On Saturday, April 1st, the 16th Annual Juried Show Opening Reception was held from 12 – 2 pm. Artists and enthusiasts alike enjoyed a range of art styles and mediums chosen by our juror Eddie Dominguez and art pieces submitted by UNL Faculty for the Faculty show. A statement about the winning art pieces by Eddie was read by NAC staff and certificates were handed out for Best in Show, 1st and 2nd place. Mike Trotter won Best in Show with his piece Fisherman’s Dilemma. Mary Mancuso received 1st place with Ancestral Voices. 2nd place went to Zoe Nielsen with Scale Studies and Honorable Mention was awarded to Butch Rohrschneider for Tornado Impression Number 1. Read The official statement and all of the artist statements
We encourage artists of all expertise to apply to the 16th Annual Juried Show in 2023! Approximately 20-30 fine art works encompassing all mediums, styles, and genres will be exhibited in the NAC gallery.
WIN $250 Best of show | $150 1st Place | $100 2nd Place
Featuring local and regional artists.
Zoe Nielsen Jeanette Johnson Francine Fox Butch Rohrschneider Tom Schultz Diana Jo Tweedy Victoria Harper Greg Brown Rodney Beyke Wendy Ketelsen Janna Harsch Katy Edmisten Rachel Vogel Katie Wilson Karen Voborny
Frank Taylor Mike Trotter Denise Kraft Barb Gustafsson Sue Morfeld Jerene Kruse Bonnie Mercer Erin Spencer Mary Mancuso Steve Elliot Danika Rowe Leroy Von Glan Kathleen Lohr Clark Koppelmann Bobbie Leesley
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
**Sponsorship ensures the gallery is ALWAYS free and open to the public!
Hundreds of elementary students visited the Johnny Carson Theatre On Tuesday, January 17th to watch “Pete the Cat’s Big Hollywood Adventure.” Performer’s from TheaterWorks USA transformed into characters from pirate, dinosaur, dancing and robot movies as Pete and Callie the cat explore a Hollywood movie studio and avoid the security guard. Lessons are learned along the way about friendship and responsibility. Kids were encouraged to dance and sing from their seats which they were more than happy to do.
Thank You!
We would like to thank all of the volunteers that helped us keep everything organized and fun for the students and the performers.
John McCaughey – “In my work, I draw inspiration from the distressed buildings and defaced walls of the inner city. I am attracted to these structures for their visual and textural properties, the cracks, chipping paint, poorly removed graffiti, overgrowth, and flashy advertisements. I love how cities age, how they evolve… embracing their past while also looking to their future. It is a parallel to how I develop work in the studio. I enjoy recreating the ephemeral qualities of these spaces through acts of painting, sanding, screen-printing, collage’ and decollage’. These processes combine to produce a mass of colorful and texturally diverse materials that I can quickly layer into my compositions. I juxtapose the results against more modern, digitally produced information as well as feed the in-progress work into photoshop to tinker with saturation, pixilation, and other digital effects. The entire process is a formal exploration of color, texture, space, and time. These works are abstracted portraits of the world I inhabit and the nostalgic value I place upon it.”
Lisa Wicka –
“We live in the spaces… between past and present, between empty and occupied, between mind and body, between physical and virtual, between tangible and lost, between loneliness and love, between exposed and hidden. Through the breakdown and rebuilding of the in between, my work mimics the everyday navigation of these realms. Temporary moments of clarity come together and fall apart creating a self in motion, evolving through experience, place, failures and successes. My work is a surface where this dialogue becomes visible explorations of my surroundings and my identity, a surrogate self with limitless possibilities. Often referencing architectural spaces, wallpapers, and raw materials, my work brings into question the solidity and accuracy of things we hold true. Printmaking, drawing and mixed media methods allow me to acknowledge my experiences, dissect them, and reconstruct them into something concrete; if only for a moment.”
