Three Generations, One Show: Watie White’s Family Exhibition at Gallery 1516

June 15th, 2026

There’s a particular kind of gift that’s impossible to repay — the kind that changes the direction of your life before you know a direction was being set. For Omaha artist Watie White, that gift came at sixteen, in the mountains of North Carolina, when his uncle brought him to Penland School of Crafts and enrolled him in his first drawing and printmaking classes. It opened something. And he has been trying to find a way to give it back ever since.

This May, he finally has.

White, one of Omaha’s most prolific visual artists, is presenting what he calls his most ambitious exhibition yet at Gallery 1516. The show brings together three members of his family — each a working artist, each at a different point in their creative life. His uncle, Mark Pizer, is now eighty-nine and internationally recognized as a founding figure of the American studio glass movement; his intricate glass sculptures have been exhibited worldwide for more than five decades. White’s niece recently completed her BFA at the University of Louisville, where she studied glass sculpture. And White himself fills the gallery’s considerable wall space with his largest paintings and woodblock prints — many of them pieces he’s been making for years, waiting for a room big enough to hold them.

The family connection is central to understanding the show — but so is what makes each artist distinct. Pizer’s glass works are dense, precise, the product of a lifelong technical vision. White’s paintings and prints are expansive and narrative, rooted in Midwest place and identity. His niece’s work is at the transitional moment all young artists eventually reach, when the questions of school give way to the quieter, harder questions you ask yourself alone in a studio.

White grew up in rural Illinois — poor, isolated, far from any of the cultural life he would later make his own. Two people changed that: his brother, who brought him to Chicago at twelve, and his uncle Mark, who brought him to Penland at sixteen. When his niece reached the same age and was living in the same rural world, White began doing exactly what had been done for him. He brought her to Omaha, opened his studio, and showed her a different kind of life.

He has also quietly observed something remarkable: that despite being separated for most of their adult lives by geography and decades, he and his uncle see the world — and make things — in strikingly similar ways. Preparing this exhibition has made those invisible threads visible.

The show opens in May at Gallery 1516. Admission is free.