Opening reception: Sunday, April 7, 2013, 3-5 pm Artist interview with Nicholas Frank: Sunday, April 21, 2013, 2 pm
With Sheila Held: Rappaccini's Daughter, Lynden inaugurates a series of occasional exhibitions that will investigate the work of artists who have taken--in various combinations, either directly or obliquely—women, nature and science as their subject.
Sheila Held works within a traditional form, tapestry weaving, and up-ends it to create images that reflect a visually compelling personal cosmology. She simultaneously exploits the medium's limitations--the inflexible grid that forms the basis of weaving, the particular ways in which color relationships can develop, the textures that make the surface--and moves beyond them by assembling and juxtaposing found images to explore ideas about human existence. Her pieces retain the tactile qualities of weaving but read more like paintings, and that unlikely confluence of idea, image and medium is at once novel and powerful. Whether or not she is addressing the theme explicitly--as in her series Women + Science or in individual works like The Plantmaster, Ecotourism or Rappaccini’s Daughter—Held tries to “access the point where magic, science, religion, art and nature intersect.”
About the Artist
Sheila Held's tapestries have been exhibited in solo and group shows, both locally and around the country. She has won several awards, including a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship and multiple prizes in juried exhibitions. She has executed many commissions, both private and public, including pieces for the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marian College in Fond du Lac, and Bethesda Lutheran Homes and Services World Headquarters. She is currently a full-time artist working out of her studio in her home in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.
Surfacing: Jessica Meuninck-Ganger & Nathaniel Stern Feburary 9, 10 am-4 pm: The artists will complete an installation in the front porch during our Third Annual Winter Carnival.
View a slideshow of the work here.
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern show the most recent fruits of their collaboration in conjunction with Print:MKE, the SGC International Print Conference. In addition to works that fuse printmaking and video, they will be showing a three dimensional work related to the screen-based work, and will be creating a new installation in the porch windows at Lynden that continues their exploration of surfaces, layers, membranes, matrices and the physical relationship between viewer and object. Also on view: prints from the Bradley Family Foundation collection.
About the Artists Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries near her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, nationally and internationally. Her works on paper and books are included in several private and public collections, including the Weisman Museum of Art, the Target Corporation, and the Special Collections at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. She has received residencies and fellowships all over the world, and has provided printmaking and book arts workshops, courses, and programs in North America, South Korea, and South Africa. Meuninck-Ganger received her MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2004 and currently heads the Print and Narrative Forms area and is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Nathaniel Stern is an experimental installation and video artist, Internet artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, mixed reality art and online interventions, to digital and traditional printmaking, latex and concrete sculpture--often with kinetic parts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Furtherfield Gallery, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and several commercial and experimental galleries throughout the US, South Africa and Europe. His work has been featured in the New York Daily News, PBS.org, Time.com, BBC Radio 4, Wired.com, the Washington Post, CNET, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Guardian and Guardian UK, the Sunday Independent, the Daily Mail, Scientific American, Forbes.com, The Huffington Post, NY Arts Magazine, Mashable.com, the Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, and We Make Money Not Art. Stern holds a design degree from Cornell University, a studio art master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU), and received his PhD from Trinity College Dublin. He is an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern’s collaborative print and video work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at commercial and experimental galleries and public museums across Africa, Europe and the Americas. It has been featured in Richard Noyce’s book, Printmaking Beyond the Edge, the Mail and Guardian, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sunday Times, Art South Africa magazine, Rhizome.org, and several contemporary arts web sites and blogs.
Leo Michelson, born into Riga’s largely assimilated Jewish community in 1887, created the eight paintings on view in the early 1950s after surviving two world wars, arriving in New York (he became an American citizen in 1945) and entering into a late and happy marriage. Seven of the paintings reflect his love of Paris—his wife was French, he had established his studio in Paris in the 1930s and he had become a French citizen before fleeing the Nazis—and Venice; the eighth, from 1954, is one of a lifelong series of portraits of flowers, a subject that he approached with renewed energy in his late 60s and 70s. Michelson was fascinated by light in motion, and developed a technique of fixing powdered color in superimposed layers to create a surface that resembles fresco or pastel. These eight exuberant works are luminously yellow, with scenes sketched atop the mass of color or forms outlined in fluid black lines. Other artists hung throughout the first floor of the house include Marcel Gromaire (whom Michelson encountered in Paris between the wars), André Brasilier, and Marino Marini.
Artist Reception: Sunday, October 28, 2012 – 3-5 pm
Follow Marcasiano's residency on our blog. Le nuancier, 2009
Colombe Marcasiano is the first artist selected for a month-long residency at Lynden. She will arrive on September 27, 2012 and will spend the month of October onsite. Marcasiano’s sculpture practice, which often employs recycled wood and discarded and short-lived materials such as cardboard; her history of making site-specific temporary work (both indoors and out); and her interest in responding to different conditions make her an excellent first candidate for the residency. During her stay, she will create a temporary outdoor sculpture that will be unveiled at a reception on Sunday, 28 October 2012.
While at Lynden, Marcasiano will be connecting with the local community of artists, curators and art students, as well as the community served by the sculpture garden. Marcasiano will offer critiques and talks at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and she will meet informally with visiting K-12 students (it is one of the goals of our education programs to introduce students to living artists and their processes). Members and daily visitors may encounter her on the grounds or in her workspace in the barn. Be sure to say hello!
The Lynden Sculpture Garden Residency Program is designed to enable artists to immerse themselves in Lynden’s sculpture collection, its landscape and the surrounding community for an extended period as they make temporary outdoor work. Our primary interest is in three-dimensional work, and in hosting artists who are working, as we are, at the intersection of art and nature.
