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Wind Sculpture
Artist: Yinka Shonibare
The Wind Sculpture expresses the desire of harnessing motion and freezing it in a moment of time. Painted in a Dutch wax batik pattern, the work manifests itself as a large 3D piece of fabric that appears to be captured in a gust of wind.
Standing at about 26 feet tall, the sculpture emerges from a shallow pool of water. During the summer months, the pool is intended as a site where children and families can play and interact. During the winter months, in the absence of water, the granite base will continue to reflect the sculptural form, creating a place of stillness and contemplation for all. The artwork is painted in a bespoke pattern featuring Omaha’s historical narrative in the trademark style of a batik textile.
The vibrancy of the color and pattern not only acts as a visual beacon on The RiverFront, but as a meeting point for families from the local communities to come together and engage with one another.
Lexell’s Comet, 2025
Steel, Sailboat Stands, Salvaged Materials from Stanton Yards and the Detroit River l, 10′ 9″ H x 9′ 1″ W x 8′ 2″ D
Artist: Scott Hocking
Scott Hocking was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1975 and grew up in the small working-class town of Redford, on Detroit’s northwestern border. He has lived and worked as an artist in the city of Detroit since 1996. He creates site-specific installations, sculptures, large-scale public artworks, photograph, video projects, often using found materials and neglected locations. Inspired by subjects ranging from ancient mythologies to current events, his artworks focus on transformation, ephemerality, chance, the cycles of nature, and patterns of human behavior through time. His site-specific works involve deep dives into the history of each site, the people, the layers of time, and the materials available there, and an interest in connecting our present time with the past.
Over the past 27 years, Hocking has created over 40 large-scale sculptural installations and public artworks, received 22 awards, fellowships, & residency grants, participated in over 150 exhibitions, and exhibited at dozens of museums and public institutions worldwide, including: the Van Abbemuseum, the Kunst-Werke Institute, Kunsthalle Wien, the Gare St Sauveur of Lille, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, the School of the Art Institute Chicago, the ASU Art Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, the Mattress Factory Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities.
Raindance, 2015
Welded Core-ten Steel, 8′ 5″ H x 2′ 4″ W x 2′ 4″ D
Artist: Peter Millett
Peter Millett was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1949 and grew up in the Chicago area. He attended Rhode Island School of Design, earning a BFA in 1971. He traveled to Europe soon after and upon his return, in 1973, he went west and settled in Seattle. Millett attended graduate classes in painting and sculpture at the University of Washington in the mid-1970s. He taught figure drawing at Cornish College for the Arts, while exploring more abstract forms in other paintings and sculpture. An extended trip to Iran in 1975, while his architect father was working on a project there, proved to be informative to Millett’s sculptural visual vocabulary. This established a pattern of travel, visiting Malaysia, Bali, Peru, Ecuador and Mexico, and cultural learning that has continued throughout his career.
The artist has shown in Seattle with Polly Friedlander Gallery, Foster White Gallery, Linda Farris Gallery and has been with Greg Kucera Gallery since 1993. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seattle Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tacoma Art Museum; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington; King County Public Art Collection; Microsoft Corporation; Boeing Corporation, Chicago, and other private and public collections. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Artist Trust Grant and the Betty Bowen Committee Special Recognition Award from the Seattle Art Museum.
Gathering Currents, 2023
Stainless Steel, Steel, 6′ H x 3′ W x 2’6″ D
Artist: Daniel Roberts
Daniel Roberts, is an abstract sculptor, born in Oregon in 1984, and who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Roberts’ work begins in the tradition of found objects, elements he’s sourced in tidal rivers and urban waterways. By reframing a history of forgotten objects in the studio, he is defining contemporary urban life in order to distill shared experience into abstract sculpture. Roberts’ work deals with themes of memory, intimacy, transformation, and the marks we leave on the world.
Roberts has shown recently with Slag Gallery, Second Ave Arts, and The Brooklyn Rail’s expansive show “Singing in Unison” in New York City. He was selected to exhibit his outdoor sculpture publicly in New York’s busy West Village for NYC DOT , and in Detroit, Michigan as part of the Movement Festival in Hart Plaza. He has received new work grants from New York Foundation of the Arts for his work in Queens NY and from Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park for exhibiting in ArtPrize. He received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2011, and his BFA from Oregon State University in 2008.
Sneek, 2024
Painted Steel, 12′ H x 3′ 4″ W x 3′ D
Artist: Jeffie Brewer
Jeffie Brewer was born in Jacksonville, Texas, the son of junkyard owners, he learned to spot beauty in the mundane, developed a range of industrial skills, and discovered a knack for drawing. Those early revelations have influenced his artistic trajectory ever since.
Jeffie earned an MFA in sculpture and metals and an MA in sculpture and painting. He also holds a BFA in drawing, printmaking, and jewelry making. He taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate-level art classes from 1998-2019, from sculpture to typography to expressive drawing. Since his first exhibition in 1998, his work has appeared in solo and group shows across North America, England, Mexico, and Japan.
In addition to his academic career, Jeff has utilized his artistic talents as an illustrator and designer for an advertising firm (Point A Media, 1999-present) and as the founder and president of a design and fabrication company (Orange Cat, Inc., 2002-present). He also designed, fabricated, and built his own home in 2006.
Untitled, 2024-2025
Welded Mild Steel 9′ 2″ H x 2′ 6″ W x 2′ 6″ D
Artist: Robert Koch
Hailing from Pennsylvania, Robert Koch attended Kutztown University where he studied art education. His first and quite successful venture as an artist was born in 1986 in the summer kitchen of longtime friends Karen and Bob, who donated their space to allow Robert’s creative side to take flight. Over the course of nearly 20 years, Robert created functional stoneware pottery and traveled the east coast selling work at art festivals. In 2004, he moved from rural Pennsylvania to the NYC area and transition to Robert Koch Studios as an artist working solely on steel sculpture. This clear determination quickly garnered representation by prestigious galleries such as Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY, Charles-Baltivic Gallery in Provincetown, MA and Broadfoot and Broadfoot formally in SoHo, NYC. Robert’s list of public and corporate commissions is rapidly growing. His aesthetic goal is to emulate the fluid ebb of water and organic movement within nature to influence the design he carefully constructs into each unique piece.
Robert’s approach to sculpting is to defy the properties commonly associated with steel. He strives to take a material that is rigid, hard, and lifeless and convert it into a form that is soft and fluid. In some work the steel appears to be trapping the wind; in others, soft boundaries are created between the form and the space it occupies. The organic forms represent abstractions of nature. They are constructed by combining small sections of steel to create woven textures or made to resemble reeds or grasses.
Dream, 2022
Bronze 16’H x 8′ 11”W x 11 ‘ 1 1/2“D
Artist: Jun Kaneko
Tribute to Labor, 2003
Steel
Artist: Matthew Placzek
Heritage, Gifted in 1984
Bronze
Artist: Herb Mignery
Heritage depicts an American family – mother, father, and child – working on the land. The bronze sculpture is part of the public art collection of Omaha and was a gift in 1984 from the Mid-America Council of the Boy Scouts of America.
Chief Big Elk, 2022-2023
Clay, Cast in Bronze
Artist: Benjamin Victor
Sioux Warrior, 1935-36
Cast Bronze 2008
Artist: John David Brcin
Lent by Joslyn Art Museum
Gift Crow, 2025
Artist: Renee’ A. Ledesma
Here, we merge with the spirit of the crow, holding both wisdom
and mystery—seeing the past and the future while standing
firmly in the present, reminding us that our connection with
nature is what grounds us yet allows us to soar.