Storyville The Intersection of LearningAugust–DecemberDepictionAllusion,Abstraction,and2022Guide
—Joan Didion, The White Album We are shaped by narratives that are present all around us. The meaning of each is a variable invention affected by our use of highly personal lenses to read stories, objects, and situations. The stories within the works presented here derive equally from their authors and us—their viewers. Free to form meaning from individual relationships with the objects, viewers may connect so strongly two quotidian passages of a work as to advocate for a particular story above all others. Storyville presents works from the museum’s collection that vacillate between recognizable subject matter and the traditions of abstract painting spanning 1976 to 2022. In these instances, the objects deliver equal weight to structure and image resulting in thought-provoking tension within what we see before us. At this intersection, all roads lead to stories.
Exhibition support is provided by Kristen and Geoff Cline, Melanie and Jon Gross, HixsonLied Endowment, Nebraska Arts Council, and Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
August–December 2022
We tell ourselves stories in order to live …
The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and Depiction Storyville
Storyville The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and August–DecemberDepiction2022CARLOSALFONZO Still Life with AIDS Victim DAVID BATES Bait Shop BOROFSKYJONATHAN Untitled, Man with Blue Tungsten Light Bulb DEREK BOSHIER Corporate Business JOANNE CARSON Night Blossoms DEXTER DALWOOD White Flag JEDD GARET The Pond PHILIP GUSTON Pit II CLAY KETTER Trace Painting #11 MOSKOWITZROBERT Teapot MURRAYELIZABETH Wishing for the Farm ED PASCHKE Galapagos
Storyville The Intersection of Abstraction, Allusion, and August–DecemberDepiction2022LARIPITTMAN Thankfully, you will have taught me freedom within constraints LISA SANDITZ Pearl Farm II PETER SAUL Abstract Expressionist Still Life SAUNDERSRAYMOND East and West Coast Paints FRITZ SCHOLDER American Portrait with Dog T. L. SOLIEN Intruders LESLIE WAYNE Burning Down the House ROBERT YARBER Casino Drop
CARLOS ALFONZO Havana, Cuba 1950–Miami, FL 1991 Still Life with AIDS Victim Oil on canvas, 1990 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Jeanette Strain Alexis Excellence Fund, Mercedes A. Augustine Fund for Realistic Art, Fern Witwer Strain Sheldon Museum of Art Subfund, Virginia Koehler Knoll Fund for the Sheldon Museum of Art, Charles W. Rain Fund, and Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6879.2019
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CARLOS ALFONZO Still Life with AIDS Victim
Painted shortly after the death from AIDS of his friend and Miami-based curator Sheldon Lurie and a year before his own passing, Still Life with AIDS Victim is Carlos Alfonzo’s response to the devastation the epidemic wrought on a whole generation of gay men. In this story of death, Alfonzo painted a figure in white lying on a hospital bed with his legs raised. A second figure stands over him, outlined in white against the composition’s dark center. A quiet sense of foreboding characterizes the painting, as death stands over the patient. Yet, Alfonzo, with his suggestion of shimmering golden light, seemed to reveal his belief that there is hope even within this scene of despair.
Back Contentsto DAVID BATES born Dallas, TX 1952 Bait Shop Oil on canvas, 1994–1995 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-3110.2006
David Bates continues the American regionalist tradition by depicting the lives and landscapes of his native Texas. His interests lie in the working-class people of central and south Texas along the Gulf Coast. His bright colors and dark, bold lines recall the work of Marsden Hartley, who painted the residents of Corea, Maine, more than half a century ago.
My portraits aren’t really portraits. I can’t paint just anybody. It just wouldn’t work. The paintings usually come from memory or notes I make in my mind. The people I paint don’t know that they’re being painted. But again, it’s a painting, not a person…I don’t ever catch an exact likeness. I’ve tried a couple of times, but now I look at the subject and let the paintings go.
