THE ARTISTS
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Sharon Ahrens, a retired Foreign Service administrative assistant, has been posted to Venezuela, Costa Rica, Zambia, and Portugal; while living abroad, she studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon, Portugal. She was recently a participant in the Omaha Bench Marks project. For the Banned Books exhibit, she will be interpreting Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.
Shayla Alarie is a student of painting and art history at UNO. She illustrated her first book at the age of five, and since then has drawn and painted many beloved literary and historical characters, mythic heroes, and comic book titans. Recently in her work, she has placed these figures (Ophelia, Judas, Saint Cecilia) in contemporary clothing, much like the Renaissance artists placing their painted saints in contemporary garb. She currently uses ink fingerprints to create soft yet emotionally charged images of human figures. Instead of depending so much on previous narrations, her new cast of characters rely on their subtle grace and figural beauty to relay the message. She chose Roald Dahl’s The Witches as her banned book for the exhibit.
Wendy Jane Bantam, whose work is a whimsical mix of dream imagery, anthropomorphism, and a Saul Steinberg-like abstraction, has had her paintings exhibited in museums and galleries across the Midwest. She is currently pursuing an MFA in animation. Bantam will be interpreting American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, for the Banned Books exhibit. www.wendybantam.com
bLiNkY is an underground cartoonist and graffiti artist in LA, and shows his work widely around the world. He currently has work at the Cannibal Flower Gallery Store and the Art Annex show, both in LA, and a skateboard deck show in Australia. He has also contributed to the upcoming 100 Circus Punks Rule NYC exhibit of custom knock-down dolls. For the Banned Books exhibit, bLiNkY has interpreted Madonna’s Sex and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. deviantART
Chris Blinston owns the renowned Big Brain Productions with his business partner, Smitty. Skin Art magazine featured Blinston in their issue dedicated to the 20 most influential artists of 2004, and he has won more than 150 awards for his work as a tattooist. www.chrisblinston.com
Mike Browne grew up in Florida, his mother providing him with the encouragement and art supplies needed for him to harness his talents and to take the many art classes offered within the Miami Dade County School System. He has worked with graphite, oil, acrylics, pastels, and computer graphics. He has shown is work locally, and just recently has two displays at the Orlando International Airport. For the Banned Books exhibit, he has created two portraits inspired by Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved.
Eddith Buis has been a major force in developing distinguished public art projects throughout the city of Omaha, from the J.Doe Project to the Bench Marks citywide display of bus benches designed by area artists and writers. She is widely admired for her sculptures, prints, and her drawings that capture glimpses of domestic and urban life with the flair and sophistication of a New Yorker cartoon. Buis will be interpreting The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, for the Banned Books exhibit.
Caniglia is an artist and commercial illustrator, his work widely exhibited and published. For book illustrations, he has worked with such authors as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, Douglas Clegg, F. Paul Wilson and many other renowned fantasy and horror writers. In 2004, Caniglia won the International Horror Guild Award for best artist in dark fantasy and horror. Shocklines Press, also in 2004, released Caniglia’s first art book called As Dead as Leaves: The Art of Caniglia, which features his surreal paintings and visions from the last 10 years. For the Lit Fest, Caniglia will have work featured in an exhibit of narrative art and book illustration. www.caniglia-art.com
Josh Cotter’s brilliant and morbidly comical mini-comics, Skyscrapers of the Midwest, have recently been collected in a new edition by AdHouse Books. His work has appeared in several alternative weeklies, including The Reader and The Pitch (Kansas City). Cotter will have work in the Lit Fest’s exhibit of narrative art, and will also be interpreting Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, for the Banned Books exhibit.
Wanda Ewing, creating contemporary representations of African American women while incorporating classical and traditional methods of woodcut and printmaking, has shown her work in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. For the Banned Books exhibit, Ewing will be doing covers for The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.
Rodger Gerberding’s illustrations have appeared in periodicals such as The Horror Show, Penthouse Forum, and The Chicago Reader, among others. He has illustrated or designed 50 books by a diverse list of writers that includes Dean Koontz, Poppy Z. Brite, Fritz Leiber, and Brian Hodge. His artwork has been collected by Stephen King, Myron Heise, and the Minnesota Historical Society, and exhibited at the Minneapolis Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute in Chicago, Fluxion Gallery in Omaha, and many other galleries and museums. Gerberding is also a writer, having published two books: Some Council Bluffs Ghosts and From the Earth, a biography of wood engraver and painter Frank Utpatel. A collection of his artwork is forthcoming, as is his biography of Bette Evans, an Iowa writer, artist, and Navy careerist. For the Banned Books exhibit, Gerberding will be interpreting William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
Jason Hays’s illustrations have frequently appeared on the cover of The Reader and other alternative newsweeklies. For a special fiction issue of The Reader, he created a portrait of Proust on the beach. For the Banned Books exhibit, Hays will interpret Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
Peggy Jones is an artist, playwright and an educator, after having received her MFA in painting/drawing from UNL and BA in design from the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent exhibit was a solo retrospective at the Nicholas Street Gallery in the HotShops Art Center. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at UNO. She recently received an Individual Artist Fellowship Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council for her play The Journey, about Aaron Douglas, the first black graduate of the art program at UNL in 1922. She will be interpreting one of her favorite books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou.
