Ellie Thober, of Lincoln, looks over pieces of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Display April 25 while the traveling exhibit was on display in the Nebraska Union. The 50-section display was sponsored by the Graduate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Student Association and The Names Project of the Heartland Omaha.

Sheldon Hosts Exhibition of Contemporary Jewish Works

The Perpetual Well: Contemporary Art from the Collection of The Jewish Museum opens May 13 and runs to July 16 at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden.

This traveling exhibition, organized by The Jewish Museum in New York, presents an overview of the Jewish experience, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a people as seen though the eyes of contemporary artists. Paintings, sculpture, prints, photography, and installations by a diverse group of artists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who share an interest in Jewish issues and iconography, will be featured.

Sixty-three works by 65 artists, including Richard Avedon, Dennis Kardon, Deborah Kass, Annie Leibovitz, Joshua Neustein, Adrian Piper, Larry Rivers, Joan Snyder, Doug and Mike Starn, and Robert Wilson, will be on view.

The exhibition is divided into six sections: Narrating History: Bible, Legends, and Myths; Tradition, Ritual, and Prayer; Identity and Assimilation; Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; Generation to Generation; and Wandering . . . Home.

Narrating History: Bible, Legends, and Myths features artists whose work looks to the past and draws its inspiration from the rich legacy of Jewish literature. Sources include the Bible, the Kaballah, and Hasidic folk tales. The story of the golem (a mystical tale about bringing a creature fashioned from mud to life) is a particularly popular legend for such contemporary artists as Christian Boltanski, Louise Fishman and Robert Wilson. With its themes of survival, redemption, deliverance and messianism, the golem has powerful parallels with the history of the Jews while also serving as a metaphor for the process of creating and making art.

Tradition, Ritual, and Prayer presents a sometimes solemn, sometimes humorous view of the rituals, ritual objects and religious practices that have distinguished and united Jews throughout the ages and throughout different cultures. Light, an important symbol in several Jewish holidays, is the subject of a number of works, including Jonathan Seliger's Pop simulacra of sabbath candle boxes, an original Hanukkah lamp by Joel Otterson, and Mike Mandel's photograph of a robot lighting a menorah. Wijnanda Deroo's unflinching photograph bears mute witness to a now abandoned and decaying synagogue on New York's Lower East Side. By contrast, photographs by Patrick Feigenbaum and David Wells speak to the enduring power of prayer as a vital and valued practice.

The works on view in Identity and Assimilation address the notion of Jewish identity. With the rise of multiculturalism as a topic for discussion, identity ­ both individual and cultural ­ has become a popular subject, especially among artists who previously felt marginalized. In this spirit, Jewish artists explore what it means to be Jewish, to be an artist, and what responsibilities come with being a Jewish artist.

Ken Aptekar faces the dilemma of assimilation in his own family and Dennis Kardon struggles to reconcile a secular and religious self. Deborah Kass challenges male hegemony in the art world while concurrently asserting her own identity as a Jewish, feminist artist. Neil Winokur constructs his identity by photographing significant people and objects from his life.

Artists included in Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, both Jewish and non-Jewish, confront the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust and its aftermath. William Anastasi reveals the nuances and charged meanings of the word "Jew."

Contemporary photographers addressing this topic include Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, who went to the concentration camp at Dachau; and Mark Berghash, who recorded the faces and testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Hannelore Baron's distressed assemblages evoke the hardship of her childhood in Nazi Germany and Vivienne Koorland combines her family history with that of other victims and survivors.

Generation to Generation presents a group of photographs that highlight the relationship between parent and child. A number of these works include images of the photographers' own parents. Such works as Annie Leibovitz's portrait of a loving couple, Hannah Wilke and Richard Avedon's bittersweet images of dying parents, Gay Block's brazen portrayal of a topless mother and daughter, and Lorie Novak's constructed memory of family life affirm the primacy of family in Jewish life, while Brian Weil's photo of a Hasidic man and his son acknowledges the traditions that link generations.

Wandering . . . Home, the final section of the exhibition, reflects on the founding of the State of Israel. Joshua Borkovsky, Joshua Neustein and Krzysztof Wodiczko address the theme of displacement and the diaspora. Stuart Klipper and Richard Misrach draw inspiration for their art from Israel's topography, while Michal Rover focuses on the fact that Israel and the surrounding Middle East have been a war zone for much of its short history.

Daniel A. Siedell, Sheldon's curator/interim director, presents a gallery talk on the exhibition at 12:15 p.m. May 17 as part of Sheldon's "Wednesday Walks" series. It is free and open to the public.