This residency made possible in part with the generous support of the Cultural Service of the Consulate General of France in Chicago.
About Colombe Marcasiano
Colombe Marcasiano was born in 1974, and lives and works in Paris, France. She studied at l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris (1996 to 1999) and at De Ateliers in Amsterdam (1999-2001). Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie d’art de Créteil (2011) and Galerie du Haut Pavé, Paris (2009). Her work will be included in the upcoming Jeune Creations 2012 at 104 Gallery in Paris; recent group shows include On n’est pas la pour vendre des cravats at Lezoux; Mots de passe at 6b Gallery, Saint Denis; Petits Volumes at Haut Pavé; as well as exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Nevers, Istanbul, Amsterdam, London, Montbeliard, Tulette, Ystad and Andrésy. She has been an artist in residence at Clermont-Ferrand, France (2011-2012); FLACC, Genk, Belgium (2009-2010); Chamalot, Moustier Ventadour (2009); and Triangle France, La Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille and Палитра свободы, Yalta, Ukraine (both in 2008).
Inside/Outside: Will Pergl + Shona Macdonald Striations and Structure August 8-November 11, 2012 Opening reception: Wednesday, August 8, 5-7 pm. Artists' talk: Thursday, September 20, 5:30 pm.
The opening reception and artist talk are both free and open to the public.
In this new iteration of the Inside/Outside series, we present two artists, Will Pergl and Shona Macdonald, who are interested in creating “resonant geographies.” They locate themselves in place and space by paying attention to what is around them, and each artist’s work is marked by a certain attentiveness to the mundane, the quotidian—the physical structures that form the background of our visual lives. In their current work, the prosaic, the man-made, and the humdrum are transformed into intricate and compelling objects. Will Pergl translates and elevates urban structures and objects--cell phone towers, fire hydrants, construction signs--into lyrical, rhythmic forms. Electrical plants, water towers, and propane tanks stranded in the desolate New Mexican desert inform Shona Macdonald’s work, created during a year-long residency in the isolated Southeastern corner of that state.
Pergl and Macdonald share a deeply rooted attachment to linear form and an interest in oddities and anomalies. In their work, man-made structures emerge as singular forms against urban Milwaukee skies or barren New Mexican scrub. Macdonald will show some of her New Mexican paintings, which explore towers, tanks and fences in barren landscapes, and two of her floor pieces, Desert/Floor and Waves, Shore. Pergl will be making a new outdoor work, and will be responding to different indoor spaces with wood sculpture that investigates the disconnect between the digital and physical realms.
Tower, Will Pergl
Shona Macdonald received her MFA in studio arts in 1996 from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA in 1992 from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. Solo shows include the Roswell Art Museum, Roswell, New Mexico (2011); Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand (2010); Proof Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts (2009); Reeves Contemporary, New York (2008); Den Contemporary, Los Angeles (2007); Skestos-Gabriele, Chicago (2005); Galerie Refugium, Berlin, Germany (2002); and Fassbender Gallery, Chicago (1998 and 2000). She has participated in numerous group shows across the United States, as well as in Melbourne, Australia. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Art News and New American Paintings. She has been a visiting artist at over forty institutions, including Wimbledon College of Art, London, (1998); the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, Canada (2002); Cornell University (2006); and Georgia State University, Atlanta (2007). Macdonald was a 2009 recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and was a 2010-11 Fellow at Roswell Artist-in-Residence in Roswell, New Mexico. She is an associate professor of studio art at the university of Massachusetts Amherst.
Will Pergl is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Pergl received his MFA from Cornell University and a BFA from Southern Illinois University. Pergl's sculpture, video and drawing have been shown in over 20 solo exhibits and 30 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Current Tendencies II at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee and a site-specific installation at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Pergl’s video Rock was screened as part of the Milwaukee International One-Minute Video Fair at the Tate Modern in London, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His work has been reviewed in Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers and Dialogue. Pergl is an associate professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and has also taught at Cornell University, Grinnell College and at the University of New Hampshire at Durham.
Residency: July 1-15, 2012 Chiral Formation is currently on view in the Little Lake.
Chiral Formation in Winter, video by Roy Staab
Chiral Formation video by Roy Staab
Chiral Formation slideshow
Kat Murrell of ThirdCoast Digest interviews Roy Staab at Lynden
Roy Staab, an artist-in-residence at Lynden this summer, will unveil a new, ephemeral site-specific sculpture in the Little Lake on Sunday, July 15, 2012 as part of Coming (and Going) Attractions. The artist will be on hand to talk about his work throughout the afternoon.
Born in Milwaukee in 1941, Roy Staab received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1969 after studying, sometimes at night, at the Layton School and the Milwaukee Institute of Technology. He spent some time in the area as a substitute teacher and art director, and singing opera, before taking off for Europe, where he spent most of the ‘70s, primarily in France—seeing the things he had studied and making work. By 1980, Roy was living in New York, where he began to venture outside the studio more regularly (he had made plucked chalk line drawings in the south of France in 1979). He raided dumpsters and accumulated the discards from sweatshops in Soho to make installations in his neighborhood near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From there, he began to work in nature, or at least the natural areas within the city, working with the materials that were readily available on site. Roy claims that this was a practical decision—he had no car and no good way to transport materials—but he was also motivated by an interest in the ephemeral and the site-specific, by an interest in place and time.
