Nebraska Authors

Kirsch is an artist who profoundly influenced the history and understanding of art in Nebraska. He entered the University of Nebraska the age of 16 in 1915 and graduated in 1919. Fellow students would include Aaron Douglas (of Harlem Renaissance fame), and Leonard Thiessen. On graduation, Kirsch joined the Art Students League in New York City, where he attended lectures by fellow Nebraskan Robert Henri. He apprenticed and worked in commercial art both in New York and on the West Coast. He returned to Nebraska to accept a teaching position at the University in 1924.

A crisis in the Nebraska Art Association (NAA) in 1932 led to Kirsch becoming NAA secretary, and new exhibitions and collections policies. With considerable initial help from Mabel Langdon Eiseley, Kirsch, who became NAA curator in 1936, acquired much of the nationally acclaimed collection of art that would finally find its home in the Sheldon Art Museum in Lincoln.

Kirsch is credited with introducing Nebraska to modern art through his lectures, exhibitions and teaching. He brought a number important modern artists to the state as visiting artists, to give lectures and work in public. He visited with many important American artists and became a recognized lecturer and authority on modern art. He left the University of Nebraska in 1950 to direct the Des Moines Art Center and teach at Iowa State University. The last five years of his life, spent in a nursing home in Colorado, were among his most prolific, seeing him produce, on average, 90 works a year.

At his death, Kirsch left behind a manuscript in note form that comprises his autobiography My Life in Art. The notes found their way into private hands and have been privately published. Special Collections at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a working copy of the published work for scholars to consult.

See also, for the Sheldon Art Museum collection, Norman Geske. See also Robert Henri, Keith Jacobshagen, Dale Nichols, artists. Also, Sheldon Art Museum author Karen Janovy.

MONA has a Kirsch collection and a good biography page for the artist.

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Wallace joined the faculty at the University of Nebraska in 1901 and became Professor of English Dramatic Literature in 1912. A prodigious researcher, in his time he became a very famous Shakespeare scholar, with his discoveries of new Shakespeare documents reported in the European newspapers and the New York Times. In the summers 1904-1909 and then year-round on leave in London from 1909-1916, he and his wife, Hulda Berggren of Wahoo, Nebraska, sifted through over five million Elizabethan legal and administrative documents, finding early court cases involving Shakespeare and discovering new sources on Shakespeare and the theater, including evidence of Shakespeare's financial interest in the Globe Theater. He was also famed for his work on Elizabethan child actors.

His contemporaries in the University of Nebraska English Department included Louise Pound, Prosser Hall Frye, and Lucius Adelno Sherman.

See:
J W Robinson, “Shakespeare and Nebraska: Charles William Wallace, 1865-1932, and the ‘Great Index of the World,’” Nebraska History 60 (1979): 1-20. Accessed on-line via the Nebraska State Historical Society.

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Ernie Chambers is an African-American State Legislator who served a 38-year term in the Nebraska State Legislature representing the 11th District in Omaha, ended by new term limits in 2009. He later returned for another full 2 terms in the Legislature. Chambers is the longest-serving state senator in the history of Nebraska. He ran for a position on the Omaha School Board, but did not get elected. He also failed as a write-in candidate for the City Council. He is also the only African-American to have run for governor and the U.S. Senate in Nebraska's history. Chambers is famous for poetry on political topics, biting political speeches, and command of legislative procedure. Much of his poetry was handed out in the form of broadsheets in the legislative chamber at the State Capitol.

Chambers is a towering figure in the history of his Omaha community, and in the history of the Nebraska State Legislature. Omaha native Tekla Agbala Ali Johnson has written a political biography of Chambers: Free Radical: Ernest Chambers, Black Power and the Politics of Race. 2012.

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