The Perpetual Well: Contemporary Art from The Jewish Museum has been organized by the Jewish Museum, New York. Donna Harkavy served as a guest curator.

The exhibition is made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding has been provided by Bob and Mary Nefsky and the Jewish Federation of Lincoln.

Baskin Exhibition Complements Jewish Museum Works

Leonard Baskin: The Ultimate Need, an exhibition of 14 artworks that surveys the unique aesthetics of one of the 20th century's great draftsmen and expressionists. Drawn primarily from the Sheldon Gallery's permanent collection, which consists of nearly 40 works by Baskin, The Ultimate Need augments The Perpetual Well: Contemporary Art from the Jewish Museum, placing Baskin's art within a uniquely Jewish world view. The exhibition runs from May 9 to June 23.

Born in 1922 in New Brunswick, N.J., Baskin was reared in Brooklyn, N.Y. The son of a rabbi, Baskin was educated at a yeshiva, which had a profound effect on his aesthetic. Baskin had his first exhibition (of sculpture) at the Glickman Studio Gallery, New York, at 17. He studied at Yale University from 1941-43 and received his B.A. at the New School for Social Research in 1949. Baskin spent 1950 and 1951 abroad, studying in Paris and Florence. In 1953 Baskin began teaching printmaking and sculpture at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where he remained until 1974. It was while he was at Smith College that he founded Gehenna Press, a small private press specializing in fine book production. In 1959 Baskin's work was included in the important exhibition, "The New Images of Man," at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Baskin's sculpture was represented in the XXXIV Venice Biennale in 1968, which was curated by Norman Geske, who at the time was the director of the Sheldon Art Gallery.

Baskin's art is concerned with celebrating the tensions and contradictions of the human condition through figurative expressionism. Baskin, an outspoken critic of both "naturalism," which he argues is concerned only with physical realities and "abstraction" and to his mind has abandoned the human figure, is interested in utilizing the human figure (as well as various animals) as visual metaphors for human spirituality. Baskin's work reveals his deep interest in tragic and comic elements of humanity. His work celebrates the fact that human beings bear the Imago Dei, that is, the image of God. All the while, Baskin is all too aware of humanity's failings, and his use of the raven, the dog, and other animalistic images, suggests his interest in exploring the "bestial" as well as the "divine" inherent in human existence.

The foundation for Baskin's oeuvre is the Jewish world-view that nourishes his creative expression. This world-view has provided Baskin with a powerful sense of tradition, a sense of belonging to a tradition, a clan, as manifest in his understanding of his role as an artist. Baskin is extremely sensitive to and respectful of the deep tradition of art making and therefore does not regard himself as an innovator, only a participant in a tradition much larger than himself. His world-view is further revealed in his interest in rendering "artist portraits," that is images of artists he admires and who provide him with "forefathers" from whom he has descended as an artist.

The Ultimate Need exhibits several of these portraits, from the bronze Unknown Dutch Artist and Rogier van der Weyden to Jose Ribera and Salvadore Rosa. In addition to examples of Baskin's use of birds and dogs as metaphors for the human condition, this exhibition also features one of Baskin's more famous images, Hanged Man, 1955.

Documenting Performance/Preserving Contepts

Sheldon Exhibition Recreates Lost Art Concepts

Documenting Performance/Preserving Concepts explores the complex aesthetic and institutional issues that performance and conceptual art raise within the context of the museum exhibition. The exhibition runs to June 23 at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden.

Documenting Performance, based on the gallery's permanent collection, consists of more than 30 artworks that were conceived by artists to function within the larger context of a performance, installation, or even "idea" which, due to its ephemeral nature and transient state, has not survived with the object. The themes of "documentation" and "preservation" explore the challenges of displaying these objects without this original context.

A public reception for the exhibition will be from 5 to 7 p.m. May 4 and will feature several of these performances.

A key element in the history and development of modern and postmodern 20th art is the emphasis on art as an "event." Motivated by the desire to make art more effective outside the gallery or museum exhibition space and to interact more deeply with social and cultural processes and to aestheticize events in order to break down the barrier between art and life.

If "art" as "event" succeeded in taking "art" out of the hermetic and overly aestheticizied confines of the traditional "art context" and out into the streets, it did so by undermining the stability of the traditional means by which art was exhibited and interpreted. The responsibility of the performance or conceptual artist was to reconstruct alternative contexts within which their peformances, plans, objects, and other "events" could be interpreted as art.

Documenting Performance will attempt to reconstruct these alternative contexts that are necessary components to understanding and experiencing the art.