Roy began to receive grants for this work, the first from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and invitations to create installations around the world: Japan, Finland, Italy, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, France, Korea, Taiwan, and the United States (he recently returned from a residency on the tidal shore of the Mississippi River south of New Orleans where he created a piece in the water from black willow sticks). He received more grants and awards, including a Japan/American Artist Exchange Creative Artist Fellowship, Pollack/Krasner Grant, and a Gottlieb Foundation Award. His paintings, drawings and photographs can be found in the collections of the Musée d'art moderne and Le fonds national d'art contemporain in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
According to Roy, his work was first shown locally in 1963/4 at an exhibition at the Jewish Community Center, then on the East Side. His self-portrait won third prize and was purchased. Gone from our midst for many years, Roy’s work appeared in the “Uniquely Wisconsin” show at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 1980, and eleven years later in “Sculptors on Paper” at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art Museum.
Roy would come home to visit occasionally, and in 1991, as he traveled between New York and California making drawings on the beach with a stick and a loop of rope, you could find him (briefly) on the shores of Lake Michigan, near the Milwaukee-Shorewood border, drawing variations on the oval in the sand. Lake Michigan did not have the tides of the Atlantic or the Pacific, and Roy had to clean the beach prior to drawing, fetching water to fill and darken the lines before taking photographs.
The 1990s brought Roy’s work more frequently to Milwaukee venues, beginning in 1992 with a show at the Haggerty Museum of Art. He returned home for good in 1994, though the peripatetic nature of his work means that he continues to travel in response to invitations to make new installations: “I felt,” Roy writes, “that I could use Milwaukee as my base to go anywhere in the world to make my art and I do.” Roy had several shows in Milwaukee galleries after his return, and by 1999 was exhibiting regularly with Kent Mueller. In 1997 he made a snow work as part of MIAD’s “Different Site Installations,” curated by Mark Lawson and Jill Sebastian (last year, when there was still such a thing as snow and the pond at the Lynden Sculpture Garden could be relied upon to freeze, he made another). When he returned from Japan in 1997, where he was spending a significant amount of time at that point, he had an exhibition of photographs of the Japanese pieces at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts.
Up to that point, most of what had been seen of Roy’s work in Milwaukee were the photographs documenting outdoor installations in other locations. In the new century, that changed, and site-specific works turned up as part of the “Art Street Windows” project on Water Street (2001). In 2002 a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board led to the creation of “Spring Ring” on the grounds of the Charles Allis Art Museum. The Third Ward Sculpture Walk gave rise to “Catalano Triangle, Artscape” in 2004; “Neptune’s Arc” in 2006; and “Historic Rhythms, Artscape” in 2007. Also in 2007, Roy made three works for Sculpture Third Ward at the invitation of Elaine Erickson. A year earlier Roy was commissioned to make “Nature Belle” for the Hank Aaron Trail, an ephemeral work that was beautifully documented by Mary Louise Schumacher in words and video (Roy still admires Mary Louise for getting up at 5 am to capture the work at daybreak). Mike Brenner invited Roy to make “Crossing” at Hotcakes in 2006, and Mayor Jeannette Bell of West Allis, in a lovely instance of civic generosity, celebrated the 100th anniversary of that city by commissioning Roy to create a work on the grounds of the West Allis City Hall (“Fountain in the Sky”).
In 2009, Staab was the subject of a retrospective at Inova at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The thought at the time (to Roy’s endless dismay) was that as he approached 70, it was time to gather up the different strands of his career and, as curator Nicholas Frank put it, “present a complete picture of the artist.” The Inova exhibition included early drawings and geometric experiments and emphasized the connection between those works on paper and the later outdoor work. Roy made two new works, one in the gallery and one outside at the Urban Ecology Center in Riverside Park. As with many of his outdoor works, Roy enlisted volunteers for the project. The communal thread in Roy’s work is an ongoing one; sometimes Roy is off by himself in nature, at other times he is working with a group to create a new space that they can collectively—and temporarily-- animate.
So Roy is now 70, and he’s still drawing on the earth, or in the sky, scratching an existence in a particularly unremunerative corner of the art field (he can’t, after all, sell those transient outdoor works, and such is Roy’s compulsion to make that he will often engage directly with the environment when there is no commission in sight—see, for instance, the snow works he makes in his backyard). He is a bit like the weeds he braids and binds, stubborn and prolific. In 2012, the Milwaukee Arts Board named Roy an Artist of the Year, honoring him not for his prickliness but for his tenacity and his ability to continually make us see the world around us, and our place in it, in a new way.
Opening reception: Sunday, May 20, 2012, 3-5 pm
The artists will offer an informal tour of the exhibition at 4 pm.
In Gos Sa Mer, their first collaborative endeavor, artists Santiago Cucullu + Ester Partegàs examine the paradoxical relationship between the seemingly natural environment of the Lynden Sculpture Garden and the industrial appearance of the sculptures installed within it. The landscape and sculpture at Lynden give rise to a series of oppositions: nature/culture, organic/industrial, shades of colors/primary colors, roundness/sharpness, to name a few. In Gos Sa Mer, Santiago Cucullu and Ester Partegàs scrutinize these dualities, questioning their polarity and undermining our assumptions about which end is which. The artists develop an intrinsic dialogue that reverses charges and blurs boundaries: in this dialogue, trees become pillars, and sculptures, living beings. The arboreal landscape appears as a camouflaged installation of vertical structures, modular and architectural, and the sculptures are re-imagined as branches and fruit insinuated among the vertical forms. Moreover, the sculptures’ failure to live up to the Minimalist ideal of purity of form, material, color and installation--the works at Lynden get dirty and scratched, their colors fade; they are in need of constant maintenance—allows Cucullu and Partegàs to suggest that they are alive and in need of human care.
