Review

Bemis Builds its Future with a History of Placing Needs of Community First

by Michael J. Krainak

Call it a cliché, but great minds do think alike. When they have a shared vision, it can result in a community resource for creativity as productive as the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.

True to its conviction that exceptional talent deserves to be supported, Bemis was born in 1981 from such previous success stories as the Craftsman Guild in the Old Market downtown and began to offer artists off-site work experiences. Four years later, the art center continued to break out of the box and extend its influence nationally and internationally with a world-class residency program that flourishes today.

Bemis was first officially housed in 1985 in the Bemis Bag Warehouse, which it rented from the Mercer Family in the market area. The center co-opted the building’s name, established a foundation, and featured 14 live-in studios, gallery spaces, and a large sculpture studio. A decade later, Bemis broke out of the bag as well and purchased the McCord-Brady Wholesale Grocery building about a block away. Though Omaha lost many such storied sites in historic Jobbers Canyon east of the Old Market to make way for a ConAgra office park, Bemis secured its future while preserving a part of Omaha’s past.

Koo Kyung Sook, artist-in-residence, 2007

If all this sounds like a history lesson, it is — but it is much more than that for Bemis, its community at large, and its founders and supporters. The one thing those who have been associated with Bemis seem to have learned over the past quarter of a century is that creativity is a work in progress, and as such, the emphasis must be on process and not the end itself. Otherwise, an art center is not free to change, to meet its own needs as well as those of the community it serves. Nowhere in that community is change more constant than in its centers of creativity. Clichés aside, Bemis has learned to redefine itself, at times out of desire, but also out of necessity to survive. Yet, make no mistake; adaptation has not come about for its own sake or at the expense of its mission, according to Mark Masuoka, Bemis’ current director and chief curator.

“The bottom line is that our core program will always be our residency program,” Masuoka says as he assesses the center’s role in the arts community from its origins up to current times and beyond. In the past 24 years, more than 600 residents have taken advantage of their opportunity to create without obligation and with complete freedom. “We remain one of the most significant programs in the world. There are only a few (art centers) that have a residency, exhibition spaces, and a community arts program, but what we are most proud of is that we are committed to supporting exceptional artists within our area.”

The Bemis was founded by Ree Schonlau, Jun Kaneko (now her husband), Lorne Falke, and Tony Hepburn, who had one thing in common: they were artists who understood the value of creating a support system for anyone wanting to create a body of work over a certain period of time. Each came to this conclusion personally and professionally, but as Schonlau, Bemis’ founding director and prime mover, explains, their vision was uniform on two key issues. One, art is never created completely in isolation, and two, never in a vacuum. Though all Bemis founders identified with this vision firsthand, either as student or instructor at such places as the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington or the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, it especially applied to team Schonlau and Kaneko, who settled in Omaha after many educational and career pursuits elsewhere.

“Bemis was created in a metropolitan area, where the best residencies exist, not out in the middle of nowhere,” Schonlau says. ”Omaha was space rich and hungry for art. We provided a service by filling a gap missing in the visual arts. These beautiful buildings were here, empty and suffering. The core of the city was desolate and empty. It would be a win-win for all if artists could be active in these spaces. All it would take is finding a building, the money to renovate it, and, of course, money to support the programming.”

A sculptor herself, Schonlau began pre-Bemis in the ‘70s by renting and renovating the Greenberg Fruit Building in the Old Market and offering studio / gallery space to artists who also gave classes and workshops in what became the Craftsman Guild. After operating Omaha’s first visiting artist program for a few years, she decided the concept would be more productive if artists worked simultaneously on their projects, especially within the community. “I started a project I called Artists in Industry,” she says, “and placed artists during the summer months at a brickyard, in scrap yards or paper companies to use the gifts of industry, scale, and multiplicity. This program ran for three years, from 1981 to 1984, and brought over 100 artists to Omaha.”