KLAIRE LOCKHEART – Atrium Artist
Flipping the binary doesn’t solve all the problems related to the objectification of women in art, but it does provide an entertaining start. I use humor to inspire viewers to consider that passive representations of women for the heteronormative male gaze are neither natural nor universal.
In response to the abundance of dehumanizing imagery I am expected to appreciate for art’s sake, I invented the brodalisque. These oil paintings feature masculine men who recreate the poses and passivity of historic odalisques. Western Orientalist painters typically portrayed odalisques within the harem, a place where unrelated men were not allowed to enter. To update the trope of creating a “realistic” painting in a prohibited space, I place my subjects within the hidden mysteries known as the man cave. I render these forbidden environments representationally to persuade viewers that these compositions are factual and not at all fictitious. If the excessive depictions of nude women in art are really truly about form and aesthetics, not power and ownership, then my paintings should be completely serious and not remotely silly. (The newest paintings in this series were created with a generous grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.)
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
**Sponsorship ensures the gallery is ALWAYS free and open to the public!
Rodney Bode is an American painter and sculptor whose life and art have remained outside the boundaries of culture. Born in 1941, and having lived most of his adult life in rural Idaho and South Dakota, Bode is an outsider artist whose vast collection of paintings and sculpture were only recently discovered after his institutionalization in the South Dakota state psychiatric hospital where he is being treated for schizoaffective disorder and vascular dementia.
“The work is very sophisticated, very competent,” says Lynn Verschoor, retired director of the South Dakota Art Museum. “These are really just exciting paintings; they’re good paintings. They’re nothing like you see in South Dakota. People here just don’t paint like this. And the sculptures are fabulous, well balanced. Of course,” she adds, “people are interested in the story, too.”
The label ‘Outsider Art’ created by Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, certainly describes Rod Bode’s prolific collections of paintings and sculpture. Created in the sparse rural areas in Idaho and the plains of western South Dakota, unseen by the public, Bode’s “self-taught” creations were certainly “produced beyond the boundaries of the mainstream art world.”
Rodney Bode – 1069
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
2022 Nebraska Art Teachers Association Juried Exhibition – Atrium
September 1 – October 8
In conjunction with the Nebraska Art Teachers Association Fall Conference held at the Norfolk Arts Center, members submitted their artwork to be selected for the juried exhibition. Elley Coffin is this year’s juror and will be selecting art pieces to show in the Atrium. Winners will be announced at the conclusion of the Fall Conference.
Kansas City painter Jason Needham finds inspiration in the overlooked corners of the Midwest. As the sun rose one recent morning, he was concentrating on a tangle of overgrown vines surrounding a stand of cottonwood trees at Kessler Park in the the city’s Historic Northeast neighborhood. (Photo/ Julie Denesha)
I’ve had a long-standing interest in impressionism, post-impressionism, and early American modernists like Marsden Hartley. All the other obvious influences apply: David Hockney, Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, among others. I’m drawing and painting scenes that are very familiar to me: forest scenes just off the beaten path, a pocket of woods with an interstate, parking lot or air-conditioned retreat just behind me. The trick is to see these mundane moments as majestic while allowing the mistakes of hand and misconceptions of eye be as present as the purposeful. I like the paintings to coalesce from a distance but upon close inspection fall apart into marks and the process of making, with the underlaying scaffolding of the image still visible. Each brushstroke becomes a single particle and the painting a wave of time-space. Whether I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or staring into the corner of a room, the investment in looking is the same. On one end, I’m working areas of my brain that lie deeper than the surface stream of thoughts, the self-narrating voice. On the other end, I’m pondering the fundamental structure of reality.
The Norfolk Arts Center (NAC) invites you to the Board of Directors’ Reception on Tuesday, July 192022
We will recognize the outgoing Board of Directors and welcome the new members. Please invite your family and friends to join us. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
The NAC will recognize these outgoing board members for their years of service:
Roger Nadrchal, 6 years
Chase Pflueger, 6 years
Austen Hagood, 3 years
Rachel Reiser, 3 years
Mark Zimmerer, 2 years
Traci Jeffrey, 2 years
Mary Pat Hoag, 1 year
We welcome six new members to the NAC Board of Directors: Brent Bossard, Tina Mazuch, Clare Orwig, Tammi Reeves, Beatriz Rodriguez, and Tiffany Tichota.