The project became an opportunity to explore the dynamic tension that holds these opposing elements together. The structure Cucullu and Partegàs discovered resembled a cobweb, made up of symbiotic relationships, familiar and sympathetic contrasts, accepted contradictions, humorous incongruities, and ambiguities. As the plan for the installation evolved, Partegàs began to associate the ideas of interrelations in space, of interdependency, and of simultaneous unity and dispersion with the word “gossamer.” In its syllables she heard something that “sounded like it could be a Berlin-based techno band, or a king from a fairy tale.” Cucullu immediately responded with Gossamer, the Looney Tunes monster created by Chuck Jones. Another living paradox, Gossamer is the embodiment of strength and delicacy. Terrifyingly huge and menacing, he is covered in fine hair (in a shade of red that a Minimalist would love) that signals that he is also a vulnerable and kind-hearted creature. “His fingernails,” the artists note, “are painted as if they were the screws that hold that mass of thin, delicate hair in place.” In addition to the collaborative installation in the gallery, Gos Sa Mer includes six prints by Santiago Cucullu and Ester Pargegàs's hand-painted T-shirts.
This exhibition was made possible in part through the support of the Viriginia Commonwealth University Sculpture + Extended Media Department.
About the Artists
SANTIAGO CUCULLU (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969) lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA from The Minneapolis Institute of Art and Design (1999) and a BFA with a concentration in painting from the University of Hartford, Connecticut (1992).
Selected solo shows include: Galeria Labor, Mexico City; Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Naples, Italy; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee (2011); Loock Galerie, Berlin (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California (2006); Mori Art Museum, Japan (2004); Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago (2003); Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis (2002).
Selected group exhibitions include: Hendershot Gallery, New York (2011); K21, Dusseldorf, Germany and Biennial of the Americas, Denver (both 2010); Rowley Kennerk Gallery, Chicago (2009); Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas and Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2008); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal (2007); Singapore Biennial and Camden Art Center, London (both 2006); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Shanghai Biennial, China (both 2005); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2004); Fondazione Sandretto Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2003); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2000).
Cucullu is represented by Galeria Labor, Mexico City; Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Naples; Loock Galerie, Berlin; and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee.
ESTER PARTEGÀS (La Garriga, Barcelona, 1972) lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. She holds an MFA from Universitat de Barcelona (1996) and a Visual Arts Diploma in Multimedia Art from the Universität der Kunste, Berlin (1998).
Selected solo shows include: Foxy Production, New York; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California (both 2010); Aldrich Museum for Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2008); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2007); Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Viriginia (2006); Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona; Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York (both 2003); Rice University Art Gallery, Houston (2002).
Selected group exhibitions include: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centro Artes Visuales Helga de Alvear, Cáceres (both 2011); Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York; Denison Museum, Granville, Ohio (both 2010); Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Macro Future, Depart Foundation, Rome; Foundation CaixaForum, Madrid (all 2009); 2nd Moscow Biennale (2007); Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; Walker's Point Center for the Arts, Milwaukee; Cercle (all 2006); SculptureCenter, New York (2005); Queens Museum of Art, New York (2003); Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, Arnolfini, Bristol (both 2002), Public Art Fund, Brooklyn, New York (2001).
Partegàs is represented by Foxy Production, New York; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California; Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid; and NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona. She is on the faculty of the Sculpture + Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.
More information: http://www.esterpartegas.com/
This exhibition examines the role played by Haiti in the imagination of Orville Bulman (1904-1978), a Midwestern businessman-turned-artist, and his patrons. Set primarily in the 1950s, when Haitian cultural export—particularly of what is now referred to as first generation Haitian art--was on the rise and the country was opening itself to tourism, and when Americans were awash with a postwar optimism that celebrated America’s political and economic power, it tells us relatively little about Haiti at mid-century and a great deal about the ways Americans saw themselves and the rest of the world. As an artist, Orville Bulman was not so much self-taught as self-made; he worked assiduously to create and perpetuate his own narrative, and he made liberal use of contemporary American stereotypes of businessmen and artists to define his niche in the art market of the ‘50s and ‘60s—a market in which Abstract Expressionism was the reigning avant-garde. For Bulman, Haiti—which he visited for 12 days in 1952--was the source of a visual vocabulary, a style, and a sense of himself as a professional artist that sustained his career for more than 25 years.
Also on view: watercolors of Haiti by Emilio Sanchez.
Haiti and the Midwestern Imagination is held in conjunction with Haiti 2012: Dreams and reality € pays rêvé, pays réel: (March 5-9, 2012), a celebration of contemporary Haitian art, cinema and literature. Two years after a catastrophic earthquake devastated Haiti, this conference, the first of its kind in the United States, focuses on the vibrancy of Haitian cultural production in the twenty-first century by highlighting three art forms in three days: cinema, visual arts, and literature. The presenters include six prominent, award-winning Haitian filmmakers, artists, writers and journalists living in Haiti or in exile. More details on the conference here.
About Orville Bulman
Orville Bulman was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1904. During Bulman’s childhood, his father invented products for the retail industry including a twine dispenser and a paper cutter that became the foundation of the successful E.O. Bulman Company. The younger Bulman, who drew cartoons as a high school student, spent the year following graduation in Chicago, working as a newspaper cartoonist and studying briefly at the Art Institute. He returned to Grand Rapids to work in the family business, where he continued to draw cartoons and illustrate ads while pursuing painting as an avocation. It was not until the late ‘30s that his paintings--cityscapes and genre scenes--began to see the light of day.