Schonlau says there was something magical about the collaboration. “What the artists and factory employees had in common was both knew what it meant to work. Soon, all barriers were erased by the common work ethic these two groups had. No one else in the country was offering such experience.” From this success, she and the core Bemis founders developed a year-long residency that allowed artists to create a body of work outside of the isolated studio norm. Schonlau established a city-wide consortium in support of the project and set it up in 1985 in the Bemis Bag building, where Kaneko, now a world-renowned ceramicist, had already established a studio and giant kilns of his own.

By the late ‘80s, both Kaneko and Bemis’ directors realized the need to secure their own facilities along with their future. Kaneko now owns four warehouses in or near the Old Market, and the new Bemis Foundation is firmly entrenched at its current site at 12th and Leavenworth streets and in the recently added Okada sculpture facility just east across the street. Unquestionably, Schonlau’s and Kaneko’s creative pursuits have grown simultaneously under this marriage of inspiration and leadership. The result has been classic: an entire city block, from 11th to 12th streets and from Jones to Leavenworth, devoted to a creative campus of exhibition, live-in studios, and educational spaces — with a new venture on the horizon.

After 15 years as founding director, Schonlau, still today a vital member of Bemis’ board, left in 2000 to help plan a new arts center in that same city block. Conceived as an “Open Space for Your Mind,” The Kaneko, as it is called, comprises warehouses and a new building in progress just east of Bemis. When completed, The Kaneko will encompass classrooms, galleries, lecture spaces, and a sculpture garden, “devoted to supporting and promoting freedom in creativity.” Though not scheduled to open officially until 2010, the center has its campaign in full swing, with much of its infrastructure in place. Kaneko himself is adamant that the result will not be an art museum but a multi-disciplinary center incorporating the arts, science, philosophy, and technology. Not surprisingly, this Renaissance-era vision is a logical extension of Bemis’ own origin.

At the turn of this century, however, Bemis was in need of its own renaissance. The evolution of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts was not without the growing pains typical of many non-profit institutions. Financial troubles in the down economy of the ‘90s, fundraising problems, and rising maintenance costs led to considerable debt by 2001. Although the board of directors and its president, Todd Simon, as well as a few key donors, worked hard to right the ship, by the end of the year the Bemis was still without a rudder and in need of new leadership, organization, and a reassessment of its goals. After a series of town meetings and an 18-month search, Bemis found it all with its new director, Mark Masuoka, and the center was reborn in 2003. A former artist-in-residence and assistant to Kaneko, Masuoka was, according to Schonlau, a perfect fit.

Masuoka and his wife, Deborah, an accomplished sculptor and the current Okada sculpture facilitator, first met Kaneko at Cranbrook as students. A ceramicist, Masuoka underwent an epiphany of sorts while there and in his residency at Bemis in 1989. The non-profit world captured him as it had Schonlau. For almost a decade prior to his selection, Masuoka explored several business models as director of the Nevada Institute for Contemporary Art, of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and as the owner of his own gallery. “Mark had that language,” Schonlau says. “He had been all those characters — clay sculptor, assistant, resident, director. He’s a wonderful humanitarian. He gave Bemis a different look.”

Masuoka deserves such praise, but it has not prevented him from seeing the big picture. “Jun and Ree had the vision to create something that didn’t exist,” he says. “I stand on their shoulders. My role has been to take it and develop a program that meets the needs of the artists, remaining relevant to the community while addressing financial stability.” To that end, patrons can not help but notice that since Masuoka’s tenure, Bemis has gradually become more inclusive regarding its program and the community at large.

“Most organizations create programs and projects and then look for an audience,” Masuoka says. “Somehow, it just makes more sense for the arts to ask questions first and create what the people want and need. If met, the conversation is no longer on how to build audiences because there is already a buy-in from the community.” Consequently, although the original vision remains, three distinct goals have emerged that have redirected Bemis’ mission, as once again it has widened its horizons.

