Plein Air Artists at Gallery 1516
Gallery 1516 in Omaha showed Eugene Kingman with Augustus Dunbier and Robert Gilder, three Nebraska painters who worked outdoors, directly from the landscape.
From August 24 to October 13, 2019, Gallery 1516 at 1516 Leavenworth Street in Omaha showed three twentieth-century Nebraska painters together for the first time: Eugene Kingman, Augustus Dunbier and Robert Gilder.
What tied them together was how they worked. All three painted en plein air, outdoors and directly from nature. The gallery’s brochure put it this way: artists “began to reject idealized depictions of landscapes in favor of naturalistic observations that captured the mood and atmosphere of the time and place.” Kingman, it noted, always traveled with his brushes at hand, ready to paint the landscape at a moment’s notice.
Gallery 1516 invited our family to show 32 Kingman paintings, all offered for sale during the exhibition. Private collectors and the Museum of Nebraska Art in Kearney lent other works to the show.
The opening reception was on Saturday, August 24. Mixie Kingman Eddy gave opening remarks, joined by Quinlan Kingman Eddy and Sherman E. Eddy, and historian Maureen Waldron gave a presentation about Kingman’s mural work and the rescue of his New York Times mural. More than 100 Gallery 1516 members and visitors came. Through the two months of the show, the gallery’s Bach & Bagels Sunday concerts brought Omaha musicians into the room with the paintings.
Two days before the opening, the Omaha World-Herald previewed the show in “‘Plein air’ painters captured Nebraska landscapes,” by Kim Carpenter (August 22, 2019). It described how Kingman often headed west after a day at the Joslyn to paint the farms and fields just outside Omaha, and quoted gallery director Patrick Drickey: “These three artists all knew each other and were very well-known in the arts community.”
Our thanks go to Patrick Drickey and his team, Sara Bihlmaier and Suzi Eberly, for inviting us. Most of the photos here are by Debra Kaplan.
Gallery 1516 still has its page on the exhibition online, and the exhibition brochure is in our document library. To see Kingman’s landscapes, browse the works page. Other shows are listed on exhibitions.
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