DECEMBER 17, 2024
Walls Taking Shape at Central Library
The exterior of Omaha Public Library’s new Central Library is undergoing a transformation with the installation of the unitized curtain wall.
Those passing by 72nd and Dodge can begin to see how the building will look, including the glass wall that will provide beautiful views of the exterior City Garden courtyard. The building will be fully enclosed before the end of the year.
On the interior of the building, workers continue to frame the walls that will separate the spaces inside the library. Project partners are working to finalize the selection of interior details, including technology, furniture, art, and more. Full plans for the project, including what will be located on each floor of the Central Library, can be found on the design page.
AUGUST 30, 2024
Interior, Exterior Wall Construction Continues
Construction crews at the new Central Library at the corner of 72nd and Dodge streets are framing interior walls and starting work on the exterior walls.
The glass wall that will look onto the exterior courtyard is in place. The unitized curtain wall which will give the building its signature look is being built in sections off site and will be brought to the site for installation beginning in September.
The building was not damaged and construction was not hampered by Omaha’s severe weather event at the end of July.
Omaha Public Library and Do Space staff continue to work with project partners to plan for the building’s interior. The Central Library’s Call for Public Art resulted in 242 applications submitted by Omaha-area artists to create new works of art for permanent display at Central Library. Those applications are being reviewed now and applicants will be notified of their status in late September.
MAY 9, 2024
Construction Focus Moves to Exterior Walls
Omaha Public Library’s new Central Library will begin to look more like the renderings this summer as construction crews start to build the exterior walls of the building.
The glass wall that will look onto the exterior courtyard is in place. The unitized curtain wall which will give the building its signature look is being built in sections off site and will be brought to the site for installation beginning in September. At the beginning of May, workers celebrated the traditional builders’ rite of “topping out” as they wrapped up the structural steel work on the building. An evergreen tree and an American flag were placed on the final beam as it was lifted into place.
The high-tech collection system, called an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS), is so large that it has already been placed inside the structure and will be kept safely encased until the exterior construction is complete. Central Library will be the first public library in the United States to have a storage system like this.
The ASRS will support citywide distribution of books by storing items from Omaha Public Library’s large collection, allowing library branches to utilize more space for neighborhood-driven programming while still providing an abundance of books and materials in every branch for patrons to discover and enjoy.
Staff members from Omaha Public Library and Do Space are partnering with construction and design teams on interior and exterior details of the library, including selecting furniture, art, technology, and more. They also are looking forward to collaborating with local artists selected in the Central Library’s Call for Art throughout the design and installation process.
FEBRUARY 9, 2024
Structural Steel Work Nearing Completion
People passing by the corner of 72nd and Dodge can see the progress on the new Omaha Central Public Library.
Construction crews expect to complete structural steel work this spring and have the building exterior fully enclosed before summer. The tower crane that has been used in construction is the first of its kind to be owned and constructed in the United States. The 180-foot-tall crane was customized for this project and can lift up to 35,000 pounds. Read more details about the crane from project partner Kiewit. In addition to the work onsite, design and construction teams also performed façade testing offsite to ensure that the future building will be able to withstand all the elements that come with Nebraska’s weather. They erected a portion of the building’s signature paneled exterior at a testing facility, then used propellers to simulate wind pressure and spray racks to shoot water onto the façade. The performance testing checked for wind pressure, air infiltration, water penetration, structural loading, vertical movement, thermal cycling, and condensation. The teams were happy to report the building passed the tests.
Crews will place a high-tech collection system called an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS) inside the structure and keep it safely encased until it is installed later in the construction process. Omaha Public Library (OPL) will be the first public library system in the United States to have a storage system like this. Once the Central Library opens in 2026, the ASRS will support citywide distribution by storing items from OPL’s large collection, allowing library branches to utilize more space for neighborhood-driven programming while still providing an abundance of books and materials in every branch for patrons to discover and enjoy.
OCTOBER 27, 2023
Work Underway at 72nd and Dodge
Construction crews are making great progress on the new Omaha Central Public Library at the corner of 72nd and Dodge streets.
Excavation and deep foundation work is complete, and shallow foundation work is underway.