The history and development of performance and conceptual art reveals and relies on the tensions between the "museum" context and the artist's alternative context, between "art" and "non-art," the "universal" and the "personal," "object" and "process," and between the "aesthetic" and "socio-political."

Documenting Performance reveals the museum space to be an ideologically charged context, which privileges the "object" while de-emphasizing the specific aesthetic, social, and political processes that produced the artwork. To underscore this point the exhibition will include objects that will be utilized by several artists in their performances, which will occur periodically throughout the presentation of this exhibition.

Performances will include Dana Fritz's "Occidental Tourist," Larry Gawel's "Museo Grotto," Melissa Haviland's "The Snow Was Deep So I Had to Walk in His Footsteps," Frances Kepes's "I Buried You in the High Plains," and John Wenderoth's "Record." Each of these "art events" will underscore certain of the inherent tensions of performance and conceptual art.

African-American Quilts Donated to Quilt Study Center

The International Quilt Study Center announced the gift of 150 African-American quilts from the collection of Robert Cargo, owner of the Folk Art Gallery in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and professor emeritus of the University of Alabama.

A donation from the Robert and Ardis James Foundation and from Cargo enabled the acquisition. Due to arrive on campus this spring, the exceptional collection will add a new facet of American quilt history to the university's world-class James Quilt Collection.

Cargo began building his collection of Alabama quilts in the 1950s after inheriting a number of quilts from his great-grandmother. Since 1980, Cargo has focused more on African-American quilts.

"As a group, these quilts have the qualities that excite me as I grow older ­ bold, eccentric, idiosyncratic, improvisational, brightly colored," said Cargo.

Selected quilts from this prestigious collection have been exhibited at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York, The National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and at the Smithsonian Institution. "We can only imagine the significance of this incredible gift to quilt historians and enthusiasts. It is a legacy that will continue to inspire quiltmakers, scholars and historians for generations to come," said Carolyn Ducey, quilt center curator.

A selection of quilts from the Cargo Collection will be exhibited at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, from February through April, 2001.

Sandhills Stories Showcased

A year-long collaboration came to fruition April 7 as teachers, students and their families came to the Peppermill Restaurant in Valentine for the first Showing of Student Visual artwork. The show was a culmination of a year long Excellence in Education Council grant which saw the collaboration of between UNL's aesthetic education program, Arts Are Basic, the Cherry County Rural Schools and the UNL Cooperative Extension.

Students of the one- and two-room schoolhouses in Cherry County worked throughout the year with their AAB-trained teachers and with Wendy Weiss, UNL professor of textiles, clothing and design, to create banners and quilts and in the case of one school, an installation of a covered wagon, which reflected the history of their schools and ranches.

Throughout the year, Extension Educators Loralyn O'Keif and Jody Dexter visited the students and guided the incorporation of the "Character Counts"" pillars of character ­ trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.

The students shared their artwork with approximately 250 to 300 family, friends and community members at the Peppermill Restaurant. Each school also gave a presentation which explained and further illustrated their projects. Students told their original stories and songs that represented to them their artwork.

The show opens at the Robert Hillestad Gallery on May 8. An opening reception will be from 2 to 4 p.m. and a few Cherry County students will recreate their presentations which accompanied their art.

The show will run to May 23. For more information, visit the Hillestad Gallery's website at http://www.ianr.unl.edu/tcd/ga llery.

Rowan Exhibits Nationally

UNL art professor and sculptor Patrick Rowan recently had work accepted for exhibition in the following national and international juried competitions:

"Liturgical and Sacred Art 2000," May through June at the Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Ill., (figurative wood sculptures).

"Works of Faith 2000," May through June at the First Presbyterian Church, Portland, Ore., (figurative wood sculptures).

"The North American Sculpture Exhibition," May through July, Golden, Colo., (figurative wood sculptures).

"Response to the Holy," Sept. through Nov., Michigan Avenue Gallery, Chicago, Ill., (figurative wood sculptures).

"Religious Sculpture 2000," April through June, The Catholic University, Washington, D.C., $2,000 Juror's Award for figurative sculpture.

Welsch Guest is Filmmaker Brockley

Lincolnite Ross Brockley, an actor and filmmaker, is the guest on Roger Welsch & when the interview series airs at 8:30 p.m. May 12 on the statewide Nebraska ETV Network. The program will repeat on EduCable at 4 p.m. May 21.

Brockley, a former stand-up comic, appears in Holiday Inn's national TV ads as the hapless Mark whose family asks him, "What do you think this is, a Holiday Inn?" His film, Carpula, follows a man and his dream of stocking a fish farm by breeding carp with tilapia.