I am extremely excited to be heading into Year 3 of the 3 year project, the Midwest Artist Studios™ (MAS) Project. I will be traveling this summer to the following states to visit the 2016 MAS featured artists; Karri Dieken (ND), Sharon Grey (SD), Jody Boyer (NE), Lori Elliott-Bartle (NE), Rachel Mindrup (NE), Joe Bussell (KS), and Larry Thomas (KS).

These artists were selected based on their responses to an online survey focusing on Art Education, body of work, and a Skype interview.

Throughout the studio visits I will be introducing you to 7 amazing and talented artists from the Midwest working in printmaking to painting, sculpture to mixed media and collage to installation art.

Click here to read a collaborative reflection from this past school year’s MAS Project. 

This project is supported by a grant from the Kohler Foundation, Inc. 

Join me on this MAS adventure via facebook.com/midwestartiststudios or subscribe to the blog, midwestartiststudios.com.

– Frank Juarez, art educator and founder

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Karri Dieken

Web: www.karriadieken.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

I have always known I was going to be a teacher, how I was going to get there and the full time line. Up until my final year of college, it was then, that I met a professor who changed the way I will forever look at teaching. Rita Cihlar Hermann was a professor of photography, she engaged all students in the course dialogue, creation or work, and developed a safe work space. I never, thought college would be a place with bullying, I found out during my final year of school that there were so many students who didn’t quite fit in. This is where Rita, helped them see they had a full potential, and a place in art, where they could share their stories and belong. She incorporated interdisciplinary curriculum, innovative uses of technology, and group work where all the members actually participated. It was as if she had some magical power over the students, where everyone wanted to participate and create to the best of their ability. Her magical power was positivity, and using positive feedback during critiques, she modeled behavior on acceptance and free speech without hurting another person. During this last year I was exposed to new forms of art and photography and how they could be created to make one piece of work or a body of work. That we as a class were a team and once we worked together we were un-stoppable. Today, I use many of the teaching methods facilitated my Rita. It is through kindness and positive feedback that we see the greatest gains, building strength through confidence and trust, this is what allows for the opportunities to take risks and not fear art. Its with this that I share art in my classroom, exposing students to a world they shouldn’t fear. The biggest gain has been seeing so many students share their creative voice!

Why is Art Education important today?

Art is a way to pair our thoughts and ideas in multiple forms, mediums, methods. Its something that everyone can do! Through art education we will open doors for future scientist, mathematicians, doctors, accountants, and so much more. With out art education in schools, children loose the opportunity to express themselves through visual images and creative solutions. We can look at Adult coloring books and see that art is essential in balancing our everyday lives. Art is a necessary part of our lives, and is essential in our K-12 and college schools. Art is the butter to our dry toast!

Artist Statement

As a mixed media artist, she is interested in fibers and polymers as mediums for documenting moments in time, considerations for collecting data, re-creating patterns, and engaging in community based performances and installations.

Relying on the repetition of imagery found in relationship to domesticity of common place and nostalgia. With the use of various techniques within handmade art making practices. Her work is about making marks via material exploration. She works with both traditional fibers, to cast porcelain, to found material sculpture. Resulting products range from cross stitched food, domestic interior installations, prints and paintings about “home.” Dieken, references outdated technological use of communication with everyday objects and repeated patterns.  Type writers, telephones, sewing machines, and bicycles become surrogate objects within each narrative space. Much of the work is instigated by a collection of narratives informed by life experiences growing up in the Midwest to current daily interactions. The labor intensive repetitive work is an act of meditation, remembrance and homage to her Grandmother and Father.

Bio

Dieken grew up in the badlands region of the Midwest, inspired by the landscape, heritage, craft and the hand-made. She earned an MFA from Washington State University in 2010, and a BSED in Art from Black Hills State University in 2007. She has studied printmaking, sculpture, photography, and ceramics throughout her education.

Since 2007, her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, New Zealand, Germany, and the Netherlands. Her work has been included in exhibits at the Plains Art Museum, Museum of Art WSU, Boise Art Museum, Essex Art Center, Dahl Fine Art Center, and the South Dakota State Museum of Art. A selection of her prints have been acquisition into the permanent collections at the Museum of Art WSU, Boise Art Museum, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, and the Missoula Art Museum. She continues to participate in select print exchanges and sculpture based installations exploring narratives of nuclear family, midwestern heritage, and childhood in rural America.

