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Flow – a Sheldon Statewide Art Exhibit

real fossilized dinosaur leg bone

Alice Cumbow
Autumn Reflections, 1951
oil on canvas
15 1/2 x 23 5/8”
NAA–Gift of Mary D. Hillegass

April 11 - May 18, 2008

Approximately 25 paintings, photographs, sculptures and prints from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery’s permanent collection will be on exhibit at the Hastings Museum April 11 to May 18 in the East Gallery. The exhibit is part of the Sheldon Statewide traveling exhibit program that sends art to various communities around Nebraska each year. This year’s theme centers around water and is entitled Flow.

Flow explores water as a subject of art. Symbolizing purity, sustenance, tranquility, power, movement and continuity, water is a source of life as well as destruction and death. Its surface serves as a metaphor for self-reflection and contemplation. Humans rely on water and take it for granted. We pollute it, misuse it and fight over it. It is easily accessible and inexpensive to some, while nearly out of reach to others.

Artists with an affinity toward nature, especially landscape painters, have chosen water as a primary subject because of its reflective beauty and emotive qualities. The Impressionists gravitated towards water’s abstract, impressionistic qualities. Artists whose work is included in the show are: Joel Meyerowitz, William Theo Brown, Wayne Thiebaud, Neil Welliver, Harry Callahan, Nebraska’s Alice Cumbow and others.

Hastings College Art Department is co-sponsoring the exhibit at the Hastings Museum. Flow is organized by Sheldon Statewide with generous support of Nebraska Art Association, the Nebraska Arts Council, James and Rhonda Seacrest, Lonnie Pierson Dunbier, Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of Nebraska and the Groundwater Foundation.

Location: Main Level