Around 1946, Bulman began to rearrange his life to put painting, rather than the family business, at its center. He started to spend his winters in Palm Beach, Florida, explaining that the chronic pain from earlier neck injuries required a warm climate for recovery. He continued to direct his businesses (there were now two companies back in Grand Rapids) from Palm Beach, and by the early ‘50s he had become president of the Bulman Manufacturing Company, a position he retained until 1975, despite the sale of the company in 1971 and of his Grand Rapids home in 1974. Early on, Bulman sought out Eric Lundgren, an artist in West Palm Beach, as a teacher; he also spent brief periods at Oxbow in Saugatuck, Michigan and the Woodstock Art Colony in New York. At the latter, he formed a friendship with Adolf Dehn, an artist who spent time in Haiti in 1948 and 1949, and who may have piqued Bulman’s interest in the island and Vodou. By 1950 Bulman had launched a career of solo shows at galleries that continued unabated until his death in 1978. While his earliest shows were in Palm Beach, Grand Rapids, Madison, Wisconsin, Wilmington, Delaware and Knoxville, Tennessee, by 1955 he was exhibiting in New York (first at the Grand Central Art Galleries, and then at the Hammer Galleries) with Chicago, Paris and Los Angeles following before the end of the decade. By his own account, he had had 40 one-man shows and sold about 2000 paintings by 1975.
About Emilio Sanchez
Emilio Sanchez was born in Camagüey, Cuba in 1921. He moved to New York City in 1944 and began studying at the Art Students League. Though he lived in New York until his death in 1999, it was in Cuba that he became fascinated with the play of light and shadow on colored forms, a dominant characteristic of his works. These watercolors are among his early stylized, figurative works. In the 1960s he moved toward abstraction, making architecture his focus. His mature architectural works are stripped down, simplified forms that convey universal meaning; the paintings often capture the effect of light on color. Sanchez had over sixty solo exhibitions and was included in numerous group shows in museums and galleries in the United States, Latin America and Europe. His art is in private and public collections including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He received first prize at the 1974 Biennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Gary John Gresl & Valerie Christell's Mound of Being - Disintegration
Artists' reception: Sunday, February 5, 2012, 3-5 pm
The Lynden Sculpture Garden hosts the Wisconsin Visual Artists juried exhibition featuring the works of WVA Southeast Chapter members. The exhibition is juried by Fo Wilson, Assistant Professor at Columbia College in Chicago.
Wilson chose 32 works by 26 artists. Taking the location of the exhibition at Lynden as her starting point, Wilson focused on sculptural form. The sculptures chosen range from intimate tabletop pieces to large outdoor works. When selecting two-dimensional work, Wilson identified “paintings, prints and drawings that had a winter theme or responded well to the beautiful grounds of the site.”
Participating artists incude Rïse Andersen, Diane Anderson, Allen Caucutt, Dara Chappie, Valerie J. Christell (with a solo work and a collaborative installation with Gary John Gresl), Dagmara Costello, Sally Duback, Audrey Dulmes, Tom Eddington, Pat Hidson, Angela Laughingheart, Darron Lillian, Jim Maki, Gene Mihleisen, Gary Niebuhr, Sandra Nowicki, Mark Overs, Kris Reicher, David Sear, Colette Odya Smith, Jean D. Sobon, Jane Boller Stoebel, Tori Tasch, Bilhenry Walker and Rochelle Whiteman.
Four prizes were awarded: Rïse Andersen, “Roundabout” (First Prize), Diane Anderson, “Death of the Garter” (Second Prize), Valerie J. Christell & Gary John Gresl, “Mound of Being – Disintegration” (Third Prize), and Gary Niebuhr, “Horse Flies” (Merchandise Award).
The work hangs throughout the first floor of the house and includes two works on the patio.
About Fo Wilson
Fo Wilson graduated with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design’s Furniture Design program in 2005 with a concentration in Art history, Theory and Criticism. Prior to her graduate studies, she ran her own graphic design consultancy with offices in New York and the San Francisco Bay area. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Columbia College in Chicago, and previously taught at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Massachusetts and Dartmouth, as well as the California College of Art (formerly CCAC) and Parsons School of Design. She writes and lectures about art, design and craft to international audiences. Her furniture-based work is exhibited nationally, and her design work is included in the collection of The Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design.
About Wisconsin Visual Artists
Wisconsin Visual Artists (WVA) is a not-for-profit membership-based organization made up of visual artists working in a wide variety of media and supporters of Wisconsin Art. They are united to advance opportunities and services for artists and the general public, and are committed to the importance and value of art and its creation in our society.
Small sculptures from the collection by Barney Bright, Mary Callery, Émile Gilioli, Milton Hebald, Sergio Lanzavecchia and James Rosati, and a pastel by Hans Hartung.
Peg and Harry Bradley began collecting monumental sculpture in 1962 with the purchase of Gerhard Marcks’s The Bremen Town Musicians (1951). In the decade prior to that, the Bradleys had been acquiring small sculptures, as well as paintings and works on paper, and Peg Bradley continued to collect small sculpture after she began to actively seek large works for Lynden.
The eight works in this exhibition give us some insight into Peg Bradley’s interests and collecting habits. She bought from galleries with whom she had long-standing relationships—M. Knoedler, Fine Arts Associates, Galerie Louis Carré--and it is likely that she purchased particular pieces after she saw them in exhibitions on 57th Street or in the 8th arrondissement. Most of the work was new, and made by often peripatetic 20th-century European and American artists (Mary Callery and Milton Hebald left the United States for Paris and Rome, respectively; Hans Hartung made his way to Paris after completing his art studies in Germany). As this small sample shows, Peg Bradley collected both figurative and abstract works (sometimes both from the same artist) and was broad-minded about materials; in addition to these sculptures, other works in the collection are made of various metals, stone, glass and plexiglass.
