Arts & Humanities

By Amanda Mobley

Frederick Dwight Kirsch had an unmistakable influence on the art department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the regional fine art collections of the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Neb., and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, as both an educator and a museum director. Now Dwight Kirsch, the artist, is being explored in an exhibition that emphasizes his aesthetic relationship with the open sky of the Great Plains. This collection of Kirsch’s work, donated by his niece JoAnn Kelly Alexander, on exhibit at the Great Plains Art Museum through July 27, 2008, emphasizes the atmospheric landscape that stretches above a low-lying horizon and dwarfs the vast scale of mountain ranges.

By Mark L. Moseman

Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art opened earlier this year in David City, Neb. As far as we know, it is America’s only museum devoted exclusively to agrarian art. Agrarian pertains to fields or land or their tenure. Western art is celebrated in museums around the country. Bone Creek Museum of Agrarian Art provides a new national focus for both historical and contemporary agrarian art.

By Suzanne Smith Arney

Robert Hillestad’s fiber exhibition is a heady extravagance of color and texture. “Celebration Threads” is a fitting title for this banquet of masterworks created since 1997. “I have long regarded working with textiles as a celebration unto itself,” says Hillestad. “Some of my most joyful moments are embedded in the pieces I create.” It’s easy to sense the passion worked into every stitch of these garments, accessories, and two- and three-dimensional artwork. You can imagine the feel of silks, velvet, rayon and wool in your fingers. Cut into bias strips, they come alive and dance with the slightest provocation. They may even fly!

By Jack L. Kennedy

There was a chill in the air on the January morning in 1974 when Dennis Rader killed four members of the Otero family, two adults and two children, in their modest Wichita home.

By Dianne Kennedy

In many ways, the Meadowlark Festival is the antithesis of a typical American chamber-music concert, but in many ways it is the distinctiveness of the entire festival experience that has helped the Meadowlark Music Festival grow from an upstart in Lincoln to an event recognized by the national classical media. One of the secrets to the festival’s success is rooted in the technique of booking concerts at places, in Nebraska, where people would be inclined to go during the summer. This year is no exception.

By Maureen Ose

Passion fueled the building of the world’s largest collection of quilts. More intense dedication led to the construction of a glorious new home for the quilts. Lincoln, Neb., is now home to the finest quilt museum in the world.

Why quilts? Why a quilt museum?

By John R. Wunder

For many historians, the ’30s represents a time when the American people were looking for ways to survive in a national crisis. Indeed, the crisis was not a simple one. Its complexities featured an extensive economic depression, a devastating environmental disaster—the Dust Bowl on the Great Plains—and the looming signs of yet another world war. How Americans sought to understand and prevail over these national catastrophes is a tale of determination and success.

By Martin E. Marty

Through the decades, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has called me teacher, reminding me of the years when he earned a master’s degree in theology and ministry at the University of Chicago—and friend. My wife and I and our guests have worshiped at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he recently completed a 36-year ministry.

By J. Brooks Joyner

Among the many historic and cultural treasures that one will find in Nebraska is a unique collection of original watercolors and drawings by the Swiss-born artist Karl Bodmer. This collection is housed in the Margre H. Durham Center for Western Studies at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha.

By Byron Barksdale

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, with the participation of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Foteca de Cuba, has created quite a stir in the art world with its magnificent exhibit “CUBA: Art and History from 1868 to Today” (exhibit ends June 8, 2008). The exhibition has 100 paintings, 200 photographs, 100 posters, and other works on paper, video, in music and in film excerpts.

By James W. Hewitt

In 2005, the Friends of the Center for Great Plains Studies opened their first annual Great Plains Invitational Art Show and Sale at the Great Plains Art Museum. The show had three purposes: to draw attention to the museum and its $10 million regional collection by attracting a larger audience, to showcase the work of young, upcoming or established regional artists, and to raise funds for acquiring new artwork that will enhance the mission of the museum.

By Amber Mohr

Wright Morris wrote in “The Inhabitants,” “In all my life I’ve never seen anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house.”

Morris’s words can well describe the vision of San Francisco photographer Nancy Warner, who has dissected and disseminated some of this “crowd of vacancy” to produce a photographic study of farm homes for a new exhibition, “Going Back: Midwestern Farm Places” at the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, Neb.

By Becky Van de Bogart

Labels have become a mainstay in our social conversations these days and resisting them is a full-time occupation. Due to the limited pool of funding, music has not escaped this need for definers. As the arts try to divvy up the shrinking pie of dollars, new definitions rise out of the quagmire to limit one slice and add or expand another. Last year there was a heated discussion at the Chamber Music America conference trying to fit jazz into their mission. This led to yet another effort to define chamber music (and, by default, jazz), when in the end it was all about which genre deserved funding with the available dollars.

By Casey Logan

A quarter century ago, German filmmaker Werner Herzog traveled to the rain forests of South America to make "Fitzcarraldo," the story of a man who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon. Obsessed by this vision and determined to make it reality, the title character (played by the inimitably crazed Klaus Kinksi) employs a local tribe to help him drag a steamboat from one river to another, with no less than a mountain standing in the way between them.

By Bob Hall

I run the Flatwater Shakespeare Festival in Lincoln Neb., and while I have thus been asked to write about the state of Shakespeare on the Plains, I find myself dealing more with how to convince a wary audience that, without teaching or training, they already possess all the tools necessary to give the bard a tumble. There's certainly plenty of Shakespeare for them to try.

By Robert Narveson

Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music, a group of Lincoln, Neb., citizens, sponsors performances by nationally and internationally famous chamber music ensembles. The name of the group, informally abbreviated to LFCM, was suggested by Larry Poston, a then-member of the University of Nebraska English Department, who along with several other faculty members was casting about for a way to bring top-flight musical performances to a city that was, at that time, sorely lacking in so important a sign of cultural vitality.

By Mohamed El Ghannam

I visited Nebraska during the period from Oct. 19 to Nov. 10, 2007, as a visiting scholar to Doane College in Crete. This visit was a part of the Fulbright Visiting Specialists Program called "Direct Access to the Muslim World." The program promotes understanding of the Muslim civilization through U.S. higher educational institutions that host specialists from the Muslim world for short-term programs of intensive lecturing and public outreach.

By Karma J. Larsen

Healthy Families Play Outside partners offer these suggestions to get outside.