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—David Bates
DAVID BATES Bait Shop
Back Contentsto JONATHAN BOROFSKY born Boston, MA 1942 Untitled, Man with Blue Tungsten Light Bulb Oil on canvas with blue Tungsten light bulb, 1981 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Foster Goldstrom S-1184.2021
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JONATHAN BOROFSKY Untitled, Man with Blue Tungsten Light Bulb
In 1967–68 I gave up all painting and sculpture to focus on my inner mind. I would count from one to ten over and over again as a sort of meditation, and usually write the numbers down on paper…
Over the years, Borofsky has accumulated a lexicon of symbols that reappear over and over again. The light bulb atop of the head, as seen in this work, may stand for knowledge or enlightenment. At the same time, the dismembered body could symbolize an interior dilemma or psychological trauma. As for the series of numbers on the bottom right, they are part of a conceptual practice he began in the late 1960s.
At one point, I decided to just start from zero and keep counting towards infinity and see for how long and how high I would count—maybe a year, or two years. The numbers were hand-written: every day I picked up the counting process where I left off the day before. At some point, that rigid kind of conceptual control started to get in the way of my need to make visual psychological and personal imagery. I started making very small drawings and paintings again, and every time a work was completed, instead of my normal signature, I signed it with the number that I was on in that particular day in my counting meditation. This was a way of merging my need for structure with the figurative. —Jonathan Borofsky Jonathan Borofsky’s work is unpredictable. Through his installations, drawings, twodimensional work, sculptures, and performances, he explores his psyche and reoccurring thoughts in an almost unconscious, trancelike manner. For him, every work is also a self-portrait.
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DEREK BOSHIER born Portsmouth, United Kingdom 1937 Corporate Business Oil on canvas, 1984 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Zenith Insurance Company S-1192.2022
—Derek Boshier, 1985 In the early 1960s, Derek Boshier became part of the second wave of British pop art along with artists David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj. At that time, his work dealt with the Americanization of Britain, pop music, and the space race between the US and USSR. In 1980, Boshier was invited to teach in Texas at the University of Houston’s art department. What was supposed to be only a one semester gig turned into a thirteen-year stay, during which he began making large, expressive oil paintings tackling subjects of modern life, cowboy mythology, and the relationship between art and politics. BOSHIER
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Abstraction in painting is a sensitivity that I look at but am not particularly interested in, yet I doubt I would paint the way I do (in terms of paint application) if it hadn’t been for coming into contact and seeing abstract art, especially American abstract expressionism. Inevitably, after the creative push that established the movement, abstraction (especially in America) became the new academicism. What are the critical issues in painting today? I am unsure, but hope it is towards a more humanitarian, lifebased art, away from the art derived from art.
DEREK
Corporate Business
Back Contentsto J O ANNE CARSON born New York, NY 1953 Night Blossoms Acrylic on canvas, 2022 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-7007.2022
My artistic ambition is to create worlds that have the vigor, inventiveness, and enveloping imagination of a sort of new nature in which hybrid plant/animal characters radiate a growor-die ethos … They reflect the instability of life and its changeability in a widening world, the purpose being to inspire a fresh but not always entirely comforting sense of possibility and wonderment. My work serves as a testament to the belief that, in spite of the fearsome decline of our environment, life continues on. And often with exuberance.
JOANNE CARSON Night Blossoms
—JoAnne Carson JoAnne Carson’s fantastical landscapes blend playful surrealism with a style reminiscent of the backgrounds in Looney Tunes animations. Her paintings center on meditative and personal examinations as she builds environments that become “portals into a universe of alternative biology and psychological spectacle.”
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DEXTER DALWOOD born Bristol, United Kingdom Flag Oil on canvas, 2010 of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust
U-6949.2021
1960 White
University
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DEXTER DALWOOD White Flag
I am first and foremost interested in painting as a conceptual practice. When I say this, I mean the meta-awareness of painting as language: the detached, yet figurative, use of form as language. It has taken me a long time to get to this position. But it is what engages me in still wanting to make paintings at this point in time … when looking at my work and trying to step outside of it—I think I see disparate images bolted together like words in a sentence that make up a whole. —Dexter Dalwood British artist Dexter Dalwood stitches together seemingly disparate cultural and historical references to evoke a feeling rather than a coherent narrative. In White Flag , Dalwood painted Jasper John’s 1955 work of the same title along with a portion of Eugene Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834) and imagery from the 2004 videogame Six Days in Fallujah about the Iraq war. The painting encapsulates a history of Western imperialism and American exceptionalism that has persisted for centuries.