Thank you for your continued commitment and dedication to the Norfolk Arts Center to carry out our mission.
“This series is a collection and journey of what growth looks like, with each piece revealing a piece of tangled webs inside a mind looking for hope or that splinter of light at the end of a tunnel. Some people simply cannot speak and write what is deep inside, but you can give them some paint and they can make you feel it. My hope is that my art can connect with something inside of yourself, that you may be able to feel inspired to not feel alone and that if you’re in a place where you find yourself laying on the cold tile floor…that God speaks to you and says, “Talitha Cumi.” And places a paintbrush in your hands.”
“The Crucifixion of Illusion”
“Untitled”
“Sprigs”
Sophia Ruppert – Atrium Artist
“In my practice, “material” refers to any object that is human-made and does not naturally occur in nature. Physical things inform every part of our being. they connect us to other times and root us in community. Fabric swaddles us through life, tools aid our labor, dishes hold our food. By nature of necessity, materials chronicle our history as complex individuals and, when dissociated from use, catalogue our existence as artifacts. As I work, I consider our human nature and ask further questions: making up answers when I find none or am unsatisfied with a resolution.”
Second Place – Butch Rohrschneider – Goodbye Tomato
Honorable Mention – Emma Bermel – Misty Morning
Best in Show – Zoe Nielsen – Searching
First Place – Nita Erickson – Oak Seed Tea
Second Place – Butch Rohrschneider – Goodbye Tomato
Honorable Mention – Emma Bermel – Misty Morning
This year’s juror is Beatriz Rodriguez who teaches printmaking and drawing at Wayne State College. Before coming to WSC, Rodriguez worked closely with renowned artist, Mira Lehr and taught at the University of Miami as well as in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Florida. Her work has been exhibited in places such as the Yellowstone Art Museum, Remarque Print Workshop in New Mexico, FAR Gallery in Florida and H Gallery in California. Her work has been published in Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art as well as in Voyage Magazine Miami.
About this year’s work Beatriz said “Amongst this year’s submissions, there were a lot of works that showed a great deal of talent and artistic vision, and I would like to thank everyone who took the chance and sent in their work for consideration. When jurying, I look not only to the works that display a great level of skill, but also artistic maturity, concept and ambition. Amongst the works submitted, I would like to bring special attention to the following pieces. To Butch Rohrschneider’s Goodbye Tomato, for its dynamic use of composition, bold colors and painterly aesthetic, most unexpected in a photograph. To Emma Bermel’s Misty Morning, a perfect capture of what renown photographer Henry Cartier Bresson’s refers to as The Decisive Moment. To Nita Erickson’s unexpectedly harmonious mixture of mediums in Oak Seed Tea. The translucent quality of glass, transitioning to bronze, creating a juxtaposition between the fragile and the resilient. And finally, to Zoe Nielsen’s Searching, which demonstrated a great understanding of the elements of design, as well as technical skill and conceptual depth.”
