Connecticut-based artist Cary Smith uses meticulously crafted abstraction to express his myriad influences, which range from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics to mid-century art and design.

During the 1980s, Smith became known for grid paintings that were inspired by his collection of Colonial-era game boards. His current practice is not restricted to the study of hard-edged, geometry. He also utilizes biomorphic imagery in bodies of work he calls Splats; here, the artist composes surrealist-influenced, radiating forms that play with the relationship between positive and negative space.

While works like the Splats hint at recognizable imagery, Smith has noted: “For a good while now I’ve wanted to make nonrepresentational paintings that suggest a narrative while remaining essentially abstract. I try not to think of references; they get in the way for me. When I start to see something or think of something particular, I will veer away….”

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.