Programs S-1293.2022
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JEDD GARET born Los Angeles, CA 1955 The Pond Acrylic on canvas mounted on shaped stretcher, 1985 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Dorsky Gallery Curatorial
—Jedd Garet Jedd Garet rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the emerging neo-expressionist movement—an international resurgence of painting that combined figuration and abstraction using high-contrast colors. Garet, in particular, was inspired by the Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico and his enigmatic, dreamlike scenes. In The Pond , Garet adds an additional element of dimension by beveling the edges of the painting to recede into the wall. His colors and forms are not meant to appear naturalistic and only hint at the subject matter.
No words, or natural elements, nothing natural, including the figures … And no natural colors, no earth colors. Well of course, everything is found in nature, but I wanted it, nature that is, to be artificial. It’s not that nature is hard to do, it’s that it’s against the rules. I broke down all my rules—one by one.
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JEDD GARET The Pond
Back Contentsto PHILIP GUSTON Montreal, Canada 1913–Woodstock, NY 1980 Pit II Oil on canvas, 1976 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of the estate of Musa Guston U-4429.1992
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As a young artist in Los Angeles, Philip Guston apprenticed with artist Reuben Kadish creating political murals for left-leaning organizations, hospitals, and the Mexican government. He then joined the Works Progress Administration creating public murals for federal buildings. However, by the mid-1950s, Guston became a major figure in abstract expressionism, known for his deft handling of paint and wholly nonobjective pictures. During the last decades of his life, he switched to cartoonish figuration and began creating work that addressed his complicated feelings about his Jewish ancestry, which had been profoundly shaped by his choice to change his inherited surname of Goldstein to Guston. He grappled with guilt from this dissociation from his religious heritage and from knowledge of the traumas Jews suffered in the Holocaust. In Pit II and related other works, Guston painted his vision of inhumanity, torture, and genocide.
PHILIP GUSTON Pit II
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1961 Trace Painting
CLAY KETTER born Brunswick, ME #11 enamel on of Sue S-1187.2021Stoffel
plastic laminate, gypsum wallboard and wooden board, 1996 Sheldon Art Association Gift
Household
paint
[A]fter contemplating this scale, I realized that it was a magic grey zone between manageable and monumental, at the outer reaches of my corporeal zone. With my arms outstretched, I can just barely grip the piece. In reference to the Vitruvian human scale, one has to consider whether the area in question is just within one’s grasp, or just beyond. In art, the perfect zone is floating in between the two, creating a vibration. —Clay Ketter Clay Ketter’s paintings stem from his experience working as a construction worker and carpenter. His Trace Paintings present ghostly remnants of wires, wall sockets, and shelfing resulting in a semi-minimalist exploration of ready-mades and process art. To achieve the works’ textured surfaces, Ketter installs everyday building material to a substrate of sheetrock and wood. He applies several layers of paint throughout the process and then removes all attached elements leaving only traces on the surface.
