Artist Bios

Barbara Rogers

Barbara Rogers grew up in a small town in Northern Ohio surrounded by the lush greens of the verdant natural world. Early, formative childhood influences included her mother, an accomplished seamstress and clothing designer. Her young aunts who included her in their love of the worlds of glamor and fashion. Her father who was an inventor and a “fix it all” kind of man and her great uncle who crafted furniture that he then decorated with stencils. Influenced by industrious and creative family members, she filled a proverbial tool box with techniques and materials. But more importantly, she learned the value of a dedicated creative practice supported by a committed work ethic. She graduated with a B.S.E degree in Art Education from Ohio University. In California, she studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute with Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Frank Lobdell. She studied life drawing with Nathan Oliver 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 Revolo. 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. For Rogers, painting is just another truth. Her work explores ideas of paradise, destruction, vulnerability and beauty — evoking the sublime. She paints to transcend daily life, and hopes her work reminds others to cherish the earth.

Christian Rothmann

Christian Rothmann was born in Kedzierzyn, Poland in 1954. He 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.

“My paintings have been and continue to be influenced by Willem de Kooning, Nathan Olivera and the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Lately I have been looking at Rembrandt and Monet, more in terms of surface technique and less in terms of subject matter. I have come to believe in a kind of alchemy whereby a thought can be transformed from being a mere idea into a complex image. The rendering transforms into something so sophisticated technically that it defies explanation and confounds its own mode of execution. This inexplicable result is what I am always working towards.” Dan Moylan passed away in Omaha, NE in 2017.

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.” Edith Vonnegut was born in 1949 in Schenectady, New York. She studied art at The Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and the School of Visual Arts at the University of Iowa. Edith is the daughter of Kurt Vonnegut, a celebrated American author known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels that blended science fiction, humor and social commentary. “He’s contributed so many helpful writings
that never get old and continue to bring comfort to humans, making them feel less alone and making them laugh . . . and cry . . . as we should in these
times. I can’t think of any other father who would have been better.”

Gary Bowling

Gary Bowling is a painter who works primarily with oils. Most of his work explores landscape. He lives with his wife, Linda, in Lamar, Missouri, a small town in western Missouri near the Kansas border. After highschool, Gary intended to pursue a degree in architectural engineering, but soon found studies in the visual arts to be more interesting. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Arkansas in 1974, he joined the University painting and drawing faculty for a short time before accepting a teaching position at Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa where he was Chairman of the Art Department for eight years. Bowling’s MFA is in painting and drawing; however, his graduate research investigated conceptual art and mechanisms that connect art with a viewer’s experience. His artistic interests evolved while he was teaching at Westmar College toward paintings that explored of light and atmosphere and ideas associated with the landscape. In 1981, Gary was invited to work as a guest artist at Yaddo, a retreat for artists and writers in Saratoga Springs, New York. That experience was a life altering and helped clarify his interests in landscape painting. He quit teaching in 1983 to focus his attention on painting 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

Mary Beth Schmidt Fogarty was born on February 19, 1943 to German immigrants Dorthea and Emil Schmidt. She grew up on her family farm in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, where her mother ran a cake shop, and her father worked as a farmer. She lived on the farm until attending university for art practice and education in 1962 at Stephen’s College, Missouri. She went on to get a bachelors in art education at San Jose State University in California, and years later in 1984 completed an MFA in fine art and sculpture from the University of Nebraska. She rose as a working artist in a space and time traditionally coined “a boys club.” She was an inspiration to other women trying to find their place as artists in the midwest. Her struggles with mental health–while often undetected outside of her work–created a strong dichotomy: there was the Mary Beth who laughed and played, and the Mary Beth whose dark figures and depressive episodes shone light onto a pain unseen. Mary Beth worked across a number of media, including painting, sculpture, paper making, printmaking, and collage. Her paintings were largely inspired by 20th century German expressionism: intentional use of color, line, and abstract figures that expressed elements of the artist’s personality and innermost thoughts. Much of her work had the spirit of being unfinished. The process of making work was as important to her as the finished product. At her show at the Museum of Art in Nebraska, curator Josephine Martens included a sketch of Mary Beth’s done in marker on a paper bag. It stood out unanimously as the most popular piece at her opening night. She created urgently, compulsively, and deliberately. At her studio, she kept the news on. Global current events would weave themselves onto the surface of her paintings. Her artwork was described as encapsulating two parts of her: her reaction to the physicality of life, and her reaction to the spirituality of life, which came together in a confused way. She used her various mediums as an agent to express life’s tangibles, and she used color, line, and form to express a spiritual state. Mary Beth was deeply rooted in symbolism. Mary Beth touched people. She sketched her servers. She captivated her students. She framed anything her children made. Curators who were otherwise unphased by the emotionality of their artists were struck by the voice within her work. It was not uncommon for curators and artists to sense a profound presence within her pieces, and an immediate intimacy upon meeting her. This intensity was as haunting as it was inspiring. Even those who preferred traditional landscapes of the midwest and realistic portraiture favored Mary Beth’s abstract expressionism. Mary Beth was hospitalized after a suicide attempt in 1992. Her release was followed by what has been described as “ten great years”. She had the biggest show of her career in 2001 at the Goethe Institute; she was the only living artist to exhibit that year for the New York City museum mile. In 2002, she was diagnosed with cancer. She slowly started to lose mobility in her arm, jeopardizing her ability to create. She took her own life on May 14th, 2002. She was survived by her sons Robert, Zack, and Ted Fogarty. She left behind nearly 1600 sketches and paintings tucked inside of books, basements and attics. There are likely hundreds of others owned by strangers, family, and friends.

