Art and More Art: Amy Keever

Amy Keever ’05 was once told that whatever you did at age eight tells you what you love. “I was living in the panhandle of West Texas, sketching everything I could get my hands on,” she said. “I absolutely loved art.”

Keever was raised predominantly in East Texas but frequented Siloam Springs to visit her grandparents who, along with her parents, were big fans of JBU.

Keever’s journey took her from Tyler Junior College to JBU in 1990, then elsewhere. Years later, as a mother of two, she returned to JBU and completed her business degree through the online program. Today, she is a full-time artist and gallery owner living in Bentonville, Arkansas, and her artistic journey began as a child.

As a young mother, Keever dabbled in different mediums before landing on her favorite.

“The first mosaic I ever tried, my son was four months old, and my daughter was five. I just decided, ‘I’ll make a table out of glass.’ So, I took my great-aunt’s wooden table and didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I went to Lowe’s and got a tile cutter, which is not what you use. I got glass at Hobby Lobby and was determined to make it work. That project became my dining room table for the next 16 years. It was the medium that stuck with me. I started making two-dimensional mosaics.”

Keever’s art was inspired when visiting a Cathedral in Italy where she first saw a material called Smalti in the Cathedral’s mosaics. Smalti is handmade, hand-poured glass with a vibrant, rough surface that captures and reflects light in dynamic ways. She fell in love with the material and started implementing it into her wild pony and girl sculptures.

Recently, she has been plotting large-scale sculptures and added welding to her skill set to make them possible.

Many days, Keever is at her gallery on South Main Street in Bentonville, but she is frequently on the move. Last July, she was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in September, she will be in Cincinnati, Ohio, at shows featuring her artwork. She also has a month-long residency lined up in Ireland in 2025.

“That’s all I do is think about art. Art and more art,” she said.