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CLAY KETTER Trace Painting #11
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born New York, NY 1935 Teapot Acrylic and oil on canvas, 1976 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6948.2021
Robert Moskowitz began his career in New York in the early 1960s as the formalist ideals of abstract expressionism began to wane. At this time, the art world also witnessed the emergence of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol, who used objects both as subject matter and Moskowitzmaterial. sources his images from architecture, sculpture, photographs, and common objects. He distills his subjects to bare silhouettes, stripped of contextual details, and leaves them floating in painterly, monotone spaces. He chooses images that are recognizable and can act as symbols for the viewer’s own interpretations. In 1989, Teapot was included in a traveling retrospective exhibition of Moskowitz’s work, organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
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A lot of paintings are just about survival— different ways of surviving. Teapot is about people, about relationships. The shaft of light, or energy, between the teapots is going both ways—coming from one into the other and vice versa. It is a very idealistic painting … —Robert Moskowitz
ROBERT MOSKOWITZ Teapot
Back Contentsto ELIZABETH MURRAY Chicago, IL 1940–Granville, NY 2007 Wishing for the Farm Oil and canvas on wood, Summer–Fall 1991 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of the Hormel Harris Foundation, Rhonda Seacrest, Donna Woods, and funds from the Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, and the Charles W. Rain and Charlotte Rain Koch Gallery Fund U-6778.2018
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—Elizabeth Murray In this undulating work, Elizabeth Murray paints the corner of a room with multicolored walls as a wailing, white, wormlike form rises in the center. The engorged shape of the canvas mimics the rolling hills of upstate New York as one weaves through the winding roads toward the titular destination.
Murray began constructing cartoonish figures on shaped canvases in the late 1970s as a renewed interest in painting emerged in the art world. Other contemporary artists such as Frank Stella and Ron Gorchov were also exploring the physical limits of painted canvases. Murray’s unique approach of combining figuration, abstraction, painting, and sculpture influenced other women painters, including Leslie Wayne, whose work Burning Down the House (2018) is also featured in this exhibition.
ELIZABETH MURRAY Wishing for the Farm
If I got the shapes right, if I got the forms right, I could go back into illusion. I could use perspective and architecture to create the perspectival space. Even though it was physically coming out, visually it could go back in another direction. It took a long time to start to grasp those possibilities, but that was what was fun about it—beginning to find this other world that you didn’t even know you made. I think inventing situations like that is the best part, it’s where spontaneity and intuition and the unconscious come in. I don’t know what I’ve made when I start in on it; I don’t know how it’s going to come together. If I knew, it wouldn’t be any fun.
Back Contentsto ED PASCHKE Chicago, IL 1939–Chicago, IL 2004 Galapagos Oil on canvas, 1982 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of Wil J. and Sally Hergenrader U-5648.2011
In this painting, Paschke suggests nocturnal activity: the sensation of a television with poor reception, the visual companion of an insomniac or late-nighter at 3:00 a.m., an effect the artist himself acknowledged: “Television sets that are out of focus or don’t work right interest me a great deal. I don’t think we realize how ingrained in us that way of seeing is. There’s life and there’s TV.”
A native Chicagoan, Ed Paschke was part of the Chicago Imagists, a group of figurative artists who emerged in the mid-1960s. Influenced by comic books, advertisements, the encyclopedic collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the ethnographic holdings in the Field Museum, they were known for their use of bright, vivid colors and exaggerated Paschkeforms. often gave his works Spanishlanguage titles, adding to their ambiguity and referencing the influences of living in a multicultural city. Galapagos , with its allusion to the island chain off the coast of Ecuador, is from a series of works from the late 1970s and early 1980s in which Paschke’s paintings became less literally representational.
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ED PASCHKE Galapagos
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LARI PITTMAN born Los Angeles, CA 1952 Thankfully, you will have taught me freedom within constraints Acrylic, alkyd, and aerosol on mahogany panel, 1999
University of Nebraska–Lincoln Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust H-3111.2006
The artist is supposed to provide a service, a short cut, a sound bite, a shamanistic insight, an edited and compacted version of reality. And I don’t know how to do that, so I don’t provide that service in the work. This means that the viewer has to trust themselves with the work because there’s also no location of meaning in the work. There’s no estimated time of arrival of understanding. There’s no primer. Maybe the command is, ‘Let me show you an experience as total and as complete a history of that experience as I can show you. Now you start and see if you can experience it.’