The next phase will see a large tower crane erected on site, moving building materials into their proper places. Occasionally, part of the crane may extend over traffic lanes, but safety measures are in place on the crane to prevent any loads from being suspended over the streets below. Contractors are also working with Metropolitan Utilities District (MUD) and the City of Omaha to schedule utility work that will temporarily close some traffic lanes on 72nd Street. The goal is to keep any closures as brief as possible with minimal impacts to traffic. The current schedule has two southbound lanes of 72nd Street closed for a maximum of two weeks in mid-November.
Omaha Public Library staff, Do Space staff, and the construction and design teams continue to collaborate behind the scenes to work out the details of what the interior of the library will look like and what equipment and amenities will be needed to provide the best experience for all who will visit this community hub. Details on current designs can be found here.
And an important note on the deconstruction of the old Do Space building: crews were happy to report that they were able to recycle more than 90% of its building materials. In addition, after planning for Do Space’s needs during the construction of the library, all remaining furnishings, fixtures, and equipment from the building’s interior were donated to community organizations and partners. Do Space’s free technology services are now located in a renovated area at Omaha Public Library’s Abrahams Branch at 90th and Fort streets during construction of the new Omaha Central Public Library. Find more information about Do Space here.
Local Artists Creating Art for Central Library
The partners collaborating to build Omaha Public Library’s new Central Library teamed up with Omaha nonprofit Amplify Arts on a call for permanent public artwork produced by local artists that will be installed in the interior and exterior spaces of the Central Library.
242 Omaha-area artists applied during the open call; 16 were selected. Those selected artists were awarded project budgets ranging from $5,000 to $100,000 to realize their new works. Selected artists are now collaborating with the project team throughout the design and installation process prior to the library’s opening in 2026. See below for more information about each artist and join us on Sunday, January 26, 2025, from 2-4pm at Omaha Public Library’s Downtown Branch for a Meet & Greet with the artists. Find full details on the event here.
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Littleton Alston
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Littleton Alston maintains a sculpture studio in Omaha, where he is also Professor of Sculpture at Creighton University. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. They are included in many private and public collections, including the U.S. Capitol National Statuary Hall Collection, where his sculpture of author Willa Cather was dedicated in 2023. Littleton has been featured on the PBS NewsHour and in documentary films produced by Nebraska Public Media and the National Willa Cather Center. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, the Martine Vaugel Studio in France, and the International Centre for the Arts in Italy. Littleton holds an MFA from the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
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Celeste Butler
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Celeste Butler is a first-generation native of Omaha and a fiber and textile artist, Quiltologist, and storyteller whose family migrated north in the 1940s. Her work is devoted to preserving the voices of American history that are often silenced, overwritten, or erased. With every stitch, Celeste finds endless joy, embracing the responsibility to document history as a testament that “we were here” and that, despite all odds, Black Americans’ contributions built this country.
She pays homage to the women and men who broke societal barriers and found ways to thrive and survive. Growing up in North Omaha, where she spent her childhood running and playing in the streets, Celeste developed a deep love for art. Throughout her life, art has provided peace, solitude, and refuge, helping her discover and amplify her voice. As she expresses it, “Art is a universal love language that transcends time and speaks to all generations, both in this physical world and the hereafter.”
Some of her earliest memories involve playing with fabrics her mother carefully stored in an old cedar chest. She watched her mother, godmother, and neighborhood women sew, quilt, knit, and crochet, learning to appreciate the magic they created with their hands. These early experiences inspired Celeste to master quilting as a non-traditional form of art.
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Richard Chung
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Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1977, and raised in the California Bay Area, Richard Chung earned his B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, under the guidance of ceramic artist Richard Shaw. Seeking further artistic growth, Chung relocated to Omaha, where he worked as a studio assistant for the esteemed artist Jun Kaneko. This invaluable experience allowed him to fully immerse himself in the daily life of an artist, providing unique insights into both the creative process and the business aspects of art.
Richard Chung's art has found a prestigious place in permanent collections, notably the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. He currently lives and works in Omaha.
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Dana Damewood
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Dana Damewood is an artist and photographer based in Omaha. She earned her BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2003. Working in both film and digital mediums, Dana is passionate about exploring the unique qualities of people and places. As a photographer, her aim is to capture the interplay of light and form, distilling these elements to reveal the essence of her subjects.
