Artist Finds a Language By JI Repoter, Ceci Urbanski
The day started like many others: Bart Vargas hopped on his bicycle and started pedaling hard in an attempt to escape to somewhere else, to anywhere else. At a young age his pedals carried him from his absent and abusive home life, from the loneliness that comes from being one of the few racially ambiguous kids in the small town of Bellevue during the 1980s and 90s; and from the general pain that comes with feeling misunderstood. More than 30 years later Vargas is an accomplished professor, artist, activist and thinker with work featured all over the United States as well as Europe, Asia, and Australia. How did Vargas go from trying to escape his life to chasing his dreams? As he put it when he talked about how he finds motivation to survive as an artist: “I was crazy enough to keep going.” Vargas stands at 5’9’’ and has long peppered dreadlocks that reach about half that length. He has a warm and welcoming smile that you can notice even when he has a mask on. Anyone who knows Vargas will tell you how genuine of a person he is. Maddie Urbanski, a waitress at a restaurant he frequents said, “when he asks how your day is going, he actually cares about your answer.” He also wears a pair of dark
rimmed glasses that usually have a few small specks of paint around the lenses: most likely something he is used to by now. Vargas has been an artist his whole life. Art, more than his bicycle, became an escape during his youth. Though Vargas got to see a lot of the world as a military child, he also had to deal with the consequences of constantly being uprooted and the effects of the actual war on his father. His father was a Vietnam veteran who dealt with severe PTSD as well as alcoholism; on top of that, his mother had severe Schizophrenia and refused to get treated. “Between my parents’ demons, it was a pretty chaotic childhood.” And yet, oddly enough, he credits his parents for him becoming the artist he is today. “I drew all the time…I drew to create worlds where I had some kind of control over.” And he never stopped creating. When he was 16 he got a job in the shoe department of a Shopko. Within a few
months his boss started to notice something was wrong. Vargas was taken in and given a safe place to stay by his boss who he now considers his real family. Though both his biological parents and his real family were traditional blue collar families who weren’t exactly thrilled about his attraction to the arts, Vargas still carried his love for it into his teenage and young adult years. As a teenager he was an angry misfit. He was bullied for his non-white features and called numerous slurs that he didnt even understand the meaning of at the time. He hung out with other angry kids and they listened to angry music because “we were all trying to escape something.” Vargas was getting Cs and Ds and never saw himself as the type of student to be able to go to college. “Art was the only thing I was really good
“I can’t change the world, but I can make people think and that might change things.” -Bart Vargas
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at,” he said. Vargas did, however, make it to college, but only after 6 years of serving in the Air Force. He got to see the world and gain the skills of self discipline that would later assist him through his college years. He realized he wasn’t happy in the Air force and it wasn’t good for his mental health so he decided to go back to school at age 28, utilizing his new found self discipline. He became an “A-level student” and earned his bachelors in fine arts four years later at the University of Omaha. He later furthered his education by receiving his masters at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Using his degrees, he became a professor of fine arts as well as a highly notable artist in the Omaha community. Vargas has said that he doesn’t think art in itself can change the world. But he does believe that “art can be a tool for communication and education…I can’t change the world, but I can make people think and that might change things.” He creates thought provoking pieces that express his frustrations and feelings concerning the earth and all the humans on it. To this day Vargas is still angry but not in the same way he was as a teenager for now he has
