Artist Bios

Barbara Rogers

Barbara Rogers grew up in a small town in Northern Ohio and graduated with a B.S.C degree in Art Education from Ohio University. In California, she studied painting at The San Fransisco Art Institute with Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Frank Lobdell. She studied life drawing with Nathan Oliviera at California College of Arts and Crafts. She received the Eisner Prize and her MA in Painting from the University of California at Berkeley. At UC Berkeley, she studied with NY painters Michael Goldberg and Angelo Ippolito. Her major professor was the Chicago painter, Felix Ruvolo.

Rogers has been a faculty member or visiting artist at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, University of Chicago, San Jose State University, The San Francisco Art Institute, Cooper Union, New York City, NY, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. Pusan National University, Pusan, South Korea, and Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. In 2007, after numerous mentoring and teaching awards, Rogers retired from the University of Arizona, and most recently was a Professor Emeritus of Painting and Drawing in The School of Art at The University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ.

Christian Rothmann

Christian Rothmann is a painter, photographer and graphic artist. In 1976, he first studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main, Germany and moved to Berlin in 1977, where he graduated in 1983 at the Hochschule der Künste. From 1983–95, he taught at the university as a lecturer and as an artist with a focus on screenprinting and American art history. To date, a versatile body of work has been created, which includes not only paintings but also long-standing photo projects, videos and public art. Guest lectures, teaching assignments, scholarships and exhibitions regularly lead Rothmann to travel home and abroad.

Dan Boylan

Dan Boylan was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1940. He attended the University of Nebraska at Omaha and finished his education in art after moving to California in 1961.He returned to Omaha in 1984 to paint full time and shows his work in galleries around the midwest. His work is locally seen at the Adam Whitney Gallery and Dundee Gallery. He is also represented by Vivian Kiechel, a fine art dealer.
Dan\'s exploration of painting takes him through the worlds of nature: the midwestern landscape, the city scene and ultimately to the subject of the human figure. He has had one man shows from the joslyn museum in 1989 to the haydon gallery, lincoln in 2000. His work is in private and corporate collections from con agra to Senator Ben Nelson in Washington, DC.

Edith Vonnegut

“My aim is to rewrite the history of women as I think we have been portrayed incorrectly from Eve on. I'm here to herald the unheralded and bring majesty to the mundane. I'm also working on some politically charged paintings regarding the trashing of our planet. I've always painted angels, though that's a mystery as I was raised agnostic bordering on atheist but have a sneaking feeling there is more to this world than meets the eye. I am more of an illustrator than a painter and proud of it. I begged my parents to send me to apprentice with Norman Rockwell but he was not taking students. Then I begged them to send me to Italy to study with the masters, but they told me they were all dead so I dropped in and out of multiple art schools and consider myself self taught by getting too close to masterpieces in museums and studying books with titles like 'Painting Techniques of the Masters'. I want to make paintings that are beautiful, with humor and are about something. My mediums are oil on linen or lately, gouache on antique wallpaper.”

Gary Bowling

Gary Bowling, a Southwestern Missouri native, returned to his home state in 1981 after a decade of teaching art at Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa. After receiving a fellowship to Yaddo, an artist’s retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, Gary was encouraged to quit his teaching career and focus his energy on painting. Since then, he has been painting and exhibiting full-time. His work has been exhibited across the United States, including shows at the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska; Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia; Mitchell Museum in Mt. Vernon, Illinois; and the Rockford Art Museum. His current studio and residence is in Lamar, Missouri.

Mary Beth Fogarty

Plattsmouth artist Mary Beth Fogarty’s work draws from German Expressionism and is infused with spiritual symbolism. Many of her works focus on the subtle beauty of Nebraska’s landscapes.

As a child, Mary Beth Fogarty cherished her freedom to roam the woods of the eastern Nebraska farm where she was raised. As an adult, she found inspiration in “the beauty of the lush banks” of the Niobrara River. Fogarty wrote, “I’m striving to create an architecture for the human spirit.”