Sachio Yamashita

Painter and muralist Sachio Yamashita (1933-2009) was born in Kagoshima, Japan. As a child during World War II, he developed an early interest in drawing and later trained as an artist in Tokyo. He worked as a cartoonist for local newspapers and magazines until 1968, when he traveled to the United States to teach spatial design at an art school outside of Chicago. In Chicago, he became active with local arts organizations and government agencies as a community muralist. Committed to altering the urban environment through large-scale public art, he executed nearly two dozen murals in various parts of the city through both public and private commissions and guerilla art tactics. Identifying as an “environmental artist,” his aim was to bring a new sense of spatiality to public spaces using bold shapes, vibrant colors, and eye-catching images. One project in particular involved painting Chicago’s iconic rooftop water towers different colors, while another consisted of a large swath of a city wall along an underpass. Yamashita’s most memorable murals, however, were a replica of the nineteenth century woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Ukiyo-e artist Hokusai along the entire length of a three-story corner building, and a large super-graphics mural on lower Wacker Drive. This mural, titled Balance of Power, was featured in the final chase scene of the 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Yamashita is credited with developing the Midwest supergraphics approach to muralism in the early 1970s. Receiving significant press coverage for his murals and community-based projects, Yamashita became in-demand as a Midwestern Muralist. Between 1968 and 1982 he completed more than 100 public murals in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois. Relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1980s, he painted regularly, creating a large body of work that built on his ideas in public art. Although he continued to create murals in California, his output of public art decreased significantly and he instead chose to focus on canvas painting and drawing. Delving into colorist experiments, he explored the visual sensation of muted hues in colorist paintings that seem to radiate light or focused on a single swath of color in paintings of various sizes that invoke his early muralist days. Yamashita’s work is housed in private and public collections throughout the West Coast and the Midwest including the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, Oakland Museum of California, and the Sacramento Convention Center. A recent renewed interest in his work led to a 2018 segment on Chicago’s PBS affiliate titled “What Became of the Artist Behind These 1970s Murals.” Yamashita had several solo exhibitions throughout his career at galleries such as the Takada Gallery in San Francisco, the Roberta English Gallery in San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kirkpatrick Center Museum in Oklahoma City, the gallery at Stanford University, and the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln.

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. From 2009 to 2014, Steve Joy worked between his studio in Omaha and his studio on the Rame Peninsula Cornwall in England. In 2017, he spent most of his time working in his windswept England studio overlooking the sea in an area near Plymouth referred to as ‘The Forgotten Corner’ where he began his ‘Elegies to a Mad King’ series. From 2020 on, he began working in a studio in Orient, Long Island, New York. He also spends his winters working in Berlin.

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.

John Thein

John Thein was born on September 6, 1942 in Milwaukee, WI. After earning his BFA from the Layton School of Art with studies at Marquette University, he studied in Paris, France, at the renowned Atelier 17. John earned his MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. He was then a professor of fine art at Creighton from 1975-2015. During that time, Thein has taught art in China three different times; the Dominican Republic; Leister, England; and twice for the U.S. government in Guatemala. As an artist, Thein has had 44 one-person exhibitions; participated in nine international, 22 national and 42 regional exhibitions; and illustrated six books. Over the years, John's work highlighted the story of Native Americans, especially the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee. His singular passion to chronicle this event led to the creation of his work, "Wounded Knee: The Painted Spirit." John's epic Wounded Knee series will have a permanent home and be in the founding collection of the soon-to-open ArtBank in McCook, NE. This monumental canvas project was a dedication of 22 years of John's life and talent that found a home on the Plains, as it should be. John participated in countless shows throughout his career, worldwide, including one-man shows at CFM Gallery in New York, China, Mexico, and England, to cite a few. Thein's artwork is held in the collections of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, Mo.; the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Neb.; the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha; Shaanxi Art Museum in Xi'an, China; and the Instituto Guatemalteco Americano, Guatemala City, Guatemala. John Thein passed away on May 8, 2023 in Omaha, NE.

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