About the Sculpture
James Rosati is represented in the outdoor collection by his untitled Corten steel sculpture of 1975/1976. Leda was purchased nearly 20 years earlier, in 1958, from Fine Arts Associates in New York. The piece was part of a group exhibition at the gallery in May, and was featured in the photograph that accompanied the review in The New York Times. The exhibition included several artists, both sculptors and painters, whose work Mrs. Bradley collected.
Mrs. Bradley purchased Gilioli’s The Vase of Flowers from the Galerie Louis Carré in
Paris in 1959. This was a gallery that Mrs. Bradley had patronized previously, buying three paintings by Marcel Gromaire early in 1952. In 1961 she returned to purchase a second work by Gilioli, Le Petit Glacier. Four additional Gilioli works may be found in the Bradley Collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
By 1965, when Mrs. Bradley purchased The Budding Crisis in Rome, she had acquired large-scale works by Aldo Calo, Henry Moore and George Rickey. She came across Sergio Lanzavecchia, a joiner and self-taught “scrap iron wizard,” early in his career—he had just begun showing his sculpture in 1962—and she bought a second work, The Garden, on the same visit. This work is now in the Bradley Collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Hebald’s Scooter was acquired in Rome in 1966. Hebald, who was born in New York City, travelled to Italy in 1955 on a Prix de Rome fellowship and didn’t return until 2004. He is known for his figurative works and for many public commissions, including the 220-foot Zodiac Screen (1961), a series of twelve monumental bas-relief representations of the Zodiac on what was then the Pan American World Airways terminal at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport.
Barney Bright’s Sara, originally part of the outdoor sculpture collection, was purchased from the Naples Art Gallery in Florida in 1968. It moved indoors when the house was renovated in 2009-2010.
Peg Bradley began collecting Mary Callery’s small sculptures in 1961. Callery is one of several female sculptors in the collection—Barbara Hepworth, Linda Howard, Marta Pan and Beverly Pepper all have works on the grounds. In March/April 1961, the Knoedler gallery in New York produced Symbols, an exhibition of Callery works; it included Composition, The Letter S. Christian Zervos, writing in the catalogue and making an argument for Callery as an artist equally in thrall to “reality, sign and technique,” noted that “For Callery the sign has the same power as a living model of creating tension in the depths of the unconscious, of provoking unexpected stimulations, of containing a host of formal combinations.” Half a year later, Mrs. Bradley returned to Knoedler to purchase an earlier figurative work, Two Sailors. Knoedler had another show of recent Callery sculpture, covering the years 1961-1964, in early 1965. Here one could see the letters E, H, J, P and two versions of Z. The following year Mrs. Bradley purchased Alphabet Letter J, No. 2 (1962).
Opening reception: Sunday, September 25, 2011, 4:30-7:30 pm
The opening will include a curators’ ambulatory talk, a chance to sample the specially-brewed beer, and Hannah Weinberger’s participatory concert at 6:15 pm.
A video screening is planned for October.
Dressing the Monument is the culmination of an 18-month series of exhibitions entitled Inside/Outside. Pairs of artists were selected to exhibit work in the gallery and to undertake temporary installations on the grounds. The Lynden Sculpture Garden opened to the public in May 2010, and by choosing Inside/Outside as our inaugural theme, we hoped to initiate a dialogue between the new indoor gallery and the environment--both sculpture and nature--beyond its walls; to explore Lynden’s transition from a private, domestic space to a public space; and to define Lynden’s new position within the art community.
The central challenge of a permanent outdoor collection is its permanence, and though the changing seasons and the passage of time (trees grow, flora and fauna evolve, Corten degrades) introduce elements of change, Inside/Outside has provided a series of opportunities for artists to reframe the collection and to re-present it—and the individual works in it--to the public. This establishes the basis for ongoing engagement with Lynden and its collection.
With Dressing the Monument, an exhibition of temporary sculpture and performances across the grounds and in the gallery, we expand the dialogue to include artists from beyond the region and the United States, and we re-establish Lynden as a venue with an international scope and a continuing commitment to contemporary art.
Dressing the Monument features the first institutional collaboration of Tobias Madison & Kaspar Müller, and Hannah Weinberger’s first site-specific exhibition, in the United States. These Swiss artists will be joined by nine artists from New York and the American Midwest in an exhibition that responds to Lynden’s permanent collection of monumental sculpture.
Participating artists: Tobias Madison & Kaspar Müller (Switzerland); Hannah Weinberger (Switzerland); Nicholas Frank (Milwaukee); Michelle Grabner & Brad Killam (Chicago); Lucas Knipscher (New York); John Miller (New York) & Richard Hoeck (Vienna); David Robbins (Milwaukee); and Anicka Yi/Matt Sheridan Smith (New York). The exhibition is curated by Piper Marshall, assistant curator, Swiss Institute, NY, and John Riepenhoff, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, in association with Polly Morris, Lynden’s executive director.
The Lynden collection offers a snapshot of monumental sculpture production in the ‘60s and ‘70s. The works are meant to be permanent; they eschew pedestals, emerging from the earth; they are often made from industrial materials; and their size amplifies the heroic role of the individual artist. Dressing the Monument reframes this collection, and individual works within it, by challenging these modernist tenets, and most importantly the aspiration —audacious, arrogant or simply optimistic— toward permanence.
