Now Showing: Back Roads and Blue Skies

Paintings and Assemblages by Bill Stamats

July 2 - August 23, 2025

On Wednesday, July 2, the Abbe Creek Gallery unveiled paintings and assemblages of Cedar Rapids master artist Bill Stamats.

Titled “Back Roads and Blue Skies / Paintings and Assemblages,” the Stamats exhibition opens with an artist reception that night at 6:30pm in the uptown Mount Vernon gallery. His 16-piece exhibit runs through August 23.

Stamats will return to the Abbe Creek Gallery for an artist talk on Saturday July 19 at 11:30am.

A Midwest artist who creates neo-regionalist artwork, Stamats’ net result for this exhibit is an intensely colored, passionately created and playfully designed collection of original paintings which stem from his local and national meanderings.

Productions include pieces from series based on the Sac and Fox trail, barns and bridge on Rosedale Road in SE, Cedar Rapids, Three Forks, Montana, Deerfield, Massachusetts, and Watkins Glen, New York.

“People have historic connection to barns, they are the icon of farming in Iowa,” Stamats furthered.

Bill’s story begins with his father Peter Stamats, an art collector, who owned a significant library of art books.

“My father had a good eye for art, and a good rapport with galleries in New York,” Bill recounted, adding that long ago his father asked, “who’s this Ansel Adams guy?” He then started buying Adams prints. (Author’s note: Ansel Adams is America’s most renowned photographer, famous for his b/w prints of Yosemite National Park.)

Despite living in the surrounds of art, Stamats’ personal artistic journey took flight in his high school senior year at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. “There,” Bill recounted, “the art room was in a building basement, tucked away, an afterthought…”

After Deerfield Bill obtained a BFA in design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. An initial in-depth experience was his internship in New York for printmaker Kathy Caraccio. “She printed the work of other artists,” he explained, “and that hands-on experience got me interested in printmaking.”

After many years and geographic stops, Bill finally settled in his hometown of Cedar Rapids where he was Executive Vice President at Stamats Communications until October, 2024 when he retired from the business. Additionally, he and his wife Anne offer art appraisals.

Bill’s creative process involves “painting to such music as Sylvan Esso (electropop duo), or Black Pumas (American psychedelic soul band), and contemporary music, indie stuff.”

A signature element of Stamats’ paintings is the inclusion of subtle “ancestor spirits” which connect his family with the land, barns or bridges. His skies depart the commonplace with brilliant, unconventional colors. “It’s a funny thing how I decide the sky, the painting tells me what I need. The painting talks back to me. It’s a feeling…” Stamats explained.

“My work is a study of these structures and, by extension, the objects and relics of rural America. Part chronicle and part celebration, my paintings and assemblages are a tribute to practical beauty, to peeling paint and popped nails, to what is found again after being nearly forgotten,” Stamats concluded.