Lincoln, Neb.—Muralists Linda Fernandez and Keir Johnston, founding members of Amber Art and Design, will present the next Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture on Thursday, Oct. 9 at 5:30 p.m. at Sheldon Museum of Art’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Fernandez is a multicultural artist, muralist and educator specializing in public art and community engagement. She is a founding member of Amber Art and Design, an artist collective based in Philadelphia that creates public art through engagement with community members.
Her work features bright colors, designs and symbols that reflect her Caribbean heritage. She's inspired by the ways in which nature, architecture and history weave together to tell stories of people and the places they call home. Her work merges themes of identity and home across physical, social and cultural divides by exploring Caribbean heritage through a diasporic lens.
Fernandez earned a Bachelor’s degree in art education from Tyler School of Art, a certificate in contemporary art from Metafora Escola de Arte Contemporaneo in Barcelona, Spain, and a Master’s in public administration from Austin W. Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. She is an alumna of Community Arts Education Leadership Institute, National Urban Fellows and the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute’s Intercultural Advocacy Fellowship.
Johnston painted his first mural as a teenager while studying fine art at California State University at Northridge. That early experience sparked a deep appreciation for the collaborative nature of mural-making and the power of public art to engage diverse communities.
Over the years, Johnston has worked with a wide range of populations—including incarcerated youth, prisoners serving life sentences, elders, students, and individuals with disabilities—leading them in mural production and community-based art projects.
As a founding member of Amber Art & Design in 2013, he has been instrumental in projects that tackle themes of race, class, poverty and inequality. His notable works include Colorful Legacy: Building Brotherhood, a mural developed through community dialogue around violence and trauma experienced by men of color in Philadelphia, and Philly’s Firsts, which celebrates the city’s rich legacy of innovation and history-making events.
The remaining lectures in the series are:
• Oct. 16: Margaretta Lovell. Lovell is a cultural historian working at the intersection of history, art/architectural history and anthropology. She holds the Jay D. McEvoy, Jr., Chair in the History of American Art at the University of California Berkeley and studies material culture, painting, architecture and design in England, France and North America from the 17th century to the present.
• Oct. 30: Adrian Arleo and Jane Shellenbarger. The UNL Clay Club welcomes two visiting artists who will present successive lectures on Oct. 30. For the last 32 years, Arleo has lived and worked in Missoula, Montana. Her ceramic work is exhibited nationally and internationally and is in numerous public and private collections. In 1995, she was awarded a Montana Arts Council Individual Fellowship. Shellenbarger is a professor and graduate program director at Rochester Institute of Technology in the School for American Crafts. She established her studio pottery, Mill Station Pottery, in rural Hale, Michigan, in 1997.
• Nov. 6: Julia Blaut. Blaut is the senior director of curatorial affairs at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Celebrating the artist’s centennial, Blaut will deliver a lecture about Rauschenberg’s enduring legacy with special attention to his prints.
• Nov. 20: Pablo Helguera. Helguera is a visual artist living in New York and often considered a pioneering figure in the field of socially engaged art. His practice involves performance, drawing, pedagogy, installation, theater and other literary strategies. Coming from a family of classical musicians, his work also frequently includes musical elements.
• Dec. 4: Kristina Paabus. Paabus is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores systems of power, particularly in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. Working primarily in printmaking, she exhibits internationally and teaches at Oberlin College, where she is associate professor of studio art in reproducible media.
The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. The series is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations.
For more information on the series, contact the School of Art, Art History & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.