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Mari Dailey
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The arrival of Mari Dailey began in the Arizona desert, Tucson. The paternal side of her family is of the Tohono O'odham Nation, straddling the Arizona/Mexico border. Early childhood years would place her in Japan, Mexico, Tumacacori, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. Education and corporate jobs would sprinkle her throughout the nation; Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, ultimately landing her in the midwest.
The first formal introduction to fine art would be at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, Arizona. Darkroom photography was the gateway to recognizing the beauty of process, the importance of the Masters, and studio arts practice. Life took some turns and placed her in the corporate world of work, leaving an art practice altogether. Recently, a return to studio arts has included drawing on birch panels, block printing, and functional pottery.
Some local Omaha venues that have included her work are a solo show at the Ming Toy Gallery in Benson, group shows including Gallery 1516 Biennial 2023, several Bemis Auction events throughout the years, Split Gallery, St.Cecilia's Holiday Shows and Museum gift stores, and the annual Omaha North Hills Pottery Tour.
On a personal note, Mari had one magical elder in her life as a young child, "Tanta". Although only a few years were spent together, Tanta would make sure she experienced many trips to the Smithsonian's galleries and museums, bookstores and libraries, found live theatre shows and symphonies, listened to records from other countries, and picked out an instrument - a zither. To this day, Mari has the first book ever given to her by Tanta: June Jordan's "Who Look At Me". These are the shapers of her life towards pursuing a creative and enduring interest in a creative life.
Mari maintains a working studio in the Bench building just north of downtown Omaha.
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Kim Hager
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Kim Hager is an Omaha-based video artist and a member of the Ute tribe. In her work she investigates our relationship with the natural world and human storytelling through narrative devices like animation, tableau, and installation.
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Shelby Neeley
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Shelby Neeley is a sculptor who creates paper mache creatures out of books. She got her start in the library of her high school, when the librarians encouraged her to find a use for the books they had to throw out. She created many sculptures for her school over 3 years as a library aide, leaving them decorating the school when she graduated. Now at UNL as a history major, Shelby has continued to create sculptures as a hobby.
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Peyton Pearson
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Peyton Pearson is a fiber artist based in Omaha whose work explores themes of touch, memory, and loss. Graduating summa cum laude from the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History, Pearson has participated in solo and group exhibitions, including “Exit Wounds” at Petshop and “Spring Tides” at Project Project, both in Omaha. Their journey into fiber art began at age 17 when two women at the Omaha Public Library taught Pearson to knit, sparking a lifelong passion for textiles.
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Christopher Prinz
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Christopher Prinz is an Omaha-based industrial designer seeking to expose extreme and rarely visible possibilities of materials and processes associated with manufacturing and construction.
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Linda Rivera García
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Linda was born in Omaha in 1946. After the death of her father in 1949, Linda's mother remarried and the family moved to a farm in the outskirts of Papillion, Nebraska, where she graduated from Papillion High School, in 1964. After graduating from the College of St. Mary's in 1971 with an art degree, Linda became the Artistic Director at the newly founded Chicano Awareness Center, beginning a Community Activist artistic career spanning half a century. Linda married, gave birth to two boys, and finished a long career as a Children's Librarian with Omaha Public Library. Along the way, Linda's community activism earned her numerous awards and recognition as a Chicana activist. She traveled the state of Nebraska, facilitating art residencies and workshops supported by Humanities Nebraska and the Nebraska Arts Council. In 2009, she and husband José founded the Mexican American Historical Society. To this day, Linda remains artistically active with art exhibits in museums and art centers throughout the state.
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Sarah Rowe
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Sarah Rowe is a multimedia artist based in Omaha. Her work opens cross-cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, fiber arts, performance, and Native American ceremony in unconventional ways. Rowe’s work is participatory, a call to action, and re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of today’s global landscape. Drawing from skewed imagery in historic texts, in conjunction with images from Lakota winter counts, Rowe projects her vision of contemporary Indigenous experience into the mix with an offbeat enchantment. Rowe's imagined landscapes are bold and vibrant, containing a shape-shifting bestiary of tales both familiar and strange. Rowe holds a BA in Studio Art from Webster University, studying in St. Louis, MO, and Vienna, Austria. Rowe is of Lakota and Ponca descent.