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LARI PITTMAN
A Los Angeles native, Lari Pittman paints disorienting, maximalist settings that marry high and low culture. His experience as a former wallpaper designer and his use of stencils account for his crisp lines and predilection to populate the entire composition. With every detail given equal measure, Pittman’s picture planes offer the eye no place for respite. Here, hot rod flames, anatomical illustrations, mid-century ranch homes, and a Victorian mansion interlock into a scene of colorful chaos contained within the edges of the canvas. Pittman weaponizes a kitschy, camp aesthetic to construct a hieroglyphic language that hints at queerness, desire, sex, and death in a destabilizing composition that frees the viewer from direct interpretation.
—Lari Pittman
Thankfully, you will have taught me freedom within constraints
LISA
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SANDITZ born St. Louis, MO 1973 Pearl Farm II Acrylic on canvas, 2007 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-5493.2007
—Lisa Sanditz Lisa Sanditz travels throughout the United States and abroad depicting the effects of industry and human intervention on natural landscapes. Her paintings typically mix saturated, synthetic colors with murky earth tones. In the early 2000s, Sanditz traveled to single-industry cities in China that were developed for specific manufacturing purposes such as consumer electronics, petroleum, steel, and textiles among others. As an artist who grew up in the Midwest and now lives in upstate New York, Sanditz found connections in China to postindustrial towns in the US that now lay abandoned.
I did a number of paintings of pearl farms in China, which are flooded fields that are about six feet deep with water. There are rows of plastic bottles organized in these fields, for miles in every direction. Attached to each plastic bottle is a string, and attached to the string underwater is an oyster with a pearl growing in it. There’s a grid of trash where these semiprecious items are grown. There is a particular challenge to this new work from China, because the signifiers that are familiar to us from the American landscape do not translate.
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LISA SANDITZ Pearl Farm II
Abstract
CA
Still Life Acrylic
canvas, 2016 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-6563.2016
PETER SAUL born San Francisco, 1934 Expressionist on
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I have a feeling that abstract expressionism was caused by a certain nervousness that came about because of World War II. I think everybody was drinking coffee and smoking, and it made everyone so jittery they couldn’t paint buttons and noses and things, you know; they just couldn’t do it. Their patience was shot by the war. —Peter Saul For the past six decades, Peter Saul’s work has critiqued and satirized contemporary society, politics, and the art world, using his exaggerated, cartoonish, and often acerbic, imagery. He has never strayed from figuration. Even in the late 1950s, when he began painting, he found abstract expressionism too cerebral. Despite having always considered himself an outsider, his pictures have influenced generations of younger artists, beginning in the 1980s during the resurgence of figurative painting.
SAUL Abstract Expressionist Still Life
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PETER
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University of Nebraska–Lincoln Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust U-5000.A–B.1999
Diptych, from left: acrylic and mixed media on canvas, polychrome metal sign, 1998
RAYMOND SAUNDERS born Pittsburgh, PA 1934 East and West Coast Paints
I had a chance to be a doctor, a lawyer, all that, but as a black kid, I had a greater chance as an artist to be more who I really am ... I realized what art would allow me. —Raymond Saunders Raymond Saunders’s paintings, or constructions, or assemblages, are related almost exclusively to his own physical encounters with the world in which he lives. The works are less works of art in an objective sense and more relics of personal experience. East and West Coast Paints is a monumental example of Saunders’s aesthetic process. Referring to the artist’s different life experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York, his adult life as an artist and his early childhood years, this diptych evokes his bicoastal existence by imaging the symbol of his identity as an artist—paint.
RAYMOND SAUNDERS
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East and West Coast Paints
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American
U-3438.1982
FRITZ SCHOLDER Breckenridge, MN 1937–Scottsdale, AZ 2005 Portrait with Dog Acrylic on canvas, 1981 University of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of Mrs. Olga N. Sheldon and the Bertha Schaefer Bequest
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—Fritz Scholder Even though Fritz Scholder was an enrolled member of the Luiseno tribe and a quarter Native American, he never considered himself an Indigenous artist. Yet in the 1960s, he began painting Native American men and women with American flags, inside vehicles, holding beer cans or with ice cream cones, challenging perceived stereotypes long held in the United States.