Jeff Koterba, editorial cartoonist, has been with the Omaha World-Herald since 1989, provoking controversy and offering impeccably illustrated analysis of the world during a particularly complicated era. His work is distributed to over 400 newspapers with King Features Syndicate and has appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsweek, Newsweek Japan, and The Washington Post National Weekly Edition. His original illustrations are in the private collections of Oprah Winfrey and other famed collectors. www.omaha.com
L. Eugene Methe is a musician and artist, having recorded music with Simon Joyner and the Mountain Goats. He has toured extensively with various bands, including the experimental group Arnoux, and his music has been featured on nearly 60 recordings on independent labels. He has also contributed cover artwork for CDs and LPs for acts such as Naturaliste and Lux-O-Values. For the Banned Books exhibit, he will be interpreting Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence.
Amy Nelson is an artist living in Omaha. Her work deals with what it means to be "healthy" in today's society. She likes to "use" drugs and babies (in her work). She will be illustrating Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for the banned books exhibit, because it's about drugs...and...babies...and being "healthy."
Bonnie O’Connell received her MA in design from the University of Iowa and has worked for a number of years at UNO. She is the director of the Nebraska Book Arts Center. O’Connell has exhibited her work in many group exhibitions and solo shows, both locally and nationally. She has received an Outstanding Teaching Award and small press grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. O’Connell’s work, in her own words, combines the “tactile, textural qualities of hand papermaking with the mechanics of binding to create both supportive structure and metaphorical meaning.”
Kristin Pluhacek's pastel drawings have been exhibited extensively in Midwestern fine arts galleries and museums, and her work is represented in numerous public and private collections. She illustrated the book Send Me Tulips, recently published by Prisma Press, and her work can be viewed on line here. A graduate of Creighton University, she teaches drawing at Metropolitan Community College and Joslyn Art Museum. She has interpreted Slaughterhouse-Five and James and the Giant Peach for the banned books exhibit.
Kathy Puzey is the executive director of the KHN Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She received a master’s of fine arts from UNL in 2001. Puzey also studied art in Italy and served as a representative for a collaborative student exhibition in Dhaka, Bangladesh. For the Banned Books exhibit, she will be interpreting Doris Day: Her Own Story, by Doris Day. http://www.khncenterforthearts.org/
Jill Rizzo, whose paintings demonstrate both haunting and fanciful realms of brooding animals and love-struck children, has exhibited her work widely throughout Omaha, contributed to the J. Doe Project, and created original art for a CD by Grasshopper Takeover. For the Lit Fest’s Banned Books exhibit, she will be interpreting Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume, and The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger.
Tim Siragusa is a native Omahan who currently works as a waiter. He has written and performed numerous plays at the Blue Barn Theatre since 1994. His journalism and reviews have appeared in The Reader, Omaha Pulp, and medium. In the past year he has worked with Eddith Buis on the Bench Marks project, contributed a poem to a local slam anthology, Slam a lam a ding dong, and given public readings of Fahrenheit 451 for the Omaha Reads program. This Christmas Timothy will be performing The Santaland Diaries at the Blue Barn.
Carla Swartz is a documentary still photographer. She graduated from Hastings College (Hastings, Neb.) with a BA in Art History and Theater in 1993. She continued her photographic studies through 1999 at International Center for Photography in New York. She had her first solo photographic exhibition titled “The Sons of the Midwest” in the fall of 2002 at the darkRoom gallery, in Omaha, and has been in several group shows around the city. She is a recipient of the 2002 Getty Images Educational Grant. Her work has been featured nationally in PHOTOVISION Magazine.
Paula Wallace is a graduate of the University of Iowa and has taken additional training in the arts in Chicago and in Ireland. She is a member of several arts organizations and currently has studio space in the Hot Shops in Omaha. Many of the themes in Paula's work are drawn from literature, theatre, and opera, with an emphasis on the expressive nature of the human face. The image, "Tom Joad," created for Lit Fest is drawn from The Grapes of Wrath. The character, Tom Joad, is a marvelously complex figure whose courage, desires, and struggles would come to embody an experience often thought to be exclusively American, however, it is better understood to be a human experience not limited simply to the Depression.
Chris Ware was born in Omaha, and currently lives in Chicago. His graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan, has earned the writer/illustrator legions of fans, as well as literary awards and publication in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, and other magazines. Ware is contributing a signed copy of Jimmy Corrigan to the Lit Fest, and a print that will be part of the Lit Fest’s narrative art exhibit. check it (Please note that Ware will not actually be in attendance at the Lit Fest. His artwork will be on display, only. But we hope he'll pay us a visit for Lit Fest 2006!)
Justin Wolta is the creative director for the Downtown Omaha Lit Fest. He has worked as a designer for The Reader, Omaha Pulp, and other publications, and maintains a naughty website. He might be interpreting Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey, for the Banned Books exhibit. Spladau!