program, has also received support from the Nebraska Arts Council.
Resident Activities
The residencies of Nancy Vining Van Ness and Julia Karll overlapped in February and March of 2008. Nancy was in residence to work on a book about her experiences with Amreican Creative Dance. Julia was here as an artist in transition, having recently completed an MFA. At left: a snapshot of Nancy at the Center. At right: Julia in her Center studio with works in progress.
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The Wide Open Door, by Nancy Vinning Van Ness, 2008
The door of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts stands wide open welcoming artists in. Like some Japanese shrine, the Center is a place where the veil between the seen and unseen worlds is thin and the door is open for artists and visitors to walk through into a greater experience.
"Doors, bridges, passages that were there all along … everywhere, all unheeded, suddenly appear. I move in dimensions forgotten, lost, ignored; walls unravel, time compounds." [From the "Start" section of Connected at the Heart, the book I worked on during my residency.] The Kimmel Harding Nelson is one of those doors I discovered in my journey as an artist.
In vivid contrast to the tendency in America to discount artists or to exploit them, the Kimmel Harding Nelson respects us and empowers us. My colleagues and I are given what we need: time, space, and money, and then we are just left alone to work. That the space we work in is itself a fine example of American domestic architecture, now housing a gallery and something of a museum, contributes to making my experience here divine, in every full meaning of that word. My book Connected at the Heart tells of the ways art links people to things beyond themselves, to what human beings through the ages and in all cultures call the divine.
In this beautiful and tranquil space, with all my needs met, I have been able to pour out work. Some mornings in my studio at six before the winter sun is up, some evenings here till nine or ten in the evening, I have been able to keep my focus on the book. Awash on a sea of incidents, events, people, places, and things I have encountered on my journey as an artist, I had been having trouble finding a way to grasp those disparate, unwieldy things and sculpt them into a unified whole. What I needed was a block of time to focus just on that. My daily life in New York was not affording me that time.
The Kimmel Harding Nelson's wide open door let me into the place where I could.
The Kimmel Harding Nelson is a powerful catalyst for many kinds of artistic connections. I am enriched by contact with my fellow artist residents. A conversation over the chopping board in the kitchen with the writer who shared my apartment helped me get over an obstacle I encountered. I also benefit from seeing what kind of work the others are doing. I am going to write an article about Julia Karll's artistic response to living in a world in crisis. I will keep in touch with Rebecca Robinson and Koji Nakano, with whom I may have opportunities to collaborate later on. We have shared out work with one another in informal readings and studio visits. I was greatly encouraged and affirmed by my colleagues and can not thank them and the Kimmel Harding Nelson enough for the opportunity to interact with them. It was also my good fortune to be introduced by Assistant Director Pat Friedli to an accomplished and interesting dancer in Nebraska City, another surprising artistic and personal link that is going to lead to more contact over time.
The expansion of the artistic network does not stop here, however. My project is a book of literary nonfiction about my life and work. American Creative Dance, the company I direct, plans innovative ways to increase our presence in the world and find new funds to support it. The book project contributes to that effort. So by empowering me, the Kimmel Harding Nelson is also furthering the work of the other artists of American Creative Dance who are not actually here.
Perhaps most importantly, art is where all people live. Though human life would disappear more quickly without food, water, shelter, and air, it would still not last long without art. No human culture we have any evidence of existed without art; truly we cannot live by bread alone; and art is one of the ways human beings connect meaningfully to one another and to things greater than themselves. By empowering artists, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts is sending more of this life-giving energy out into the world.