GLOW 2024 Exhibiting Artists
GLOW transforms the Luminarium into an immersive, interactive experience as the museum is filled with light art from local and international artists. In addition to partnering with Amplify Arts(opens in a new tab) to facilitate a call for local artists to exhibit during GLOW, multiple large installations from national and international artists will illuminate the space.
Omaha-Area Artists
Buck Christensen
Buck Christensen was raised in North Omaha, Nebraska, and has since lived in various locations, including West Omaha, Parkville, Missouri, and Alexandria, Virginia, before settling in the Loess Hills of Western Iowa with his wife, Teri, and their daughter, Gavin. His passion for storytelling emerged early on, first through writing and later through photography. Christensen has been sharing his photographic work since 2009.
Christensen specializes in Midwest landscapes, floral portraits, and light painting. His ongoing series of photographs of Boy Scout Island at Lake Manawa was featured on the PBS show Iowa Outdoors in 2017 and in Outdoor Photographer magazine in 2018. His work has been exhibited widely in galleries and art shows across the Midwest, with notable solo exhibitions including minimalistic floral portraits at Lauritzen Gardens (2014 and 2024), Vanishing at Everything Electric Gallery (2016), and Breakfast With Shiva at the Michael Phipps Gallery and at Gallery 92 West (2019). Three of his prints have been selected for Biennial exhibitions at Gallery 1516. Currently, Buck Christensen is a studio artist at the Hoff Center in Council Bluffs, where he continues to explore and expand his artistic vision.
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Karen Chaka
Karen Chaka is a glass bender out of Omaha, NE with 37 years of experience. They do neon repair and custom signs for their own business, Neon Jungle, along with all of the glass bending for SignWorks. Chaka loves refurbishing old signs and creating custom signs for people’s homes and businesses.
Chaka has moved around the country a bit, working on neon in Denver, Idaho , and Boston, but eventually coming back to Omaha and putting down roots. They currently work with SignWorks on large-scale projects, and continue to work on neon repair and custom signs through Neon Jungle.
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Ken Hill
Ken Hill is a circus artist and interactive media programmer specializing in creating immersive experiences that integrate projection mapping, sensor technology, and interactive lighting systems. He develops custom installations that combine visuals and WiFi-enabled devices, including touch-sensitive controls, to create dynamic environments.
With a background in both circus arts and programming, Ken approaches his work from multiple perspectives—programmer, performer, and audience member. His projects allow visitors to interact with light, sound, and visuals, offering opportunities for creative exploration and hands-on engagement.
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Lee Emma Running
Lee Emma Running’s work is a catalyst for engagement and dialogue. Through her public art, she makes the unseen visible through research and direct observation.
Since 2013 she has made large-scale, public installations using translucent vinyl to create colored images on glass. Light is a major player in this work at every stage. She often uses overhead projectors and slide projectors to scale seeds, leaves, and grasses to the size of a wall or a bank of windows. She builds the intricate patterns for these installations by placing natural materials under microscopes.
In her most recent work, Nebraska Dark Sky, a permanent installation for the University Of Nebraska Omaha STEM trail, she created a new work of two murals and a wall of glass panels. These panels of glass, etched with hand-drawn botanical patterns, are surrounded by LED lights on motion sensors, activated by human presence. The work is in a narrow hallway and is ‘discovered’ when someone walks into the space, lighting up the wall. As someone walks down the hall, the panes of glass light up; if they hold still, the lights will ‘sunset’ and reveal a painted mural of stars behind the glass.
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FoldHaus Collective
FoldHaus is an art collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently led by Joerg Student and Jesse Silver, FoldHaus creates interactive experiences at the intersection of art, engineering, and technology that bring people together. Many of its members work at, or used to work at, the design firm IDEO, where members spend weekends and evenings building and creating art.
Each art piece is based on extensive experimentation with different fold patterns to create the desired shape and movement, as well as multiple prototypes to develop the supporting structures and digital interaction.
FoldHaus designed and built its first piece, a yurt, for Burning Man in 2010. In 2014, it created Blumen Lumen, an installation of ten large origami flowers that bloom and close. Shrumen Lumen followed in 2016, with five interactive origami mushrooms. In 2018, the group built RadiaLumia, a sculpture that nods to the intricate mineral skeletons of radiolaria, a protozoa that covered Black Rock desert when it was still part of the ocean floor.
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Luke Jerram
Luke Jerram’s multidisciplinary practice involves the creation of sculptures, installations and live arts projects. Living in the UK but working internationally since 1997, Jerram has created a number of extraordinary art projects which have excited and inspired people around the world. In 2023 alone, he had over 115 exhibitions in 27 different countries, visited by more than 3 million people.
As well as touring his installations, Luke’s artworks are in over 70 permanent collections around the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Shanghai Museum of Glass and the Wellcome Collection in London. See global map of collections.
Luke Jerram was given honorary doctorates from the University of Bristol in 2020 and University of Gloucestershire in 2022. He was made an Honorary Academician of the RWA and Fellow of The Royal Astronomical Society in 2020. He currently holds the position of Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield.
In 2019 he set up and funded both the Dreamtime Fellowship to support recent art graduates in his home city of Bristol and the Bristol Schools Arts Fund to support secondary schools impacted by austerity. In 2024 he set up the Jerram Foundation to help deliver some of these charitable projects.
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Taylor Dean Harrison
Taylor Dean Harrison creates mixed-media sculptures and installations. In all of his work, light and movement apply a meter to the viewer’s investigation of, and participation in, each piece. Color fields cast light and shadow across static materials and space inspiring novel interactions with the art.
With each creation, Harrison aims to craft an alternative universe with an order based on a mathematical system. Then he brings that universe alive with more painterly approaches, implementing handwork and moving light. These manifestations of order and subsequent departures result in spaces and objects built for suffusive moments of mental peace.
In his practice rooted in parametric design, Harrison adopts technique and research from cutting edge industrial processes. He explores generative forms and color theory to play with the physical boundaries of the eye and the expectations of the brain. Once finished in the digital realm, Harrison uses CNC processes to bring his works into the physical world.
Taylor Dean Harrison’s artworks have toured festivals and fairs internationally, exhibited in galleries and museums, and been purchased for private collections. Harrison collaborates deeply with Henry David Richardson, a cutting edge digital designer. He attended art school at UC Berkeley, and apprenticed under Michael Christian, a seminal Burning Man and public artist. Harrison has worked professionally as a designer, fabricator, and artist in a wide-range of materials since 2012.
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