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Sharon Grey

Web: shadesofgreyillustrations.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

I chose my college in order to study under one specific instructor that I had admired since childhood, Mr. Dick Dubois. It’s hard to express what a positive experience painting with him was in a single experience; he was gruff, and hummed to himself, and rarely gave compliments, so when you received one, it made you light up. Watching him paint was like magic. One early assignment I remember with him was drawing a face. He was teaching the boy next to me in the usual terse, unapologetic manner: “well, and you can see you’ve messed the nose up, can’t you. Yes. And the head here is wrong, and that makes these eyes too close together, so really the whole thing is just a bit of a disaster, isn’t it.” Then he looked over at my drawing, which was going well, and went back to the boy. “Don’t even look at hers. It’s no use comparing yourself to Sharon. She’s just…crafty.”

Why is Art Education important today?

First and foremost, art is important because it is the expression not only of how one individual views the world, but it captures and defines whole cultures, time periods, and histories. To that degree, it transcends the simple existence of any one piece and becomes something worth risking one’s life to save. You need look no further than the actions taken by individuals in wartime to see the truth of that. People stayed to sandbag the Last Supper as bombs were dropping all around them. They risked death to enter active war fields to find art that was stolen by Nazis in WWII. They even strapped themselves to their beloved cathedrals equipped with rakes to brush away bombs before they could explode and destroy the rotunda and the art within. We all know instinctively that art is precious. Art education is important because it is the breath that keeps the fire stoked. It is skill that must be learned before it can be used to create the masterpieces, and the drive to stay inspired. If either one is lost, art is as well.

Artist Statement

I always enjoyed drawing people, and my first priority even as a child was to make realistic art, so I suppose it’s natural that my work today focuses on realistic renderings of people. I tend to shy away from the traditional portrait, however; if my subjects are looking at the viewer, it’s meant as a sort of challenge, or invitation to experience the world from their point of view. So, while my work is usually of people, it’s really more about the person’s relationship with the world around him or her. That’s why you often can’t see the faces, or if you can, they’re looking away, looking at something you can share in with them, whether that’s something magnificent and other-worldly or as simple as falling snow.

I also love to capture moments of childhood—the simpler the better— and elevate them to something memorable. Children in my paintings are doing everyday things: feeding ducks, sitting by a tree, playing on the floor, splashing in water, but just by virtue of painting that moment, it becomes important. Of course, that’s not to say that my painting made the moment important—it always was. But only through artwork can we freeze time and examine a second that happened long ago, and in so doing, remember what it is to be a person. Most of life is hum-drum moments, and I paint children more than adults simply because they are much better at enjoying their lives minute to minute. I see that as a good reminder for all of us. Live life in the present, appreciate every bit of it, applaud the beauty that you see. And remember to care; for the world, for animals, for each other—just care.

Sharon Grey, Backstage, watercolor, 22X28, 2016

Influences

I watch people constantly, and it’s people who inspire me to draw and paint. My children, my sisters, and my parents are my most common subject matter, primarily because they’re the ones I have pictures of, but in painting a person doing something universal, I am trying to capture that experience more than the individual. Style wise, I was hugely influenced by my first and greatest watercolor teacher, Mr. Dick DuBois, and by the work of my two other favorite watercolorists, Nita Engle and Steve Hanks. I also enjoy traveling, and try to put as much as I can of the world that I’ve seen into my work.

Bio

I was born and raised in the Black Hills of South Dakota in Spearfish. That is where I spent long summers doing things that you can do for free or cheaply, like inter-tubing in the glacial creek, walking to the library, reading in my “treehouse” of three planks of wood nailed to the branches of a black walnut tree, or going camping in a tent. I sketched constantly, and had dreams of becoming a street artist and living in Florence. Instead, I attended the local college and studied painting and drawing with Dick Dubois, transferred briefly to Baylor University, and went back home to finish my art degree. From there, I taught art and tutored the high school boys at a Challenge Academy in Waco, then moved to Rapid City and taught at Girls Inc. until my first daughter was born. At that point I discovered that I could work from home as a freelancer and have a life where I get to draw and paint all day AND stay in pajamas! To that end, I have been an freelancer now for eight years and have illustrated over a dozen books for kids, but my primary love is still painting my own watercolors. I stay busy as an active member of the Northern Plains Watercolor Society and the SCBWI, and have added two more kids to the stack as well. They enjoy spending long summers in the Black Hills doing things you can do for free or cheaply.

