Diane Bush

Diane Bush is an artist who was born in Buffalo, N.Y. and now lives and creates work in Las Vegas, Nevada. She studied studio photography at Paddington Technical College in London, graduating in 1974, then returned to Buffalo, where she studied fine art photography at the University at Buffalo, receiving an MFA in 1981. Bush and her artist husband Steven Baskin were major presences at both Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and CEPA Gallery throughout the 1980s and 1990s. [https://www.dianebush.net/bio]

After relocating to Las Vegas in 1997, she continued and broadened her art-making practice while serving as a curator and board member of several not-for-profit organizations. In a 2013 story on her work, Las Vegas City Life described Bush as an “artist/activist/fun-having prankster.” To learn more about Diane Bush and her work, visit her website.

On her website, Diane Bush describes herself as:

an American activist artist and photographer, who trained in the U.K.  In her later years, Bush has embraced public art through public participation projects using fiber art (Yarn Bombing) and performance. “I think of myself as a problem solver that uses art (and humor) to get the job done.”

Diane Olson-Bush was born in Buffalo, N.Y. At the age of 18, she emigrated to the U.K. with a draft dodger, in response to the Vietnam War. After living there for ten years and working as a documentary photographer, she returned to the U.S. to attend to her ailing parents. Once back in Buffalo, N.Y. she obtained her master’s degree in photography from the State University of New York at Buffalo by documenting local boxing gyms and billiard halls.

After graduating, she spent seven years as staff photographer at the local affiliate of the National Public Broadcasting and ABC-TV stations. At the same time, she pursued self-imposed artistic projects and established a non-profit public arts organization, “URBAN ART.”

Diane returned to academia by spending six years as the Coordinator of the Photography Department at a local two-year college just outside of Buffalo. While her students were winning numerous national awards and prizes, Diane was doing the same with her own professional and artistic work, through the generosity of such entities as Kodak, Polaroid, Women in Photography, Nikon, Ilford, the Royal Photographic Society, Friends of Photography (San Francisco), The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the United Nations.

Throughout her professional career, Diane has continued to exhibit her work in approximately 2-5 group shows per year, and has been exhibited and published locally, nationally, and internationally, including shows in Japan, China, Great Britain, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Since her relocation to Las Vegas in 1997, she has been awarded 15 grants and a Fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council. In 2009 she became a U.S.A. Fellowship nominee. Diane continues to teach occasional photographic workshops and regularly contributes art and donations to Buffalo and Las Vegas-based arts organizations.

Diane’s satirical and fine art imagery sampled from T.V. and other sources spans over 30 years, and includes videos, talking pictures, performance work, and stills. Her monograph, WARHEADS, published in 2005, contains images that satirize America’s news censorship of the Iraqi War, [that] are more relevant now, than ever.  These were created by shooting TV surfaces with a macro lens at obtuse angles and throwing bleach on the resulting C-prints. Currently, she is creating fiber-based works aimed at satirizing president Trump’s self-admitted sexual predatory behavior, called “Make a Merkin Great Again.”

Diane is a past President and Director of the Contemporary Arts Center of Las Vegas where she lives with her artist husband, Steve Baskin, and Mookie the cat. Both she and her husband collect everything vintage, but have a very soft spot for anything mid-century, mod and psychedelic.