If optimism fueled the impulse to create large, permanent works in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the artists in this exhibition are more likely to rechannel that optimism into collaborative and collective experiences; to dwell on memory and the ephemeral by charting the traces of the just-happened; and to embrace the rich social, cultural and political meanings of their throwaway materials. They celebrate the fragmentary and the in-between, deploying strategies of impermanence in their dialogue with the permanent work. Sculptures will hang from trees, be conjured from thin air, or take the form of a sensation: the taste or smell of a pheromone-laced beer, the sound of untrained musicians.
Beer craft for the Anicka Yi/Matt Sheridan Smith project by Aran Madden of Furthermore Beer.
NICHOLAS FRANK (Milwaukee) is an artist, writer and curator. Recent solo projects: Poor Farm, Manawa, WI; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Western Exhibitions, Chicago. Group projects: Picturing the Studio, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Halbjahresgaben at Tanzschuleprojects, Munich and 200597214100022008 at Laurel Gitlen, NY.
MICHELLE GRABNER is an artist, writer and the chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work at Musée d´art Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Stadtgalerie, Keil; Kunsthalle, Bern; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Midway, Minneapolis; Rocket, London; INOVA, Milwaukee; Southfirst, Brooklyn; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Minus Space, Brooklyn; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; The Milwaukee Art Museum; Anne Mosseri-Marlio, Zurich; Bricks and Kicks, Vienna; Turbinehallerne, Copenhagen; Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas; Leo Koenig Gallery, NY; Harris Lieberman Gallery, NY. With her husband, BRAD KILLAM, Grabner founded The Suburban, an artist-run project space in Oak Park, IL, and the Poor Farm, a not-for-profit exhibition space in rural Wisconsin.
LUCAS KNIPSCHER is based in New York. Recent group shows: Swiss Institute, NY; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; Sculpture Center, NY; and Balice Hertling, Paris.
TOBIAS MADISON (b. 1985 in Basel, lives and works in Zurich) & KASPAR MÜLLER (b. 1983 Schaffhausen, lives and works in Zurich and Basel). Their collaborative work has been featured at the Kunstverein Munich (2010), Johan Berggen Gallery, Malmo (2010); and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Madison’s recent solo shows include Sammlung Haubrok, Berlin and The Vanity, Los Angeles (2011); Haus Konstruktiv; Frame, Frieze Art Fair, London, Æuroasia, Kunst Raum Riehen and Hydrate + Perform / Yes I Can! The Movie: A Preview, Swiss Institute, New York (2010). Madison co-runs New Jerseyy and the Basel-based published house Used Future. Müller’s recent solo shows include Société, Berlin and Circuit, Lausanne (2011); Manor-Kunstpreis Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen (2010); and Paloma Presents, Zürich, and New Jerseyy, Kunsthaus Baselland, and Galerie Nicolas Krupp, Basel (2009).
JOHN MILLER (b. 1954, Cleveland, Ohio; lives and works in New York and Berlin). Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne, Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2010); and Kunsthalle Zürich (2009). RICHARD HOECK (b. 1965 in Hall, Austria; lives and works in Vienna). Recent solo exhibitions (2010) include ORF Landesstudio Tirol; Museum of Art, Ningbo, China; and Gallery Johann Widauer, Innsbruck. More information on their collaborations (1998-present) at www.lownoon.com.
Artist and writer DAVID ROBBINS investigates the intersections between art, entertainment, and comedy. As an artist he is best known for Talent, eighteen "entertainer's headshots" of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer and others, and The Ice Cream Social, a project comprising installations, performances, a novella, and a TV pilot. His sixth book, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, has just been published.
HANNAH WEINBERGER (b. 1988, in Filderstadt, lives and works in Basel and Zürich). Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and Alte Fabrik, Rapperswil (2011); Kunsthalle Basel, Karma International, Zurich, The Modern Institute, Glasglow, and Kunsthaus Glarus (2010). Recent performances include Kunsthal Charlottenborg; Theatre de L‘Usine, Geneva; Jam Session, Museumsnacht, Kunsthalle Basel (2011); Regionales Konzert, The Village Cry, Kunsthalle Basel and Transdisziplinäres Konzert, ZHdK, Zurich (2010).
ANICKA YI is based in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at 179 Canal (solo), White Columns, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, The Artist's Institute, X Initiative, Karma International, among others. Upcoming projects: a solo show at 47 Canal, NY and a group show at Rudiger Schottle, Munich. MATT SHERIDAN SMITH (b. 1980, Red Bank, NJ) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include galeria kaufmann repetto in Milan and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Selected group exhibitions include SculptureCenter, The Drawing Center, Galerie Lelong, Andrew Kreps, and Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York, Karma International in Zurich, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore. His first public art commission is on view in downtown Brooklyn as part of the Public Art Fund's Total Recall exhibition.
Harry and Peg Bradley collected nearly 40 works by Toulouse-Lautrec between 1950 and 1955, a period of intense interest in the artist's work in the United States. This interest coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of his death. A. Hyatt Mayor, writing in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin in November 1951, observed that Toulouse-Lautrec’s sense of aristocratic detachment coupled with his intense empathy—his ability to be both knowing and candid—made him “the artist of our day.”
Toulouse-Lautrec’s mid-century popularity was fuelled by the publication of Pierre La Mure’s novel about the artist’s life, Moulin Rouge (1950), Peter Riethof’s film, Toulouse-Lautrec Painter of the Parisian Bohème (1951), and John Huston’s film adaptation of the La Mure novel (1952). Works by Toulouse-Lautrec were reproduced in national magazines such as Newsweek: it was the dawn of the golden age of advertising and the artist’s bold and groundbreaking posters, advertising everything from bicycle chains to chanteuses, were increasingly admired.