Sachio Yamashita

Born in Kagoshima, Japan, 1933, residing in the United States since 1968, Sachio Yamashita has exhibited in many solo and group shows. He has completed more than 100 murals throughout the Midwest, i.e., Milwaukee Museum, University of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and many in Chicago, Kansas, and Nebraska, including Employ Airport, Omaha, and Omaha Children’s Museum.

In 1982, he moved to San Fransisco. In the Bay Area, his public murals include: Urban High School, San Francisco; Mill Valley Community Center, Mill Valley, CA, North Marin High School, Marin, CA, Madrone High School, San Rafael, CA, and Fairfax/San Anselmo Children’s Center, Fairfax, CA.

Steve Joy

Steve Joy has both worked as an artist and taught two generations of artists on three continents since his emergence on the London art scene in the early 1980s. Internationally respected and collected, he is considered one of the most eloquent practitioners of art as a vehicle for conveying spirituality and the mysteries of the journey for self-understanding. Joy’s vocabulary is abstraction, a style that, on the surface, might suggest no meaning at all, but in its history, in the work of the great masters of non-objective painting — artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian — abstraction was the most lyrical way of conveying these mysteries.

Joy came to art late, after a career in Great Britain’s Royal Air Force, and was moved to become an artist from his extensive professional travels and his voracious reading. After art school he sought out fellowships and positions teaching art in locations far away from the comforts of the artistic capitals of Europe and the United States, returning to these centers only on occasion. His work has always reflected his influences: other artists, filmmakers, thinkers, spiritual leaders, and physical and cultural landmarks.

His technique has evolved over time from small, rich panels of ambiguous pigment to oil paintings with projecting additions to his more current work on heavy supports carrying wax, gold or silver leaf, and pure colors rich with symbolism. While he continues to travel extensively and has made paintings in recent years in Asia, Mexico, and Europe, he is currently based out of a loft in the Old Market of Omaha.

Susan Beck Conaway

I’m drawn to the potential for expressing the luminosity I perceive in certain forms. My studio is cluttered with all kinds of things I’ve collected that seem to hold the possibility of expressing more than what they are.

I pick certain items and move them about and fiddle with the light source and move them about some more. When I think my arrangement is “there”, I paint it.

I paint in a very traditional way; under painting in monotones to set the values and applying layers of velaturas and transparent glazes. The tricky part is to keep my vision in tact, and the trickiest part is knowing when to stop.

I’m often asked about my titles. They’re important because I think to name something takes the mind down a very specific path and that’s not what I want to do; just the opposite in fact. So, I come up with a title so specific it’s pretty obvious what the painting is about. Sensing that, it is my hope that the viewer will have room to wander.

Sylvia Schuster

With a career spanning six decades, Sylvia Schuster, born in 1943, depicts in her work her deep understanding of the human form. as a young child roaming the corridors of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sylvia Schuster spent endless hours drawing torsos, Egyptian Mummies and African Heads. Early on she was recognized as a child with exceptional ability.

Sylvia says of her many drawings, “They are a part of me. I remember them. When I look through my drawings, I recognize them. I remember them. I know when I did them. They are my friends.” Speaking of why most of her work is in black and white she relays, “I was forced to use black and white a lot because I just could not afford paints. Cadmium yellow, cadmium red and vermillion are very expensive paints. The earth colors were much cheaper. I could use inks. The inks were cheaper because they went further, but I spent $20-25 a day on ink, every day. I did big brown heads like this one with the sepia ink and burnt Sienna ink, charcoal and brown. I just kept making more and more heads and doing collages and making prints. It was a wonderful experience.”

Schuster attended L’Academia de Bella Arti in Rome as a member of the Rhode Island School of Design. Ms. Schuster earned her B.F.A from R.I.S.D. in 1965, and continued her studies in Italy on a Fulbright grant and a Prix de Rome scholarship. In 1967 she earned a M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Ms. Schuster also studied at Boston University at Tanglewood, the University of Iowa, New York Studio School, Creighton University, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the University of Illinois.

Sylvia Schuster was invited to serve residences at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York, Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forrest, Illinois. In 1999, she was the artist in residence for the Summer Six Art Program at Skidmore College.

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