Perhaps the most obvious change is Bemis’ interest in promoting the cross-pollination of the arts. “In our public discussion panels, we noticed dancers, musicians, and writers in the audience,” Masuoka says. “It became obvious that Bemis’ reach was expanding. Cross-pollination only works if both parties are compatible … that means there must be a common mission, goals, and expectations.” This goal was achieved recently and most dramatically with Bemis08: Creativity Festival, a three-day multi-disciplinary arts event in June that included exhibitions, studio tours, panels, lectures, and performances in theater, dance, music, and spoken word.

Bemis08 operated under an umbrella that linked performance and process, another major goal of the center. “What has changed is how we give access to the public to see process firsthand,” Masuoka says. In the case of Therman Statom’s current exhibition, Nascita, a glass and mixed-media installation (through August 16, 2008), instead of just seeing the end product, viewers talked with Statom and witnessed his ongoing changes to the work. Patrons even became part of the process as the artist conducted workshops within the installation itself. “Think of it,” he adds, “as popular as Signal Channel (a survey of contemporary video art in summer of 2006) was, how much more interesting it would have been if artists had demonstrated and conducted classes as well in the galleries.”

Bemis’ increased interest in community interaction has led to a third goal: developing social conscience. “The arts have the power to change lives,” Masuoka says, “so why can’t this power be tapped into other aspects of society, health care and wellness, poverty, the environment, and other quality of life issues? Half the battle is to just get invited to the table in order to be part of the conversation. Artists are great problem solvers and have the ability to see multiple possibilities.”

For example, Bemis is supporting Scottish artist Mark Gilbert and his residency / project at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Gilbert is currently drawing and painting portraiture based on the interaction of patients and caregivers at the hospital. The purpose is interpretive, not documentary, as Gilbert’s work will be exhibited for professional discourse, scholarship, public education, and as art in an exhibition at Bemis in December 2008. This mix of art and health institutions, Masuoka feels, benefits all concerned. “If we’re not relevant, we’ll get marginalized,” he says. “With no sustainability or support, what gets cut first or even cast aside? The arts. We understand the creative process. We can work with institutions and not just by creating art in their lobbies. We need to take care of our own community.”

Additional outreach programs or projects in the community include: the bemisUNDERGROUND, an eclectic 3,000-square-foot gallery space devoted to self-curated experimental exhibits from local emerging artists; the Art 4 Omaha Initiative, which collaborates with community members for the creation of public art throughout Omaha; and Bemis Center Podcasts, which take listeners behind the scenes for interviews with visiting artists and those in residence. Add the above to its regular schedule of more than 20 annual exhibitions of contemporary art, and one can understand how Bemis membership has grown under Masuoka’s leadership from 50 in 2003 to nearly 1,500 active members in 2007.

Not that any of them expects Bemis to sit still or stand pat. Recent off-the-radar events such as kickboxing, mechanical bull riding, and artist slide jams have raised eyebrows as well as attendance and profile. Not even its residency program is sacrosanct, as Masuoka would like to stretch that concept too. Always the visionary, he sees Bemis and the community someday cooperating to keep its local artists here in Omaha, in their own homes, thriving, building civic pride along with their own self-image through their work.

Hanging on to one’s local talent is a pervasive problem, and the devil is in the details. But, creative problem solving is what Masuoka believes Bemis is all about. Besides, his vision has its roots in programs such as Artists-in-Industry and Alternative Worksites begun some 27 years ago. Keeping its artists happy and productive here in Omaha is just the next step in keeping the Bemis Center a vital and permanent resident as well. ~

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 South 12th Street (at Leavenworth)
Omaha, Nebraska
402-341-7130
www.bemiscenter.org

Michael J. Krainak is the senior arts contributor for the Omaha City Weekly. In addition to his work for Review, he also contributes to the Journal on Religion and Film and is an adjunct professor in film and the humanities at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Nebraska.