I did make it to Florence last summer as well, and put my dream of being a street artist to rest once and for all. I hadn’t envisioned quite so much standing and selling my art to tourists when I had the dream, which just goes to show you, life is best lived as it comes to you. There is no such thing as the good life; there are many, many varieties.

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Jody Boyer

Web: www.jodyboyer.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

At the age of twenty when my father became ill with cancer, I was already a bit lost in college, and chose to leave school to assist him with treatment. When I got a scholarship to college, I thought I wanted to be a scientist, but found that 1) my brain did not work as systematically as I needed to be successful in the traditional sciences 2) that I had deferred my interest in the arts to societal ideals of what success should be.

During his treatments my father gave me a camera, and I became very fond of the process of documenting and framing the world. When I returned to finish my undergraduate degree, I found support in the arts for the way my brain processes information, and found support to overcome many of the academic struggles I had in my first two years.of undergraduate studies. I found a path that supported outside the box thinking, and even encouraged you to explore concepts and ideas that seemed irrational and nonsensical. The visual arts supported my desire for experimentation and discovery, and gave me a sense of pride and accomplishment for what had previously been characteristics that made me different or weird.

Why is Art Education important today?

The visual arts give students opportunities to develop and foster strengths that are not supported in other areas, and gives many students an opportunity to shine who may struggle with the written word and traditional academic strategies. The visual arts give students a wide variety of ways to tell stories, share knowledge and develop a deeper understanding of themselves and others.

Additionally, in the arts taking risks is encouraged and necessary. exploring a wide variety materials, techniques and processes is vital to the physical and cognitive development of kids. And in the 21st century, when almost of information is negotiated through a visual interface, teaching students to be producers of visual content in addition to consumers of visual art gives them the tools to innovate and create the future.

Artist Statement

Over the last fifteen years I have explored interests in personal memory, landscape, cinema and a sense of place. Science has always appealed to me, but I am far too subjective to withstand the rigors of its objectivity.  My life thus far has been a beautiful and poetic mess.  At twenty, when my father was diagnosed with cancer, he gave me a camera. This had a large impact on me, and I became very fond of how the lens can frame, reconfigure and interpret the everyday world.

However, I have never been fully satisfied with the lens alone or the idea of the real story. The scientist in me continues investigating and experimenting with new tools for creating images and objects. Technology and the reconfigured image: Paints and pens, hammers to heat guns, antiquated and digital cameras, toys to electric trains, and computers, with all their 21st century possibilities. I use all of these in my studio.

If someone was to ask me what I like most about Art it is ideas.  The way an artwork and its formal constructs can symbolize a conceptual gesture, a philosophical theory or entire narrative without the written or spoken word. These are some of the things I think about when asked why I am an Artist.

Jody Boyer, Forest for the Trees

Bio

Jody Boyer is a visual artist and arts educator originally from Portland, Oregon. In her studio practice she explores the broad interdisciplinary possibilities of traditional and new media with a specific interest in personal memory, cinema, landscape and a sense of place. She received her B.A. in Studio Arts from Reed College, her M.A. in Intermedia and Video Art from the University of Iowa, and her K-12 teaching certificate at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  Her artwork has been shown nationally, including at the Des Moines Art Center, Womanmade Gallery in Chicago, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and in such publications as Review and Art in America.  She also collaborates with Russ Nordman, Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University Nebraska-Omaha on a variety of visual arts and education projects. Together they are raising  two children and live in the Loess hills of Western Iowa.

She has taught in a variety of P-16 environments including Universities, public schools and community nonprofits throughout the Midwest. She currently teaches art education and digital art courses at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and visual arts at Norris Middle School. In 2014 she received the Caucus of Social Theory in Art Education’s Social Theory in Practice Award for K-12 Art teachers, and was selected 2014 Nebraska Middle School Art Educator of the Year by the Nebraska Art Teachers Association.

 

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Lori Elliott-Bartle

Web: lorielliottbartle.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

I recall working on a large painted mural with friends in second grade as we learned about dinosaurs. Designing and painting that mural reinforced the science ideas we were exploring about that time period, ecosystems and environment. I still enjoy working across disciplines and allowing ideas from history, geography and biology to inspire and inform my artwork.

