Healing Arts Artists

Tidepools

Artist: Trisha Coates

Medium: Cone 6 Porcelain and Glass on Panel

Year: 2023

My Inspiration for this piece: My work engages the idea that our relationship to the past and our own personal histories is more fluid and impermanent than we are led to believe. I celebrate memory as a creative act where fragments of the past and present commingle in a fragile, surprising way. Clay is a shape-shifting material, rife with dialectical properties. In my process, I drip, coat, cast, render, shatter and reconstruct porcelain. In this making and unmaking, objects and images begin to emerge and dissolve within each other to create hidden trails of the common and unlikely, the real and imagined. While culling through the accumulated debris in my work, I'm seeking to make tangible the act of recalling an experience.

I am originally from New Hampshire, and have spent hours by the ocean, searching the shoreline for the perfect rock or ocean debris to bring back to my studio. Tidepools was inspired by the rich biodiversity and life found within that specific ecosystem. The creatures who exist within tidepools are uniquely adaptive in order to thrive in dynamic, changing environments. I also grew up near one of the major horse shoe breeding grounds, where each May hundreds of these creatures would make their way to shore to mate. These creatures are currently playing a role in cancer research, and wanted to celebrate them within this work, while also paying homage to one of my favorite places to reground myself during moments of turmoil and anxiety - Adams Point in Durham, New Hampshire.

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I was extremely honored to be selected to exhibit work in the April Sampson Cancer Center. This piece came at a time when our family was struggling with the loss of our beloved matriarch to a two year battle with cancer. Not only do I hope my work provides solace, inspiration or just a quiet moment of looking, creating Tidepools was a timely and meaningful place to put my energy and my grief during this period of loss. This piece is for you, Leigh, with all my love.

My career path: Trisha Coates grew up in New Hampshire, riding horses, walking wooded trails, and collecting shells along the Atlantic coastline. The constant search for the perfect rock, undiscovered bones in the woods, or elusive blue sea glass informs the work she makes today. She received her BFA in Art with an emphasis in ceramics from the University of New Hampshire. She relocated to Wichita, KS in 2012 to study at Wichita State University where she received her MFA in Ceramics. She is currently the Art Department Chair and Instructor of Ceramics at Butler Community College. She has exhibited work throughout the country including the Holter Museum of Art, The San Angelo Museum of Art, and the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. She has held residencies at Watershed Center for the Arts, Truro Center for the Arts, and The Hambidge Center. She currently lives in Wichita with her husband, son, and two adorable rescue dogs

Visit Trisha's Website

Poetics of Recognition #7

Artist: Francisco Souto

Medium: Graphite and acrylic on paper

Year: 2023-2024

My Inspiration for this piece: This drawing embodies a profound sensorial awareness, with its central motive being visual reconciliation as a response to the influence of living in the Great Plains. This piece was slowly crafted with meticulous care as direct visual interpretation to the ever-present feeling of this vast geography

It stands as tangible evidence of my personal journey, capturing the essence of my experiences through immersive visual exploration in pursuit of the everyday sublime.

Over the years, the pristine emptiness of the sky and the vastness of the prairie became irresistible haunting images longing to become visual testimony of a life well lived.

My career path: Francisco Souto is a Venezuelan-born American artist known for his highly detailed drawings and prints. He received his BFA from the Herron School of Art and his MFA from The Ohio State University. His current drawings are visual testimonies of the social and political reality that is eroding his native land. The fundamental preoccupation of these drawings is the lack of empathy that pervades public life leading to conditions of increased brutality. They offer a collective experience of struggle and perseverance. As the artist has written, “Art should be considered a way of thinking through an image, a testimony of a life lived”. Souto currently lives and works in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work has been exhibited and collected widely around the world and his accolades include more than 45 national and international awards and honors. As one art critic recently wrote about his recent drawings, “I have never seen anything quite like them in three decades of looking at and writing about art and consider them to be among the greatest artistic achievements to ever come out of Nebraska”.

He was recently selected for the exhibition “State of the Art 2020: Discovering American Art Now” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

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Earthline & Invocation

Artist: Steve Joy

Medium: Mixed media on 9 wood panels

Year: 2023/2024

My Inspiration for Earthline: This multi panel painting is inspired by the spirituality and history of medieval icon painting, intending to give a sense of meditative reflection and contemplation beyond the imagery of icons, to reach a wider audience . The painting also reflects the history of American abstraction including the work of Barnet Newman, Pollock and Rothko.

My Inspiration for Invocation: My inspiration for this came through a discussion with Tom Prinz (Omaha artist),about the transcendental and spiritual dimensions of the Giottos in Padua, and the way in which those paintings and those of Giotto in general, can take the mind to a place of great composure and calmness. Together with Mike Nesbit, we thought of a room at the cancer center which somehow alluded to the Giotto frescoes.

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I have made many installations intended for meditative contemplation, including paintings for churches in the Omaha area ,among others.

I believe that a space reserved for healing process through meditative contemplation ,without the barriers of representation, to be of great help in restoring peace of mind, much in the way that appropriate music does.