The Juried Show and Wayne State College Faculty Exhibition will be on display until May 25, 2022
Do you want to see adorable artwork made by your very own pup? If this interests you and your pup, you won’t want to miss the “PawCasso” Dog Art class. This class will be held at Happy Tails... Read More
Cost: Individual $25 / Duo $40 Ages: 13+ Learn the basic fundamentals of the art of stand-up comedy with professional comedian Pat Janssen. Pat is a Nebraska native who has appeared in numerous commercials and TV shows. He... Read More
First Fridays are getting a fresh new look and name as we move to expand our open mic, music, poetry and art nights at the Arts Center. Join us for the first edition of Fresh Friday’s on June... Read More
Artist Reagan D. Pufall will be exhibiting 3d printed faces in the main gallery during the summer of 2024. Saturday, June 10th he will scan faces of Norfolk community members to add to his show. participants will receive... Read More
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Posted: April 6, 2023 by webmaster
Top Juried Show Artists Announced
On Saturday, April 1st, the 16th Annual Juried Show Opening Reception was held from 12 – 2 pm. Artists and enthusiasts alike enjoyed a range of art styles and mediums chosen by our juror Eddie Dominguez and art pieces submitted by UNL Faculty for the Faculty show. A statement about the winning art pieces by Eddie was read by NAC staff and certificates were handed out for Best in Show, 1st and 2nd place. Mike Trotter won Best in Show with his piece Fisherman’s Dilemma. Mary Mancuso received 1st place with Ancestral Voices. 2nd place went to Zoe Nielsen with Scale Studies and Honorable Mention was awarded to Butch Rohrschneider for Tornado Impression Number 1. Read The official statement and all of the artist statements
Posted: March 31, 2023 by webmaster
16th Annual Juried Show
March 30 – May 24, 2023
We encourage artists of all expertise to apply to the 16th Annual Juried Show in 2023! Approximately 20-30 fine art works encompassing all mediums, styles, and genres will be exhibited in the NAC gallery.
WIN
$250 Best of show | $150 1st Place | $100 2nd Place
Featuring local and regional artists.
Zoe Nielsen
Jeanette Johnson
Francine Fox
Butch Rohrschneider
Tom Schultz
Diana Jo Tweedy
Victoria Harper
Greg Brown
Rodney Beyke
Wendy Ketelsen
Janna Harsch
Katy Edmisten
Rachel Vogel
Katie Wilson
Karen Voborny
Frank Taylor
Mike Trotter
Denise Kraft
Barb Gustafsson
Sue Morfeld
Jerene Kruse
Bonnie Mercer
Erin Spencer
Mary Mancuso
Steve Elliot
Danika Rowe
Leroy Von Glan
Kathleen Lohr
Clark Koppelmann
Bobbie Leesley
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
**Sponsorship ensures the gallery is ALWAYS free and open to the public!
Last Updated: February 14, 2023 by webmaster
Hollywood Adventure At The Johnny Carson
Students Attend Performance
Hundreds of elementary students visited the Johnny Carson Theatre On Tuesday, January 17th to watch “Pete the Cat’s Big Hollywood Adventure.” Performer’s from TheaterWorks USA transformed into characters from pirate, dinosaur, dancing and robot movies as Pete and Callie the cat explore a Hollywood movie studio and avoid the security guard. Lessons are learned along the way about friendship and responsibility. Kids were encouraged to dance and sing from their seats which they were more than happy to do.
Thank You!
We would like to thank all of the volunteers that helped us keep everything organized and fun for the students and the performers.
Sponsored By
Norfolk Arts Center Ladies Guild
Posted: December 2, 2022 by webmaster
John McCaughey, Lisa Wicka and Klaire Lockheart Winter Exhibitions
JOHN McCAUGHEY & LISA WICKA – Gallery Artists
December 1, 2022 – February 22, 2023
John McCaughey – “In my work, I draw inspiration from the distressed buildings and defaced walls of the inner city. I am attracted to these structures for their visual and textural properties, the cracks, chipping paint, poorly removed graffiti, overgrowth, and flashy advertisements. I love how cities age, how they evolve… embracing their past while also looking to their future. It is a parallel to how I develop work in the studio. I enjoy recreating the ephemeral qualities of these spaces through acts of painting, sanding, screen-printing, collage’ and decollage’. These processes combine to produce a mass of colorful and texturally diverse materials that I can quickly layer into my compositions. I juxtapose the results against more modern, digitally produced information as well as feed the in-progress work into photoshop to tinker with saturation, pixilation, and other digital effects. The entire process is a formal exploration of color, texture, space, and time. These works are abstracted portraits of the world I inhabit and the nostalgic value I place upon it.”
Lisa Wicka –
“We live in the spaces…
between past and present,
between empty and occupied,
between mind and body,
between physical and virtual,
between tangible and lost,
between loneliness and love,
between exposed and hidden.
Through the breakdown and rebuilding of the in between, my work mimics the everyday navigation of these realms. Temporary moments of clarity come together and fall apart creating a self in motion, evolving through experience, place, failures and successes. My work is a surface where this dialogue becomes visible explorations of my surroundings and my identity, a surrogate self with limitless possibilities.
Often referencing architectural spaces, wallpapers, and raw materials, my work brings into question the solidity and accuracy of things we hold true. Printmaking, drawing and mixed media methods allow me to acknowledge my experiences, dissect them, and reconstruct them into something concrete; if only for a moment.”
KLAIRE LOCKHEART – Atrium Artist
Flipping the binary doesn’t solve all the problems related to the objectification of women in art, but it does provide an entertaining start. I use humor to inspire viewers to consider that passive representations of women for the heteronormative male gaze are neither natural nor universal.
In response to the abundance of dehumanizing imagery I am expected to appreciate for art’s sake, I invented the brodalisque. These oil paintings feature masculine men who recreate the poses and passivity of historic odalisques. Western Orientalist painters typically portrayed odalisques within the harem, a place where unrelated men were not allowed to enter. To update the trope of creating a “realistic” painting in a prohibited space, I place my subjects within the hidden mysteries known as the man cave. I render these forbidden environments representationally to persuade viewers that these compositions are factual and not at all fictitious. If the excessive depictions of nude women in art are really truly about form and aesthetics, not power and ownership, then my paintings should be completely serious and not remotely silly. (The newest paintings in this series were created with a generous grant from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.)
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
**Sponsorship ensures the gallery is ALWAYS free and open to the public!
Posted: October 20, 2022 by webmaster
Rodney Bode Exhibition
October 21 – November 23
Rodney Bode is an American painter and sculptor whose life and art have remained outside the boundaries of culture. Born in 1941, and having lived most of his adult life in rural Idaho and South Dakota, Bode is an outsider artist whose vast collection of paintings and sculpture were only recently discovered after his institutionalization in the South Dakota state psychiatric hospital where he is being treated for schizoaffective disorder and vascular dementia.
“The work is very sophisticated, very competent,” says Lynn Verschoor, retired director of the South Dakota Art Museum. “These are really just exciting paintings; they’re good paintings. They’re nothing like you see in South Dakota. People here just don’t paint like this. And the sculptures are fabulous, well balanced. Of course,” she adds, “people are interested in the story, too.”
The label ‘Outsider Art’ created by Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, certainly describes Rod Bode’s prolific collections of paintings and sculpture. Created in the sparse rural areas in Idaho and the plains of western South Dakota, unseen by the public, Bode’s “self-taught” creations were certainly “produced beyond the boundaries of the mainstream art world.”
Thanks to our sponsors for believing in the arts and supporting our gallery which is always free and open to the public!
**Sponsorship ensures the gallery is ALWAYS free and open to the public! View Sponsorship Brochure 2022 – 2023
Posted: September 9, 2022 by webmaster
Nebraska Art Teachers Association (NATA) Juried Exhibition
2022 Nebraska Art Teachers Association Juried Exhibition – Atrium
September 1 – October 8
In conjunction with the Nebraska Art Teachers Association Fall Conference held at the Norfolk Arts Center, members submitted their artwork to be selected for the juried exhibition. Elley Coffin is this year’s juror and will be selecting art pieces to show in the Atrium. Winners will be announced at the conclusion of the Fall Conference.
Posted: September 7, 2022 by webmaster
Jason Needham Gallery Exhibition
Jason Needham – Gallery Artist
Understory – Landscape Paintings
September 1 – November 23
I’ve had a long-standing interest in impressionism, post-impressionism, and early American modernists like Marsden Hartley. All the other obvious influences apply: David Hockney, Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, among others. I’m drawing and painting scenes that are very familiar to me: forest scenes just off the beaten path, a pocket of woods with an interstate, parking lot or air-conditioned retreat just behind me. The trick is to see these mundane moments as majestic while allowing the mistakes of hand and misconceptions of eye be as present as the purposeful. I like the paintings to coalesce from a distance but upon close inspection fall apart into marks and the process of making, with the underlaying scaffolding of the image still visible. Each brushstroke becomes a single particle and the painting a wave of time-space. Whether I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon or staring into the corner of a room, the investment in looking is the same. On one end, I’m working areas of my brain that lie deeper than the surface stream of thoughts, the self-narrating voice. On the other end, I’m pondering the fundamental structure of reality.
Posted: July 14, 2022 by webmaster
Norfolk Arts Center Board of Directors Reception
The Norfolk Arts Center (NAC) invites you to the Board of Directors’ Reception on
Tuesday, July 19 2022
We will recognize the outgoing Board of Directors and welcome the new members. Please invite your family and friends to join us. Wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served.
The NAC will recognize these outgoing board members for their years of service:
We welcome six new members to the NAC Board of Directors: Brent Bossard, Tina Mazuch, Clare Orwig, Tammi Reeves, Beatriz Rodriguez, and Tiffany Tichota.
Thank you for your continued commitment and dedication to the Norfolk Arts Center to carry out our mission.
“Bringing People and the Arts Together”
Posted: June 4, 2022 by webmaster
Summer 2022 Exhibitions
June 2 – August 24, 2022
Tammi Reeves – Gallery Artist
“This series is a collection and journey of what growth looks like, with each piece revealing a piece of tangled webs inside a mind looking for hope or that splinter of light at the end of a tunnel. Some people simply cannot speak and write what is deep inside, but you can give them some paint and they can make you feel it. My hope is that my art can connect with something inside of yourself, that you may be able to feel inspired to not feel alone and that if you’re in a place where you find yourself laying on the cold tile floor…that God speaks to you and says, “Talitha Cumi.” And places a paintbrush in your hands.”
Sophia Ruppert – Atrium Artist
“In my practice, “material” refers to any object that is human-made and does not naturally occur in nature. Physical things inform every part of our being. they connect us to other times and root us in community. Fabric swaddles us through life, tools aid our labor, dishes hold our food. By nature of necessity, materials chronicle our history as complex individuals and, when dissociated from use, catalogue our existence as artifacts. As I work, I consider our human nature and ask further questions: making up answers when I find none or am unsatisfied with a resolution.”
Posted: May 2, 2022 by webmaster
15th Annual Juried Show Winners Announced
This year’s juror is Beatriz Rodriguez who teaches printmaking and drawing at Wayne State College. Before coming to WSC, Rodriguez worked closely with renowned artist, Mira Lehr and taught at the University of Miami as well as in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Florida. Her work has been exhibited in places such as the Yellowstone Art Museum, Remarque Print Workshop in New Mexico, FAR Gallery in Florida and H Gallery in California. Her work has been published in Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art as well as in Voyage Magazine Miami.
About this year’s work Beatriz said “Amongst this year’s submissions, there were a lot of works that showed a great deal of talent and artistic vision, and I would like to thank everyone who took the chance and sent in their work for consideration. When jurying, I look not only to the works that display a great level of skill, but also artistic maturity, concept and ambition. Amongst the works submitted, I would like to bring special attention to the following pieces. To Butch Rohrschneider’s Goodbye Tomato, for its dynamic use of composition, bold colors and painterly aesthetic, most unexpected in a photograph. To Emma Bermel’s Misty Morning, a perfect capture of what renown photographer Henry Cartier Bresson’s refers to as The Decisive Moment. To Nita Erickson’s unexpectedly harmonious mixture of mediums in Oak Seed Tea. The translucent quality of glass, transitioning to bronze, creating a juxtaposition between the fragile and the resilient. And finally, to Zoe Nielsen’s Searching, which demonstrated a great understanding of the elements of design, as well as technical skill and conceptual depth.”
The Juried Show and Wayne State College Faculty Exhibition will be on display until May 25, 2022
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