On May 2, 1888, sixty-seven Lincoln community members met in the university chapel to form a fine arts society. Within months, the group audaciously presented its first exhibition, borrowing Karl Theodor von Piloty's twelve-by-eighteen-foot canvas Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

So many people traveled to Lincoln to see the work, on view in the federal courtroom of the city’s post office building, that the superintendent of the Burlington Railroad scheduled additional trains throughout the state.

In the 1920s the Nebraska Art Association—now the Sheldon Art Association—began presenting living tableaux of famous paintings. This tradition lasted through the 1950s and was revisited in celebration of the group's eighty-fifth anniversary in 1973. That year, members recreated the composition of Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the painting that started it all.