It has been a great honor to be asked to be a part of the April Sampson Cancer Center and its unique approach to treatment and healing in one place. Artwork which is reflective and contemplative needs special curating skills, for which I thank Mark Stavas and his staff for their insight and sensitivity and knowledge of this function in Art.

My career path: Please refer to my website stevejoystudio.com for a full and comprehensive biography and career path.

Visit Steve's Website

Wrinkled Mirror

Artist: Christopher Prinz

Medium: Mirror polished stainless steel

Year: 2024

My Inspiration for this piece: I made this piece specifically for the wall where it hangs. The cancer center was designed to invite in natural light and evoke a sense of spaciousness. This work was made to enhance these qualities by reflecting the light and vivid colors brought in through the window wall it faces, and to engage passersby with their own dazzling and distorted reflection.

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I’m honored to have my work in the April Sampson Cancer Center. Dr. Mark Stavas speaks about the importance of healing beyond the physical, the need to “clear the mind and lighten the heart,” and the realization of internal freedom – the sense that “no matter what happens in life we can navigate it.” I believe the arts are essential to this part of the healing process.

My career path: I am an Omaha based industrial designer seeking to expose extreme and rarely visible possibilities of materials and processes associated with manufacturing and construction.

Haveli 3

Artist: Michael James

Medium: Digital Quilt

Year: 2018

My Inspiration: Pattern has been the constant element in my work, going back nearly fifty years. I use pattern as a metaphor for the complex systems that work through our world: physical systems, emotional systems, psychological systems, etc. Pattern embodies the order implicit in these systems, but the play with pattern, altering and deconstructing it, allows for the likelihood that order will give way to disorder, to the unexpected and the unpredictable. This constant tension between order and disorder is a unifying thread that runs through my work.

I’m also interested in the unseen world that constitutes much of the emotional and psychological territory that we sentient beings occupy. Using abstract constructions, sometimes with representational images, or images that occupy that ambiguous realm between the recognizable and the indeterminate, I attempt to give visual form to these metaphysical domains. I’m comfortable in dream spaces and in the malleable and fluid territory of memory, and in my work I try to reach into these psychic spaces. I hope that the work evokes in the viewer some experience of these worlds held just below the outward surface of things.

About the artist: Michael James's practice is focused on fabric constructions. His textiles have been recognized and exhibited internationally. They are included in the collections of the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Racine Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Mint Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Shelburne Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Michael also has his BFA from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth and his MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Visit Michael's Website

Highland Park 01, 04 & 06

Artist: Mike Nesbit

Medium: Acrylic, oil stock, graphite, silkscreen ink and silver foil leave on archival paper

Year: 2022

My Inspiration: In relation to American geography, Nesbit takes the term “west” as a starting point, or rather, as a concept to theorize what it means and may represent. “West” could refer to Western Europe, the Western Hemisphere, European Expansionism, American westward expansion, or even as a midpoint - the Midwest. 

As part of his artistic identity, Nesbit lives within, and between, L.A. and Omaha, Nebraska. The former is a major metropolitan area with centuries of history, whereas the latter is a fairly small city with a suburban American attitude.

Geography and time converge, referring to Highland Park in L.A. at the very specific time of 12:00 p.m., giving context in relation to light, shadow, and human activity. Matrices on the artwork’s surface look like ruled lines, but are in fact satellite-views of Los Angeles and Omaha.

In stark contrast, Omaha’s positioning is almost at the very center of the continental United States, with masses upon masses of greenery and cornfields mixed within its city limits (with fewer roads, of course). The oppositions and similarities between these two cities are what undergirds these paintings.

About the artist: Mike Nesbit is an artist based in Los Angeles and Omaha. With a background in architecture, his multidisciplinary interests greatly inform his artwork, allowing Nesbit to explore areas between art and architecture with a focus on technique, process, context, and representation. Nesbit has participated in solo and group shows internationally and throughout the United States. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Before art and architecture Nesbit played four years of professional baseball with the Seattle Mariners. Nesbit is a founder of the Non-Profit/Artist-Run Space, Maple St. Construct, located in Omaha, Nebraska. Maple St. Construct is a gallery space and residency program that looks to bridge the gap between Los Angeles and The Midwest by providing artists in Los Angeles and The Midwest the resources to create work outside of their typical environments.

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Late Summer, Southeast Nebraska

Artist: Gib Neal

Gib Neal was indeed blessed to have pursued his passions in life - family, love of the land and art. He was born to make art.

In college he concentrated on painting and printmaking, lithography in particular.

He did large scale photo-real still lifes with ribbons, tape, flowers and scarves, using airbrush skills he honed working at a sign shop.

In later years he painted mostly the sky and the land.

He once said that even the ribbons and scarves paintings were, in his eyes, landscapes.

Let’s talk about the sky and the land and what it meant to Gib.

Out here in the Nebraska countryside the cloudscape and the landscape coincide, they act in perfect harmony, they create the big picture.

After dark on most evenings spent in the Sandhills Gib went outside to gaze at the night sky just before bed. He could see the stars out here, and the Milky Way.

When he photographed skies for use in paintings he often chose clouds that weren’t “picture perfect.”

Then he improved upon them.

