by George Parker

Created on: April 07, 2011

The Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska is a beacon of contemporary and modern art right in the middle of the prairies. The Bemis Center has consistently taken chances in showing edgier artwork, and the local audience has responded with enthusiasm. For this review, the focus will be on why the Bemis Center is able to attract a loyal following among local art patrons. The reasons for the popularity of the Bemis Center seem to revolve around consistently attracting  the works of famous artists, some of whom put on large scale works that expand the Bemis Center's reach into the community.

The Bemis Center works hard to find artists who will strike a chord with the surrounding Omaha community. A recent exhibition featured famousTacoma artist Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures. Chihuly is an abstract artist who weaves wonderfully chaotic shapes out of glass, colorful sculptures which turn this way and that. Although wonderful to experience in person, people at home can get a glimpse of their grandeur just by doing a quick image search on his name.

For the work “Message Matters”, Nebraska artist Jamie Burmeister produced a site-specific and interactive light installation which featured computer-controlled lights which bled out across the street in synchronized pulses along the window façade of the Bemis Center. The work was like a lonely missive from a different milieu as its lights danced and communicated in what the artist intended as a kind of Morse code, a now largely forgotten communication medium. Although primitive by our current standards of technology, it still invited those passing by on the street to respond in kind with their cellular phones via sms text messaging. The work seems to make us question the larger cultural and technological contexts in which people find themselves in, from the prairies of Nebraska to the more urbanized areas of the state. The surrounding urban environment becomes a backdrop for the gallery which finds itself everyday trying to adapt to new technologies, to stay relevant to an ever increasing wired audience. The Bemis Center is also an institution that is trying to reinvent itself during a period of heavy technological change which it must adapt to or else be left behind as irrelevant. The Bemis Center is itself at the center of this push and pull - as a contemporary driver of new technological means of artistic expression, and also as an archival curator for art works which express a fundamentally different technological Zeitgeist.

I think everyone will find something to like at the Bemis Center. Admission is free, although donations are accepted and those who wish to make return visits should sign up for a membership. There are also art talks on the first Thursday of every month, as well as monthly dinners, for those who wish to be more involved in the affairs of the art center.

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