“First and foremost, I am a landscape artist. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s all there. All you gotta do is look.” -Craig Roper

by Alex Priest… curator for the Bemis Art Center in Omaha, NE. “Craig Roper’s content-rich, process-oriented work is an ever-evolving landscape. Referencing the culture and ethos of the western landscape, Roper considers himself a “landscape artist” and includes imagery and traces of road trips, guns, cars, driving, signage, textures, and the debris of the land to form an encyclopedia of the Great Plains. Moving beyond a singular medium, he continually reworks old work into new. He intends to move each piece so far beyond the original that it morphs into something else.”

by J. Fatima Martins… “For a long time, Roper was a challenging artist to label because he’s successful at cleverly crisscrossing methodologies and art-making practices - he paints, he’s a photographer, he’s an experimental sculptor, and most importantly he’s a conceptual installation artist, possibly a performance artist, and occasionally an exhibition curator. He thinks and creates in a heady imperfect in-between world of realism and abstraction; his vocabulary is that of metaphors, allegory, nuance, and adult playfulness. His aesthetic is modern-prairie: a fusion of sophisticated urban and rural qualities.” -click here to read the full review.

by Michael Krainak… Roper frames (un)common phobias in patriotic red, white and blue at Project Project in Omaha. -click here to read the full review.

by Uncle Ray… That Roper Thang... When Timothy McVeigh was about to be executed for blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, PETA reached out to him and asked him to consider making his last meal vegan. He suggested… -click here to read the full review.

by Hanna Jorgensen… Journey Into True West -Nebraska artist Craig Roper has been “discovering art” for over 35 years. Despite being color blind, Roper is still inspired by his life and the landscape around him to produce bodies of work that he is passionate about… -click here to read full review.

by Rick Brown, for the Kearney Hub... True West -When Nebraska artist Craig Roper finds himself at an artistic impasse, he’s willing to take his creative process to another level — and leave bullet holes in the aftermath. -click here to read the full review.

By Cindy Lange-Kubick for The Lincoln Journal Star. -The artist arrived late to his own party at Iron Tail Gallery last week. He couldn’t help himself. -click here to read the full review.

by J. Fatima Martins for Art Move Magazine. -Craig Roper in "Nebraska Rising". The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, 724 S. 12th St., Omaha, Nebraska

“Conceptual installation artist and curator, Craig Roper, who's widely known for his "Photo Bundles," layered, mixed-media constructions which take the form of mini-agricultural geometric haystacks made of industrial man-made materials, continues his exploration into how the landscape has been altered by human intervention. In "Nebraska Rising," he is showing  five of his most iconic and diverse pieces: "Dirty Shooter", "Paintings Crushed by Rocks, Stumps and Debris," "Photo Bundles," "Empire," and "Badlands."

In all his work, the prominent motif, either real or imagined, is always aggressive human trespassing upon the land. Roper creates his smart dialogues, which are sometimes quite poetic, with a serious comic awareness generating a cheeky and witty energy that often mystifies his audience. His installations are fragmented immersive interpretations evoking the act of passing through wide open spaces while carrying with you, leaving behind, or discovering the artificiality and constructs of civilization. He pulls out details and nuances that are often ignored or highlights conspicuous features to generate anxiety and questions.

In installations such as "Paintings Crushed by Rocks, Stumps, and Debris," he's commenting on the ridiculousness of the formalist and academic art world itself while at the same time elevating his observations about the destruction of natural beauty. He's also a deep observer of contemporary culture, borrowing without judgment pop-culture motifs and transforming them into insightful and sometimes uncomfortable narratives that spotlight the contemporary polemic against masculinity. There is a 'wild-west' feel to Roper's work that is coupled with a raw urban aesthetic. Roper engages the fine line between primitivism and fine art. The ugly is beautiful to him. His work is a powerful slow burning mixture of studied planning and involuntary emotionality. -J.F.M.

by Julien R. Fielding. -on Craig Roper’s Gun Paintings. -click here to read the full review…

by Craig Roper. -On My Gun Paintings. I made these 4 paintings 20+ years ago. They were timely and relevant then and probably more so now. -click here to read the full review…