Gib held a BFA in studio art, MA in art history, and MFA in printmaking and painting from the University of Nebraska Lincoln. He taught at Hastings College.

He very much enjoyed doing workshops, It was a way of sharing his love of art with others.

Horizon 1256, Autumn on the Blue Rive & Horizon 1288, Storm over Wheatfield, Roca Rd

Artist: Anne Burkholder

Medium: Oil Painting

Year: 2022

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I am honored and delighted to be included in the marvelous art at the April Sampson Cancer Center. Thank you again for including me in your amazing art collections.

My career path: I always wanted to be an artist when I grew up but life took me in other directions. Eventually, I came back to my senses and began making art again. I love making intuitive art that speaks to people. In my next series, I will be painting and studying endangered Nebraska wildflowers throughout the state.

About the artist: I started painting in oils in 1946, and have not stopped yet. My Nebraska landscape paintings are real places. All titles include the location. Wide open spaces, big skies, and distant horizons are my themes.

More can be viewed at my studio in the Burkholder Project, 719 P Street, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Visit Anne's Website

Platte River Valley

Artist: Tom Prinz

Medium: Mixed Media: acrylic, ink, colored pencil collage on birch substrate

Year: 2023

My Inspiration for this piece: Nebraska landscape.

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I have always been interested in the healing arts and the connection to the visual realm. As a cancer survivor it's such a wonderful opportunity to be part of an incredible project. My hope with the work is to give patients an opportunity to think about the process of healing and understanding our place in the world at this moment in time.

My career path: I have always been interested in the connection between art and architecture. As an Architect/Artist I have pursued this connection for the last 20 years.

11 Piece Dealing with Cancer Series

Artist: Tom Quest

Year: 2017

The diagnosis, sorry I have a lot on my mind right now.

Open your heart, tend to trust the doctors.

I need to protect my body form this hidden killer.

When you get bad news, you need to wrap yourself in gold.

People say laughter is the best medicine.

So many people are praying for me, sometimes I feel like an angel.

You need to have a good friend to share your feelings, up or down.

"Fear" You do everything you can for your health, nutrition, exercise, healthy lifestyle, your body is like a brick house. Then the cancer returns, your foundation starts to slip away until you feel like balancing on a ball.

Hope.

At Peace.

Joy.

Visit Tom's Website

Eucalyptus Globulus, Jasminum Mesnyi & Ours Do Overcome

Artist: Lance L Smith

Medium: Mixed Media

Year: 2022, 2022 & 2021-2021

My Inspiration: Art and anxiety and mental health, they go hand in hand. Whether your art is your cooking or your parenting or your gardening … you have a right to allow those things to be a container for things that other folks can’t hold. At a young age, I realized that art was the avenue to help channel the feelings that didn’t have anywhere else to go.

About the artist: Lance L. Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator, and teacher based in Las Vegas, NV. My work often explores themes of loss, distortion, and liberatory practices.

Visit Lance's Website

Celebration of Joy

Artist: Dr. Robert Hillestad

Medium: Textile Art

Year: 2024

About the artist: Dr. Robert Hillestad, an internationally renowned fiber artist and Professor Emeritus of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design.

Kintsugi In Progress: A Journey of Healing

Artist: Lori J. Thomas

Medium: Mixed Media: acrylic, ink, colored pencil collage on birch substrate

Year: 2024

My Inspiration for this piece: As I began thinking about what I might like to say in the piece, I kept imagining a blue font on white paper. Many months later, those visual images floating around in my mind had turned into the blue on white doodles throughout my collages. It reminded me of broken china and the Japanese art of "kintsugi", where broken ceramic is painstakingly repaired with real gold and epoxy, so the resulting piece is stronger, more beautiful with gold veins running through it and even more valuable as a one-of-a-kind work of art. I suspect when one is shattered into pieces by a cancer diagnosis, it's not always easy to see the happy ending, and maybe downright impossible to see our own beauty and strength as we are acquiring it through hardship. "Kintsugi in progress" is a reminder that as we heal, as we venture into the unknown, we are putting our pieces back together again. But, this time, even stronger and more beautiful

My thoughts on being part of April Sampson Cancer Center and how the healing arts are integral to cancer care: I am overjoyed to know that something I've done in my life might bring a moment of joy or a smile to someone's face during a tough time. It is an incredible honor and humbling to have this opportunity to be a part of something much bigger than ourselves and to be a part of this wonderful healing community.

My career path: I always wanted to be an artist when I grew up but life took me in other directions. Eventually, I came back to my senses and began making art again. I love making intuitive art that speaks to people. In my next series, I will be painting and studying endangered Nebraska wildflowers throughout the state.

Visit Lori's Website

Remember When?? II & Fortress

Artist: Erika Navarrete

Medium: Oil Painting

Year: 2019 & 2020

About the artist: Erika Navarrete was born and raised in the town of Visalia in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She received her BFA in Painting and Art History from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2003 and her MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2008. Navarrete is currently an instructor at the University of Evansville and the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. She maintains an active studio practice investigating relationships between people and the structure of the home through the mediums of painting, drawing and printmaking and exhibits her work locally and nationally.

Visit Erika's Website