Bob Culver

Artist Statement

The Lone Ranger and drone pilots. Sunflowers and dear friends. Bob Culver’s body of work is distinctive for its seamless weaving together of close-to-home influences and worldwide events. With a childhood that took place during the sunny idealism of 1950s middle America and a young adulthood shaped by the events unfolding around him on the East Coast and global stage, the artist creates richly detailed paintings, 3-D cutouts and automata that all work on multiple levels. Simultaneously culturally idealistic and socially critical, they provide insight into the artist and the subjects that have informed his creative practice over the past five decades

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Culver’s career trajectory has taken him through extremes - from quiet towns in 1950’s Nebraska, where his family received only one television channel, to the heart of the artistic movement of the late 1960s and early ‘70s in New York City, where he apprenticed to Pop Art pioneer Red Grooms, and then back again to his home state where personal relationships combined with long-held beliefs have become of primary importance. He received something else from Grooms: the nickname “The Nebraska Kid.” The sobriquet implied Midwestern innocence, idealism and values as well as an earnest, enduring desire to fight the good fight.

The Nebraska Kid has stayed with him and the character appears in some of the artist’s most tongue-in-cheek work, usually accompanied by the cartoon characters and western heroes of his youth with whom he joins to save the day. The artist lives and paints in Omaha and serves on the boards of The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Nebraska Cultural Endowment and is President of the Museum of Nebraska Art Board. 

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