Visiting Artists

The Nebraska Wesleyan Art Department invites prominent artists to share their work, experiences, and wisdom with our students.

Last year’s visiting artists include:

Merrill Peterson, April 2025

Merrill Peterson was born and educated in Iowa, but he spent his adult life in Lincoln, Nebraska, teaching and chairing in the art department at Lincoln High School. His work is in many private and corporate collections including the Sioux City Art Center Museum, Iowa. Over the past few decades, he has worked on paintings that explore issues related to space, illusion, form, and shape.

Peterson’s work explores the complexities of perception, using painting to question how we see and what we think we see. Fascinated from an early age by the illusion of depth and space through perspective, they view painting as a magical fiction—one that can reveal truths beyond the physical world. Their practice delves into the tension between expectation and reality, embracing irony, contradiction, and ambiguity. With a desire to see more clearly and understand more deeply, the artist approaches each piece with the belief that nothing is ever quite what it seems.

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Rachel Adams, March 2025

Rachel Adams serves as the Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Her previous curatorial roles include Senior Curator at the UB Art Galleries, Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, and Associate Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center, now known as The Contemporary Austin. She earned her MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Adams’s curatorial interests span a range of disciplines, with particular emphasis on the intersections of contemporary art with architecture, performance, video, and new media practices. 

Notable exhibitions Adams curated include All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Drop Scene, Claudia Wieser: Generations (co-curated), Alison O’Daniel: Heavy Air, Jillian Mayer: TIMESHARE, The Language of Objects, Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967–2017, and Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (co-curated). Adams has collaborated with a diverse group of artists and her writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, including Claudia Wieser: Generations, Jillian Mayer: TIMESHARE, Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, Out of Easy Reach, Prospect.3 New Orleans, and Texas Prize 2012. She has also contributed to publications such as Afterimage, artforum.com, Art Papers, Art Practical, Modern Painters, and Texas Architect. 

Nathan Murray, February 2025

Nathan Murray is a socially engaged artist and educator from Lincoln, Nebraska. His work focuses on exploring issues of race, ethnicity, and intersectionality, particularly how these aspects of identity are expressed in people and their stories. Murray’s artistic practice revolves around creating lifelike clay sculptures that examine nuanced representations of people and contemporary issues. Currently, Murray is working on his upcoming exhibition "BIPOC of Nebraska," featuring ceramic busts of remarkable Nebraskans of color.
He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2009 and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida in 2015. Murray has exhibited his work nationally and has been widely published in magazines, books, and online platforms. Notably, his work from the exhibition "Color Theory" was featured on the cover of the March 2017 issue of Ceramics Monthly Magazine. Additionally, his work was featured in the 2023 book “Contemporary Black Ceramic Artists” by Chotsani Elaine Dean and Donald A. Clark. Murray has received numerous awards and grants, including a residency at the Lux Center for the Arts in 2015 and a grant from the Mid America Arts Alliance in 2019. In 2022, he received the Mayor Art Award for Artistic Achievement, and in 2023, Murray will attend a residency at the Union for Contemporary Art.
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Charley Friedman, December 2024

Charley Friedman’s work examines how images and objects acquire value—ranging from the sacred to the consumable—probing the cultural systems and collective agreements that assign meaning to symbols. Working across sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and video, Friedman explores how magical thinking, organized religion, and consumer culture shape perception, identity, and ritual. Humor plays a central role in his practice, used as both material and method to expose vulnerability, challenge ego, and evoke emotional resonance. Deeply informed by his Jewish identity, his work draws on traditions of humor, ritual, and Talmudic inquiry to navigate the absurdity, contradictions, and emotional weight of lived experience.
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Bri Murphy, October 2024

Bri Murphy is an interdisciplinary artist who combines digital technologies like 3D printing with traditional ceramics techniques. Their work deconstructs American mythologies, reexamining symbols such as Founding Fathers’ busts and iconic texts like the Declaration of Independence. Drawing from historical research and material curiosity, Bri explores the intersection of culture, economy, and memory, blending analog and digital processes to reflect on the relationship between tradition and technology. Based in Greeley, Colorado, Bri is Assistant Professor of Sculpture + Digital Fabrication at the University of Northern Colorado and holds an MFA in Ceramics from Ohio University.

At the core of Bri's practice is a desire to confront the contradictions of American identity by placing its mythologized past in dialogue with present-day tensions. Their work challenges cultural symbols and explores how they are shaped, inherited, and contested, questioning assumptions about access and belonging. Through this hybrid approach, Bri invites viewers to engage with layered narratives around identity, history, and nationhood, creating art that resonates with those navigating these complex themes.

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Belle Pilar-Fleming, September 2024
Belle-Pilar Fleming is a printmaker and textile artist based in Greeley, Colorado. Originally from a small town near Dayton, Ohio, her work draws from her background in psychology and social sciences. Holding a BA in Psychology from Warren Wilson College and an MFA in Printmaking from Ohio University, she uses personal narrative, ethnography, and data visualization to explore identity and place. Belle-Pilar’s art examines the role of the artist as a community historian, with a focus on how sociocultural contexts shape behavior. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Black Church Print Studio in Dublin, Ireland, and the University of North Dakota, and is currently the Director of Galleries at the University of Northern Colorado.
Her practice blends printmaking techniques like lithography and screen printing with textile methods traditionally associated with female labor, such as sewing and quilting. This fusion creates a conversation between reproducible matrices and sewn substrates. Belle-Pilar’s work often includes figurative elements, using body language and gesture to explore memory, intimacy, and identity. By working with archives and historical materials, she creates layered, collaged compositions that reflect on the complexities of identity and the limitations of archival systems.

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Past Visiting Artist