WP#: Historical Research

My art piece is called Arietta II and was built in 1998. The sculpture was designed by Catherine Ferguson. She is an artist from Omaha, Nebraska. She has a wide variety of work ranging from drawings to sculptures to opera settings. Her work is featured, not only at the Sheldon Art Museum, but also at the University of Nebraska Omaha, the Museum of Nebraska Art, the Landmark Building, the Omaha Public Library and the Qwest Center in Omaha among others. Outside of these public art works she also has some private pieces. According to her biography on her website, her installations usually have a mythical and idealistic quality to them. These pieces are what she is most well known for. In addition to her work as an artist she also serves as a board member for Bemis Center for Contemporary’s Arts and held a board member position for six years on the Nebraska Arts Council (catherineferguson.com).

I looked through pictures of some of her other pieces of art work which can be found on her website. Her drawings were all in black and white and the medium of choice was ink on paper. These drawings consisted of crosshatched lines that depicted one single object or a group of two or three similar objects. The titles of these drawings were simple whatever the name of the object was followed by a number if there was more than one representation of that particular object. Al-Khemia is the title of an installation that is located inside of Sheldon Art Museum.

There was a variety of different sculptures that she featured. Her sculpture was made of painted cast bronze or steel. These sculptures were all what I would classify as abstract. Most of them had some sort of connection with nature and she incorporated stick or twig-like shapes into many of them. All of the public sculptures I viewed incorporated some sort of animal or element from nature. There was also a similar sculpture to Arietta II in the private collection section that was titled Bird Bowl. It appeared to have the same concept, a unified composition of black painted steel birds. I found a quote from the documentary Is It Art? By Joel Geyer from Catherine Ferguson regarding her use of animals in her work that helps to explain why she likes to incorporate them: "By putting the animals in there, I am trying to add an archetypal element to it -- Carl Jung's idea of animals being part of our deepest selves in our dreams, the part that we maybe know the least. Well, as westerners we have a real separation and we have a conflict with nature and are always wanting to be superior to nature and dominate it. I'm more comfortable with a balance with it, but I think it's something we all just have to continue to examine. Way back I think I decided that the farther we get away from nature the more psychotic we're going to be. (netnebraska.org)" I think this quote will help me to see her sculpture Arietta II more in the way she intended when she designed it and I believe this will be important when it comes to writing my third writing project.

Works Cited:

Ferguson, Catherine. "Bio." Catherine Ferguson. 2007. Web. 30 Nov 2009.


Geyer, Joel. "Catherine Ferguson-Installation Artist." State Wide Interactive. 30 Aug 1993. Web. 30 Nov 2009. .