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Lee Emma Running
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Lee Emma Running is an artist based in Omaha who creates monumental public installations and arresting sculptures with cast iron, enamel, glass, bone, and handmade paper. She uses this work to engage audiences in conversations about the impact of human-built systems on the natural world.
Running was a Foundry Resident in the Arts/Industry program at Kohler Co. in 2023 and 2024. Permanent installations of her work can be viewed at the STEM trail at the University of Nebraska Omaha, The Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Bernheim Arboretum. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Kaneko, and the Des Moines Art Center. She has been awarded residencies at Western North Carolina Sculpture Park, Opera Omaha, Ucross, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture.
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Shelby Seier
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Shelby Seier is a disabled cultural access worker and multidisciplinary artist rooted in the prairie. She founded All Kinds Accessibility Consulting, a creative accommodations consultancy that practices access as an art form. She makes accessible spaces and resources, improvisational quilts, and exclusively draws beds and chairs – two of her favorite assistive aids – on found paper. Her background in theater, dance, and improvisational comedy lends itself to her practice of fostering cultures of access needs. Shelby is an Amplify Arts Generator Grant and ONE Omaha grants recipient, a Populus Fund (supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation) recipient, was awarded an ACRE residency, and will attend Movement Research’s A.M.P. Residency (supported by the Mellon Foundation).
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Angie Seykora
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Angie Seykora, MFA, creates installations, sculptures and drawings that repurpose industrial, traditional craft-based and found materials. She is interested in reorienting the way we consider value and possibility in a mass-manufactured, synthetic world. Through process driven, almost mechanical methods of assembly, she emphasizes accumulation and tactile materiality to produce work that references the history of post-minimalism, bodily systems, and “thinking through making”.
Seykora’s work has been recognized by the International Sculpture Center (Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award recipient), Sculpture Magazine, Art-St-Urban Switzerland Residencies, Amplify Arts (Unrestricted Artist Grant), and the Nebraska Arts Council (Individual Artist Fellowship). Past solo exhibitions include the Mid-America Arts Alliance (Kansas City, MO), the Museum of Nebraska Arts (Kearney, NE), The Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha), Creighton University, and the University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD). Seykora’s studio practice is based in Omaha. She is currently an instructor of drawing at Creighton University.
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Ashley Vak
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Ashley Vak, a native of Omaha, discovered her passion for art and design early on, drawing inspiration from her father’s precision as a mapmaker for the City of Omaha and her mother’s creative skills. After high school, she pursued her foundation studies at the Kansas City Art Institute before returning to complete her BFA in Book Arts at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she was awarded the Bertha Mengedoht-Hatz Artistic Excellence Scholarship. Vak further honed her artistry by becoming a certified Cake Decorator and studying Metalsmithing in Florence, Italy.
Her work has been showcased at the Bemis Art Auction and is part of the Todd Simon Art Collection. Driven by process, Vak places a strong emphasis on creating tactile experiences in her art. Her sculptural books transform industrial materials into organic, evocative forms, inviting viewers to engage with them on a physical level.
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Cindy Weil
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Cindy Weil is a fiber artist based out of Omaha and New York, New York. She graduated from Creighton University, New York School of Interior Design, and School of Visual Arts in New York City. Weil's work can be found in private and commercial collections around the country.
Cindy's upcoming solo exhibition will be held at the Museum of Nebraska Art (MONA) in Kearney, Nebraska in March 2025. Select recent exhibitions include School of Visual Art, Flatiron Gallery NYC, Four Person Juried Alumni Exhibition, New York City, 2024; Joslyn Castle and Gardens, Omaha, Nebraska, 2024; School of Visual Art, New York, New York, 2023; Bemis Center's Benefit Art Auction, Omaha, Nebraska, 2022; and Museum of Nebraska Art (MONA), Kearney, Nebraska, 2022. Residences include School of Visual Art, New York, New York, 2023 and Icelandic Textile Center, Blonduos, Iceland, 2019.
Amplify Arts is an Omaha nonprofit that provides resources to artists, organizers, and cultural workers to incubate liberatory ideas that move our community forward.
Project Timeline
What it takes to co-create a central library with community members and city leaders