Untitled from the Dyna Astromorph series

Freed received his B.F.A. degree in 1967 and his M.A. degree in 1968 from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He was the founding director of The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. Freed was also the head of the art department at State Fair Community College from 1968 to 2002 and served as the Director of Goddard Gallery in Sedalia, Missouri. Freed has been an advocate for the arts for many years. As a result of his active participation in the arts, Freed received a gubernatorial appointment to the Missouri Arts Council Board from 1984-1988. He also served as the legislative liaison for the Missouri Citizens for the Arts/Senate and Legislature. Besides receiving a National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 for a Design Arts Project Special Project Grant and a ?Creative Artist Project Grant? from the Missouri Arts Council in 1990, Freed has received several other grants and fellowships. His works appear in numerous collections such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the Steinberg Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. During the past twenty years he has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Freed is represented by galleries on the east coast, west coast, and the heartland.

Dyna Astromorph No. 111

Freed received his B.F.A. degree in 1967 and his M.A. degree in 1968 from Fort Hays State University in Kansas. He was the founding director of The Daum Museum of Contemporary Art. Freed was also the head of the art department at State Fair Community College from 1968 to 2002 and served as the Director of Goddard Gallery in Sedalia, Missouri. Freed has been an advocate for the arts for many years. As a result of his active participation in the arts, Freed received a gubernatorial appointment to the Missouri Arts Council Board from 1984-1988. He also served as the legislative liaison for the Missouri Citizens for the Arts/Senate and Legislature. Besides receiving a National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 for a Design Arts Project Special Project Grant and a ?Creative Artist Project Grant? from the Missouri Arts Council in 1990, Freed has received several other grants and fellowships. His works appear in numerous collections such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Newark Museum in New Jersey, the Steinberg Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. During the past twenty years he has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Freed is represented by galleries on the east coast, west coast, and the heartland.

Chanticleer

Gardener, school bus driver and insurance investigator are some of the jobs Waid held before his artistic career took off. After acquiring his graduate degree in painting from the University of Arizona in 1971, he landed a job teaching at the new community college in Tucson. During his time teaching at Pima Community College he started to lose interest in the formal aspects of painting. Since there was no running water in his classroom at Pima Community College, Waid decided to take his students outdoors to draw. This time spent in the desert ignited his interest in nature and its growth processes and greatly influenced his artistic style. Waid began exhibiting in 1974 and by 1980 he was successful enough to resign from teaching and paint full time. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albuquerque Museum of Art, Palm Springs Desert Museum of Art and many other public collections throughout the United States. Prominent art critic John Perreault has declared Waid?s work to be complicated and gorgeous. He describes Waid?s work as comparable to jazz because the paintings are serious, yet still easy on the mind. In his usual monumental style, Waid has created a painterly vision of the desert in Chanticleer. The title literally means ?rooster,? and to the right of the center of the painting you can make out an abstract head and neck resembling a rooster. The brilliant yellow flower appears to be a plume on the rooster?s head. There also is a tree with the same name as the title, and it flowers and resembles the yellow flower, too. The flowers of the Chanticleer pear tree are white but when the sun sets they do look like the yellow flower in this painting. This painting makes a bold statement with its bright yellow flower, intricate designs and sensual overtones throughout the composition.

The Plan: Pollen Series

Slowinski currently serves as professor of painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. He received a Certificate of Art in painting from the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1954. Thirty years later he had a twenty-five year retrospective at the Sheldon Memorial Gallery of Art at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. His works are a part of major museum collections such as the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Japan. He was the recipient of a Fulbright Advanced Grant to Japan and taught at Indiana University before coming to Kansas City.