I had made my statement on the Indian as a subject and was ready to move into a more universal and mystical arena. The single figure still intrigued me, resulting in the emergence of androgynous warriors in a state of flux. These Deco/Egyptian/Indian/Samurai magicians are the icons of the eighties. Man/woman/animal forms react with ambiguous environments. The stance of these portraits is brave, even though it is difficult to translate the pose.
FRITZ SCHOLDER American Portrait with Dog
In American Portrait with Dog , the subject is at once indistinct and confrontational, dreamlike and direct, frankly addressing the viewer, battle shield in hand, and challenging our perceptions of Native Americans. The small dog—a frequent motif in Scholder’s paintings from the late 1960s onward—in the lower right corner acts as both a counterpoint to the central figure and a surrogate for the viewer; turning his back on us, he engages with the subject in private, meditative communication.
U-4664.1996
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T. L. SOLIEN born Fargo, ND Oil in canvas, 1985 of Nebraska–Lincoln Gift of T. L. and Deborah Solien in memory of Prof. Richard Trickey
University
1949 Intruders
T. L. SOLIEN Intruders
I have attempted to invent a personal and idiosyncratic visual language in which consideration of both the history of Abstraction, and the traditions of Figural Painting are of equal and essential concern. I stretch the boundaries of what has been considered viable source material from which to distill human narratives to include exploration into product iconography, vintage illustration, commercial animation and the drawings of children ... —T. L. Solien T. L. Solien’s paintings are deeply personal explorations of the artist’s psyche. In his work, Solien attempts to reconcile events, emotions, and expectations that come with being an artist and provider. The paintings are usually set in landscapes inspired by the cold, wet days of early spring in the north Great Plains and comprise figures who act as proxies for his unresolved psychological states.
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Back Contentsto LESLIE WAYNE born Landstuhl, Germany 1953 Burning Down the House Oil on wood, 2018 Sheldon Art Association Gift of an anonymous donor S-1287.2022
—Leslie Wayne With her trompe l’oeil works of doorways left ajar, broken windows, and overflowing furniture, Leslie Wayne tells a story of anxiety during a time of great uncertainty. For Wayne, an artist who worked in abstraction for most of her career, figuration is a way to resolve her feelings around issues facing the world today: climate change, political demagoguery, and nuclear proliferation.
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LESLIE WAYNE Burning Down the House
The large paintings of cabinets, closets, drawers and shelves, while perhaps less daunting, are seen from the point of view of a small child looking into a forbidden space or up to an unreachable ledge. They assume a kind of German Expressionist perspective of an environment that’s not quite right. And in many of them, things are indeed out of whack. Containers are permeable and our best attempts at safeguarding their contents can go awry. Water can leak in, shelves can dislodge, contents can spill out or catch fire. Closets may contain dangerous or sensitive secrets and strange things can happen inside a closet. But most everyone wants to know what’s inside of one and it can just as easily be a magical zone of refuge for a child seeking comfort from the outside as its doors open on to a whole other world of fantasy.
ROBERT YARBER born Dallas, TX 1948 Casino Drop Oil on canvas, 1985 Sheldon Art Association Gift of Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs S-1292.2022
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—Robert Yarber
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In his paintings from the mid-1980s, Robert Yarber captures feelings of isolation and instability in late-stage capitalism. His distinct use of dark backgrounds and high-key, fluorescent colors was inspired by his love of film history. His figures, sometimes in pairs, suspend midair inside windowless interiors or outside and lit only by glowing hotel lights and neon signs. Yarber never indicates whether these people are ascending or descending or why no one seems to notice them. He leaves the viewer with a striking, unsettling image and offers no resolution.
ROBERT YARBER Casino Drop
I’d say my color owes a lot to technicolor … a lot of it has to do with the harsh, superhot chromatism of color … of the fifties. [The director] Douglas Sirk took it to the limit in films like Imitation of Life [1959] and Written on the Wind [1956].