LINCOLN, NEBRASKA.- Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery presents Flow - Sheldon Statewide 2007-2008. Sheldon Statewide’s 2007-2008 exhibition Flow explores water as a subject of art. Symbolizing purity, sustenance, tranquility, power, movement and continuity, water is a source of life as well as destruction and death. Its surface serves as a metaphor for self-reflection and contemplation. Humans rely on water and take it for granted. We pollute it, misuse it and fight over it. It is easily accessible and inexpensive to some while nearly out of reach to others.

Artists with an affinity toward nature, especially landscape painters, have chosen water as a primary subject because of its reflective beauty and emotive qualities. Water was a central theme of the Provincetown painters and the San Francisco bay area figurative artists. The Impressionists gravitated towards water’s abstract, impressionistic qualities. Artists whose work is included in the show are: Joel Meyerowitz, William Theo Brown, Wayne Thiebaud, Neil Welliver, Harry Callahan, Nebraska’s Alice Cumbow and others.

Approximately 25 paintings, photographs, sculptures and prints from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery’s permanent collection will travel to nine communities across Nebraska. Statewide Arts Connection, Sheldon’s teacher training project will offer workshops in four of the communities. Flow will close at the Sheldon on August 19, 2007.

Flow is organized by Sheldon Statewide, an outreach program of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since its inception in 1987 the program has reached 275,000 people with exhibitions in 24 communities.

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the membership of the Nebraska Art Association, the Nebraska Arts Council, James and Rhonda Secrest, Lonnie Pierson Dunbier, Farmers Mutual Insurance Company of Nebraska and the Groundwater Foundation.