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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 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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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 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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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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.