Why is Art Education important today?

Art education helps develop critical thinking, problem-solving skills and appreciation for good design, it lends itself to most disciplines. It also helps instill the idea that all sorts of art can enrich our daily lives.

Artist Statement

I’m a painter and printmaker who finds inspiration in prairie landscapes, travel and moments from daily life. While most at home under wide open skies and unobstructed vistas, I allow my curiosity to lead me to other terrains and cultures with an interest I honed as a professional journalist.

In recent work, I’ve focused broadly on aspects of landscape, and especially the prairie. I take a daily look at the patch of big bluestem growing in my small, urban front yard. This graceful, resilient plant reminds me of the subtle changes in color, texture and line that Nebraska’s native prairie landscapes provide.

This work is more abstract than earlier paintings, and the materials I use now are more diverse. I mix softened beeswax with oils and pigments and apply many layers. Mixing these materials allows me to create paintings that hold depth, complexity and texture, some of the same qualities about the prairie that I appreciate. My painting process is physically active. I use rollers, wide blades and brushes to apply paint, then blot, scrape and carve with knives and points to reveal underlying colors. These lines and colors convey motion and emotion. The qualities that link all my work — whether mixed media, oil painting, or printmaking — include a strong emphasis on simplified shapes, saturated color and high contrast. 

Lori Elliott-Bartle, Wind Across the Sandbar #2, cold wax and oil on birch panel, 15×15”, 2014

Bio

I took a circuitous route to art-making through journalism and public relations. For the last eight years, I’ve painted full time, usually at my studio on the third floor of Hot Shops Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Born in Berkeley, California, I grew up in a small town in south-central Kansas. I earned a journalism degree from the University of Kansas and a master’s in social sciences from the State University of New York at Binghamton. I worked for 15 years in journalism and in higher education public relations. After taking a watercolor class at a local museum in 2000, I made painting a priority.

I’ve been involved in several artist groups and have been an active member with leadership roles in the Artists’ Cooperative Gallery in Omaha since 2008. I have shown in local and regional galleries and have work in private collections across the United States, as well as in China and in Norway.

When I’m not painting, I enjoy dining out with my husband, attending the ballgames of my two teenaged children, and playing fetch with our dog.

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Rachel Mindrup

Web: www.rmindrup.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

My high school art teacher introduced copper plate etching to me my senior year. I absolutely loved it and when I went to college I realized how much she had to improvise to make that happen when she didn’t have all the facilities a university has for printmaking. It made me realize not just how resourceful she was, but that it would have been a lot easier for her just to have us draw or do something that didn’t take so much preparation. I still love etching and I credit her with that.

Why is Art Education important today?

I am a painter and when I am immersed in the act of painting or drawing I am accessing a very different portion of my brain. I am very much in the present time and I believe it is good neurologically speaking for students to be allowed time to create in that space of their brain as well. Creating art, especially with new media allows students to engage in “play”. Often the process is just as rewarding as the whatever the final product ends up being. I find that even if a painting does not turn out, it typically will, in some way, inform another.

Artist Statement

Many Faces of Neurofibromatosis (NF)

The art object and human subject oscillation, represented so personally, is what gives portraits their powerful grasp on my imagination. It is the idea of duration − or earthly immortality – that gives such a mysterious interest to the painted portrait. Studying the history of portraiture techniques has allowed me the ability to begin to integrate those concepts into relevant contemporary narratives.

My son Henry who was diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis (NF) at four months old has been the motivation behind my series. Neurofibromatosis encompasses a set of distinct genetic disorders that primarily causes tumors to grow along various types of nerves but can also affect the development of non-nervous tissues such as bones and skin. Neurofibromatosis causes tumors to grow anywhere on or in the body. An incurable and progressive genetic disorder, NF can lead to disfigurement; blindness; skeletal abnormalities; dermal, brain, and spinal tumors; loss of limbs; malignancies; and learning disabilities.

Because it is difficult to think about portraits as art and not primarily as the person represented, my “Many Faces of NF” series aims to portray people with NF as individuals first and their genetic complications as second. The individuals selected for this project are from all over the world as NF is worldwide in distribution, affects both sexes equally, and has no particular racial, geographic or ethnic distinction. Consequently, NF can appear in any family. Each person portrayed in my project has not only donated to help find a cure for NF; each has also carefully mediated the way he or she wants to be presented in the oil portrait.

