Dale Chihuly Glass in the Atrium of the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, fall 2008. Another piece hangs at the opposite side of this tall space. See the othe picture. The leaves were nice, too.

October 25, 2008 to January 18, 2009
To see this article in new Window: Diego Rivera at Joslyn Art Museum

OMAHA, NE — I know what Diego Rivera murals look like because I've seen the movie Frida and a documentary which included the communist mural for Rockefeller Center in New York that no longer exists. His big, bold graphic figurative paintings on walls are the epitome of Mexican art, to me. So clear and easy to understand, Rivera's is so clearly a good choice of style for large narrative painting.

The current show at Joslyn Museum of Art in Omaha, is just painting and drawings by Rivera from the state of Veracruz Mexico, were he spend a lot of time as a kid. His parents and grandparents came from Veracruz. The show was a lesson in how he got to be the muralist he was. Organized chronologically, it was like seeing his entire art education in fast motion. The biggest drag about the show was how small it was, but maybe Rivera didn't do that much painting on canvas.

Childhood drawings were included, and showed his love for the landscape of Veracruz and the Mexican nation. Then he went to Europe and tried every current art technique. Rivera as an impressionist, a favist, a cubist, a surrealist and then as the mature artist we know him to be in all the movies made about he and his wife Frida Kahlo.

Temporary exhibitions are housed in the museum's very simple new addition, and this show was smaller than the space would have afforded. So they added a show of Russian boxes that were too fussy for me to look at, but they were cool objects. Still not filled up, the museum showed off their contemporary collection in this space, and they have a few nice pieces. Joining this addition to the old building is an attrium of glass as tall as the two stories. Like so many museum around the country they had bought some of Dale Chihooli's blown glass to show off the sunlight.

Not yet exhausting the visual wonders of the biggest city in Nebraska,\we, art tourists, decided to see the newest piece of public art or engineering. Opened in late October 2008, is the pedestrian bridge pictured here. It crosses the Missouri River and while there isn't currently a huge need to go on foot between downtown Omaha and a residential neighborhood in Council Bluffs, Iowa, it's cool to get to experience standing above the longest river in the United States.

Terry Talty was the Art Tourist in November of 2008 who visited Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska to see the temporary exhibition of Diego Rivera's paintings from the State of Veracruz Museum of Art