The score of a great symphony is not the texture of the sound. The arcane notations of a choreographer are not the movements of the dance. The resume of Bill Farmer, artist, is not the sum of his life. Nonetheless, we will present two presentations of his life's course, the bones of his resume and the flesh of his art.

William Farmer was born March 10th 1922 at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska. When he graduated from high school in 1939 from Creighton Preparatory School, the coming war was a rumble in the distance. At that time, Bill worked as a shop electrician for the Union Pacific Railroad, his father's longtime employer. World War II changed all this and by 1943, Bill had enlisted in the Army Air Corps to avoid the degradation of being drafted. This commitment ended with the war, as peace was his true passion.

Like so many returning G.I.'s, Bill chose to go to school and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1950 from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. This course included studies with Max Beckman in Colorado during the last year of life for the great German expressionist. Beckman was famous for his stark portrayal of disillusionment with the war and many modern movements. Beckman's influence on Farmer appears real but not universal, rather subtle and sustained. This influence flowered in an ironic way as Bill Farmer grew in the power and confidence of his optimism instead of the despair of disillusionment.

In December 1948, Bill very possibly took the most important step in his life. Between semesters of his junior year at UNL, he married Marjorie Squire, born September 29th 1928. Their lives merged in a way unique among artists or perhaps even among human beings in modern life. The commitment of both Marge and Bill to continue learning and teaching became the hallmark of their individual and combined creative careers-a union of life and love that continued for fifty years and never lost its vitality.

Soon after marriage came more schooling, this time at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, which he left in 1951 with a Master's degree. Then, to the Graduate School of the Humanities in Madrid. Marge and Bill spent 1953 - 1954 in Spain, where Bill also completed courses in the Circulo de Bellas Artes. Much of what Spain offered Bill was the chance to study the works of El Greco and Francisco Goya. Bill took the religious subject matter of El Greco and masterfully combined it with Goya's dark expression to create a sense of hope flowering out of the darkness. These were important models for Bill and their influences never entirely disappear from his work.

When Marge and Bill returned from Spain, Bill distanced himself professionally as far away from his art as he ever would by working in advertising for World Insurance Company. Fatefully, in 1958, Marjorie won a Fullbright Scholarship to study the British method of teaching in Northern Ireland. Bill intent on teaching in equatorial Asia, traded his plans for a trip to Ireland with Marge. Once there he studied at the College of Technology in Belfast.

The old saw that goes "if you want to learn something, teach it" was an integral part of Bill Farmer's life. From 1961 to 1963 Bill taught as an instructor of art at the College of Saint Mary. This was a colorful and happy period for him and his fellow professors, Leonard Thiessen and Isabella Threlkeld. The staff and students were a very close-knit family, who readily supported one another's endeavors. Leonard's optimism and Isabella's inexhaustible energy blended well with Bill's ability to see beauty in all things human.

From 1965 to 1966, Marjorie and Bill lived and worked in Mexico. Marge was there to instruct in the teaching methods of Maria Montessori. Montessori teaching stresses development at a comfortable pace and encourages self-empowerment in children. During their stay, Bill studied indigenous sculptures. Some of these sculptures had been recently uncovered at archaeological sites. He also created bronzes of his own. The predominant series of sculptures that he made during this time was the Dialogue series. These sculptures were a study in contrast of the differences between the Mexican and American peoples and cultures.

In 1967 Bill began teaching art at Creighton University in Omaha. During this period, until 1969, the University provided studio space for its instructors in an early Omaha bank building which has since been demolished. Not unlike the building, the elevator was old and capricious. One day in '69, Bill arrived to work in his studio. He groped his way through the darkened vestibule to the up-and-down sliding wooden cage door of the freight elevator. After pushing the button, the door opened and assuming the car was there, he stepped into the empty shaft and plunged fourteen feet to the basement. He broke both heels, suffered a compound fracture of the leg, and painfully compressed his spine. After the fall, Bill had an adverse reaction to his medication which induced hallucinations and other visions. Dreams and symbols from his unconscious began to inform his work. The images he "saw" he reproduced in Styrofoam, aluminum, and bronze, the most prominent of which is the "vlipon" a stylized egg-shaped bird head.

In 1970, Marjorie and Bill moved back to Marge's hometown, Ashland, Nebraska where Bill built his own foundry. He built the foundry to be able to cast his own bronzes and to make it available to his fellow artists. He and Marge also retrofitted their old house with solar panels to heat their water and much of the home from the sun. During all their time in Panama (1972 - 1973) and in Ashland (1973 - 1983) Marge and Bill were vegetarians, making their own soyburgers, tofu, and yogurt, and growing their own vegetables. In 1984, because of the need to care for Bill's mother, they moved back to Omaha.

1985 saw Marge and Bill back in Mexico, this time in Chiapas, strongly affected by the refugee camps filled with victims in flight from the blood of the United States policies in Guatemala. His study in bronze of this time included the Campamento series. This series portrays refugee and concentration camps, as well as the Guatemalan version of the Native American reservation systems.

For twenty-five years without hiatus, Bill Farmer taught or worked on art commissions. Some examples include: the huge "Nigerian" corpus for a church in Africa, a welded steel sculpture on the outside wall of the Iowa School for the Deaf, and the "Horrors of War" enamels on wood created for the Prairie Peace Park in Nebraska. In Omaha, he also created fast action scenes at the Magic Theatre, capturing play characters on stage by painting enamel on paper in what must to be a unique series in the history of painting.

Between learning and teaching trips abroad, serving as artist-in-residence in schools and museums, Bill Farmer involved groups of people in every step of creative action on the way to art. Daily, relentlessly, Bill Farmer pulled form from chaos throughout his life. He wielded brush, crayon, chisel, hammer, hot wire, and yet other tools to limn on all kinds of material his visions of faith and his insights to humanity.

Awards
1961 - Good Neighbor Award, Rotary Club, Omaha, NE
1987 - Special Contribution to the Peace Community, Nebraskans for Peace
1988 - Dorothy Day Peacemaker Award, New Covenant Justice and Peace Center, Omaha, Nebraska
Francis House Volunteer