In that regard, I am merely a conduit. It is simply my job to make introductions by use of current social media platforms mixed with my traditional painting background. Through this series of paintings, I transform genetic complications into something secondary and portray the individual personalities first. Using social media as a connection, my goal is to raise funds, educate the uniformed, and ideally help find a cure for NF.

Rachel Mindrup, Hayley Shooting Photos, Oil on Canvas, 30″ x 24″, 2015

Bio

Rachel Mindrup, is a professional artist and art educator. She received her BFA from the University of Nebraska – Kearney and then continued with atelier studies at the Art Academy of Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Her current painting practice is about the study of the figure and portraiture in contemporary art and its relation to medicine. She currently teaches in Omaha at Creighton University, Metropolitan Community College and the Joslyn Art Museum.

Mindrup’s client list includes: Kiewit Corporation, Boys Town, Creighton University, Boys Town National Research Hospital, and the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. Her artwork is held in many private collections including those of Primatologist Jane Goodall and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Larry Thomas

Web: www.larrythomasart.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

Wow, that is a tough one because I had so many. But I did a series of drawings when I was a senior in college. It was about the relationship between people, trees, transformation and deception. I had been studying art history and discovered the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Bernini’s version in particular struck a real chord in me. It was a break through moment for me. The idea of deception and camouflage continues in my work today 40+ years later.

Why is Art Education important today?

Education and the arts in America are under attack. There is a growing movement of people who don’t understand the importance of art and the humanities in the overall education of civilized people in this country. There is a growing push to make educationonly about vocational or technical training to get jobs.

Walter Isaacson said that “Science can give us empirical facts and try to tie them together with theories, but it’s the humanists and the artists who turn them into narratives with moral, emotional and spiritual meanings.” Art gives the narrative and meaning to data science provides for us.

Artist Statement

At first glance my work might appear quite abstract. Closer inspection reveals glimpses, fragments, or passages of potentially more recognizable shapes. Utilizing the traditional mediums of paint, printmaking and collage with the contemporary medium of digitally generated images, I explore the concepts of perception, deception, invisibility and camouflage, both visually and metaphorically.

Larry Thomas, Glimpse 50, Mixed Media Collage, 8” x 8”, 2015

Bio

Larry Thomas received MA and MFA degrees from the University of Iowa. He’s been in over eighty regional, national, and international exhibitions and in more than sixty corporate, public, and private collections including the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. After a 40 year teaching career he is retired and Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts at Johnson County Community College where he taught for his last 25 years. He is represented by the Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art Gallery in Kansas City, MO.

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission. 

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Joe Bussell

Web: www.joebussell.com

Here are two questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.

Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.

I was very lucky to go to a high school that had 6 full time art faculty. When I was a Junior my painting instructor asked if I was thinking about art school and if so she would help me put together a portfolio. She took me to check out the Kansas City Art Institute and Kansas University. It was the first time I truly envisioned myself as a real artist.

Why is Art Education important today?

Without peers and instructors an artist’s failures may mean they will go down for the the count and never get up again. With the support of colleagues and teachers that artist has the opportunity to learn that failure is part of learning. In addition school gives the artist a chance to make professional contacts, fill them with intellectual fuel and impress upon them the importance of discipline and learning skills that will carry them through a lifetime of art making.

Artist Statement

These paper giants are mixed medium paintings that contain subjective associations that allow me to question the world in poetic abstract terms. By building up pools of paint then scraping it to the ground I am able to overlap recognition with the unknown, fusing memory with the present. 

Joe Bussell, Scrape Series 72, Acrylic, 22″x52″, 2016

Bio

Hippie, gay activist, AIDS advocate, gypsy, art educator and ex-pat have described Joe Bussell over the years but artist defines him. 

 

In 1979 Joe received a BFA in Painting from Kansas University. From that time to the present, Joe has lived in London, on both US Coasts and a variety of US cities in between. He’s received 2 MFAs, one in Painting the other in Ceramics from Washington University in St. Louis. He taught art for 8 years, 5 at Washington University and 3 at Johnson County Community College. His work has been represented by a variety of galleries from New York City to Santa Fe and his work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe. In addition to working at a myriad of art related jobs, Joe also worked in an AIDS hospice for 6 years, all the while keeping his studio practice current and vital.

 

 

All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission.