Bemis Center AIR Program
Artists Selected to Participate in Winter/Spring 2018 Residency Program
Omaha, Neb.– Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts announces artists selected for its international Artist-in-Residence Program taking place January 10–April 6, 2018. The diverse range of disciplines includes painting, drawing, poetry, digital animation, sculpture, performance, printmaking, installation, graphic design, music, photography and filmmaking. Represented areas of focus include identity; how materialism forms culture; generational stories; social systems and institutions; psychological and physical iconography; black culture in America; recreational activities and their relationship to the landscape; and speculative fiction.
Participating artists include:
Participating artists include:
Trevor Amery (San Diego, CA)
Trevor Amery is a multidisciplinary artist interested in what happens at the intersection of objects, socializing, collecting and personal narratives. During his residency at Bemis, he plans to explore combining different strategies for making, such as woodworking, metalworking, photography and clay to create a new series of interactive sculptures and installations that respond to the local environment and his experiences in it.
Nyame Brown (Oakland, CA)
Nyame Brown is a multidisciplinary artist in drawing, printmaking and painting. He desires to use art historical precedent as a fluid source of reference rather than a fixed and linear projection, creating new allegories for his characters and opening an unexplored space for the perception of black people by whites and blacks. While at Bemis, he will create paintings and drawings for his series “Black Mythologies”.
Pamela Council (Bronx, NY)
Pamela Council creates sculptures, prints and performances that transform materials. She is interested in how we soothe, protect, fashion and enhance ourselves. She manufactures her own materials such as velvet and clay and combines them with mass-produced products related to self-soothing and bodily comfort. At Bemis, Council will develop large-scale rubber-based sculptures that explore the theme “Protecting Our Play: Sheltering Black Girlhood”.
John Yoyogi Fortes (Sacramento, CA)
John Yoyogi Fortes is a painter whose artwork is rooted in self-examination, attempting to bridge his internal and external experiences shaped through a bicultural lens. He views culture as an organic form that changes through the acquisition of new ideas and new imagery, much like immigrants accumulating material possessions. During the Bemis residency, he plans to explore, from varied vantage points, the relationship of language and labels to race and identity, weaving his own experience into the conversation within that context.
Emily Lackey (Northampton, MA)
Emily Lackey is a literary artist working in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She is interested in how we come to believe stories, how they give birth to who we believe ourselves to be, and how slippery they sometimes are, given to misunderstanding, flights of passion, and frequent changes. At Bemis, she will continue a collection of linked stories that revolve around one moment of trauma in the lives of six women–generations of grandmothers, mothers, daughters and sisters. It’s an examination of memory and family and how one moment can spin infinitely outward.
Vitus Shell (Monroe, LA)
Vitus Shell is a mixed-media collage painter. His large-scale paintings are geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling and remixing identity, civil rights and contemporary black culture. At Bemis, he plans to continue experimenting with portraiture, acrylic paint, oversized photocopies of early 20th-century vintage advertisements and the incorporation of a foam-cut printing technique to combine the hip-hop lifestyle with a southern vernacular.
Daniel Spangler (Oakland, California)
Daniel Spangler is a multimedia artist, writer, musician and filmmaker. He explores the chaotic relationship between science, language and personal narrative using digital animation, music, visual effects and graphic design. During his residency at Bemis, he plans to explore science fiction and collaborative storytelling, using the format and conventions of an adventure game to mix together commissioned stories from a diverse selection of writers. The result will be a narrative collage of shifting environments, populated by documents, letters and objects.
Jacob Stanley (St. Louis, MO)
Jacob Stanley is a sculpture and installation artist who utilizes a design-based approach to deconstruct and re-contextualize materials while never overlooking their societal or historical significance. His work lives in dynamic stasis—a state between collapse and construction, tension and balance, refinement and rawness allowing viewers to scrutinize the piece and analyze its latent potential. Stanley's time at Bemis Center will be spent focusing on the connections between disparate materials inherent in his working methodology—both physical and theoretical.
These artists were selected from an international pool of 344 applicants. All applications were reviewed and finalists were selected by a twelve-person panel including Jim Bockelman, Artist and Professor, Concordia University, Seward, NE; Erin Dziedzic, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO;Adam Farcus, Artist, William R. Hollingsworth Fellow, Mississippi Museum of Art and Director, Lease Agreement, Jackson, MS; Alison Ferris, Senior Curator, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Benjamin Gardner, Artist and Associate Professor of Art & Design/Department Chair, Drake University, Des Moines, IA; David Gracie, Artist and Professor, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE; Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, Artist and Curator, Kooshk Residency, Tehran, Iran; Ann Meisinger, Assistant Curator of Public Programs, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Fabiola Menchelli, Artist and former Bemis Artist-in-Residence, Mexico City, Mexico; Marìa Elena Ortiz, Assistant Curator, Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; George Scheer, Executive Director, Elsewhere, Greensboro, NC; and Quintin Rivera Toro, Director, Area Lugar De Proyectos, Caguas, Puerto Rico. Finalists were then reviewed and chosen by a three-person panel including Deana Haggag, President & CEO, United States Artists, Chicago, IL; Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), Miami, FL; and J. Morgan Puett, Artist and Co-Director, Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA.
Trevor Amery is a multidisciplinary artist interested in what happens at the intersection of objects, socializing, collecting and personal narratives. During his residency at Bemis, he plans to explore combining different strategies for making, such as woodworking, metalworking, photography and clay to create a new series of interactive sculptures and installations that respond to the local environment and his experiences in it.
Nyame Brown (Oakland, CA)
Nyame Brown is a multidisciplinary artist in drawing, printmaking and painting. He desires to use art historical precedent as a fluid source of reference rather than a fixed and linear projection, creating new allegories for his characters and opening an unexplored space for the perception of black people by whites and blacks. While at Bemis, he will create paintings and drawings for his series “Black Mythologies”.
Pamela Council (Bronx, NY)
Pamela Council creates sculptures, prints and performances that transform materials. She is interested in how we soothe, protect, fashion and enhance ourselves. She manufactures her own materials such as velvet and clay and combines them with mass-produced products related to self-soothing and bodily comfort. At Bemis, Council will develop large-scale rubber-based sculptures that explore the theme “Protecting Our Play: Sheltering Black Girlhood”.
John Yoyogi Fortes (Sacramento, CA)
John Yoyogi Fortes is a painter whose artwork is rooted in self-examination, attempting to bridge his internal and external experiences shaped through a bicultural lens. He views culture as an organic form that changes through the acquisition of new ideas and new imagery, much like immigrants accumulating material possessions. During the Bemis residency, he plans to explore, from varied vantage points, the relationship of language and labels to race and identity, weaving his own experience into the conversation within that context.
Emily Lackey (Northampton, MA)
Emily Lackey is a literary artist working in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. She is interested in how we come to believe stories, how they give birth to who we believe ourselves to be, and how slippery they sometimes are, given to misunderstanding, flights of passion, and frequent changes. At Bemis, she will continue a collection of linked stories that revolve around one moment of trauma in the lives of six women–generations of grandmothers, mothers, daughters and sisters. It’s an examination of memory and family and how one moment can spin infinitely outward.
Vitus Shell (Monroe, LA)
Vitus Shell is a mixed-media collage painter. His large-scale paintings are geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images deconstructing, sampling and remixing identity, civil rights and contemporary black culture. At Bemis, he plans to continue experimenting with portraiture, acrylic paint, oversized photocopies of early 20th-century vintage advertisements and the incorporation of a foam-cut printing technique to combine the hip-hop lifestyle with a southern vernacular.
Daniel Spangler (Oakland, California)
Daniel Spangler is a multimedia artist, writer, musician and filmmaker. He explores the chaotic relationship between science, language and personal narrative using digital animation, music, visual effects and graphic design. During his residency at Bemis, he plans to explore science fiction and collaborative storytelling, using the format and conventions of an adventure game to mix together commissioned stories from a diverse selection of writers. The result will be a narrative collage of shifting environments, populated by documents, letters and objects.
Jacob Stanley (St. Louis, MO)
Jacob Stanley is a sculpture and installation artist who utilizes a design-based approach to deconstruct and re-contextualize materials while never overlooking their societal or historical significance. His work lives in dynamic stasis—a state between collapse and construction, tension and balance, refinement and rawness allowing viewers to scrutinize the piece and analyze its latent potential. Stanley's time at Bemis Center will be spent focusing on the connections between disparate materials inherent in his working methodology—both physical and theoretical.
These artists were selected from an international pool of 344 applicants. All applications were reviewed and finalists were selected by a twelve-person panel including Jim Bockelman, Artist and Professor, Concordia University, Seward, NE; Erin Dziedzic, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO;Adam Farcus, Artist, William R. Hollingsworth Fellow, Mississippi Museum of Art and Director, Lease Agreement, Jackson, MS; Alison Ferris, Senior Curator, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Benjamin Gardner, Artist and Associate Professor of Art & Design/Department Chair, Drake University, Des Moines, IA; David Gracie, Artist and Professor, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE; Tooraj Khamenehzadeh, Artist and Curator, Kooshk Residency, Tehran, Iran; Ann Meisinger, Assistant Curator of Public Programs, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Fabiola Menchelli, Artist and former Bemis Artist-in-Residence, Mexico City, Mexico; Marìa Elena Ortiz, Assistant Curator, Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; George Scheer, Executive Director, Elsewhere, Greensboro, NC; and Quintin Rivera Toro, Director, Area Lugar De Proyectos, Caguas, Puerto Rico. Finalists were then reviewed and chosen by a three-person panel including Deana Haggag, President & CEO, United States Artists, Chicago, IL; Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami), Miami, FL; and J. Morgan Puett, Artist and Co-Director, Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA.
About the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Founded in 1981, by artists for artists, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts supports today’s artists through an international artist-in-residence program, temporary exhibitions and commissions, and innovative public programs. Located in the historic Old Market district, the Bemis Center serves a critical role in the presentation and understanding of contemporary art, bridging the community of Omaha to a global discourse surrounding cultural production today.
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