The Metropolitan Museum had works by Toulouse-Lautrec on display in the print galleries in 1951 to commemorate the anniversary (many of their best lithographs had come from the estate of Alfred Stieglitz), and a small exhibition, from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Davies Stamm of New York, landed at the Milwaukee Art Institute in late 1954. There was a major show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1955 (where Harry Bradley purchased thirteen posters) that then traveled to the Chicago Art Institute and the Museum of Modern Art the following year. MoMA added extra hours to its schedule to accommodate the crowds during the first week. In addition to the Philadelphia purchases, the Bradleys bought their Toulouse-Lautrec works from at least four New York galleries: Fine Arts Associates, French & Company, M. Knoedler & Co., and Kleeman Galleries. Knoedler had shown Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs from the collection of Ludwig Charell in 1950 to benefit the Musee d'Albi, the Toulouse-Lautrec museum.
Of the many works by Toulouse-Lautrec that the Bradleys purchased, several went to the Milwaukee Art Museum, several hung at the various Zita’s locations (where, according to a newspaper article, art could be found in Mrs. Bradley’s “private office, in dressing rooms, in halls and even in the stock room”) and others remained in the Bradley Family Foundation Collection. Some of these works were originals, and some were reproductions; among them was a suite of 22 prints from the two volumes known as Au Cirque (At the Circus) purchased in 1951. Taken from a series of 39 drawings Toulouse-Lautrec made from memory in 1899 while confined to the St. James Clinic in Neuilly for his alcoholism, these lithographic reproductions were family favorites, hanging at Lynden and at Jane Bradley Pettit’s home.
Many lithographic reproductions of the drawings were made over the years, beginning around the turn of the century, and this group of prints appears to come from at least two different editions. The majority bear the imprint of the Librairie de France. Goupil published an edition that included 22 drawings (Volume I) in 1905; Librairie de France published the remaining 17 drawings as Volume II around 1913. In 1932 Librairie de Fance published an edition of 200 of the complete set; the plates were made by their studio.
Also on view are posters of two café-concert performers, May Milton and May Belfort. As “the premier poster artist of Paris,” the artist who “created the modern poster,” Toulouse-Lautrec was in great demand to advertise famous performers. Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters of fin-de-siècle Paris’s demi-monde are heavily influenced by Japanese prints, particularly the ukiyo-e prints that depicted the “floating world” of actors and courtesans of Edo-period Japan. He was drawn to the “…strong outlines, silhouettes, cropped compositions, and oblique angles” of the Japanese woodblock prints (May Belfort is said to resemble a cross-dressed male actor in a print by Utagawa Kuniyasu) but produced distinct portraits of recognizable individuals. “The agility of his line surprises like Hokusai’s,” writes Mayor, “though his insight penetrates instead of glancing off into routine caricature like the Japanese.”
Much of the specific information about Toulouse-Lautrec’s work, above, comes from these two sources:
Michael, Cora. “Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901)”. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000-. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/laut/hd_laut.htm (May 2010).
Mayor, A. Hyatt. “Toulouse-Lautrec.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New ser., v. 10, no. 3 (November, 1951): 89-95.
Opening reception: Sunday, June 12, 3–5 pm Artist-led Tour & Picnic: Wednesday, August 10, beginning at 5:30 pm
Amy Cropper and Stuart Morris share an interest in the relationship between art and culture and in work that removes distinctions between art and life. Inverse, their collaboration at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, marks their first opportunity to explore these ideas together. Cropper and Morris create sculptures designed to engage viewers in a dialogue with the piece and its environment. They often work with natural materials and processes, and have also explored the tension between natural and manmade materials in their solo work. Inverse asks viewers to re-examine the boundaries we erect between art and nature by altering and recontextualizing the natural objects that coexist with the sculptures at Lynden. The artists call attention to the beauty and sculptural significance of the natural objects, of trees and rocks, by modifying them —using color, for example—or moving them to bring them into conversation with the sculptures. Cropper and Morris also deploy the transformative power of the gallery space to re-cast natural objects as works of art: placed in the pristine gallery, the sculptural qualities of these unaltered forms will be heightened. Ultimately, Cropper and Morris make the familiar unfamiliar, inviting us to think differently about what we see.
About the Artists
Amy Cropper is an associate professor of art at Carroll University where she teaches sculpture, drawing, and the senior capstone. Cropper received her MFA from the University of Iowa in Intermedia Arts in 1993. She did her undergraduate work at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, graduating with a degree in art and English in 1985. Cropper shows her work regionally and nationally and has recently completed two commissions.
Stuart Morris makes public artwork about places. His ideas develop by working with the people that know these places well. He has used this approach to create public art projects in the United States and Europe. Stuart received an MFA from the University of Iowa while on a fellowship, and currently teaches art and design at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point.
Drams, Whits, Scintillas, a multimedia installation incorporating video, sound and drawing by Lynn Tomaszewski and Kevin Schlei, brings the garden into the gallery and spreads back out onto the grounds. Tomaszewski begins with video of visitors walking in the sculpture garden and recontextualizes it as part of a projected generative drawing in the gallery, and Schlei creates an outdoor multi-channel sound piece in dialogue with Tony Smith’s The Wandering Rocks (1967-1969). As Tomaszewski and Schlei reintroduce often overlooked elements of daily life into the gallery and sculpture garden, they reframe and reanimate these spaces, allowing us to see them anew.
The video, sound and drawings in the exhibition explore flocking or swarming behavior, and suggest the potential and perils inherent in group action. According to the artists, “Flocks are a good way to think about the individual and the group simultaneously. The title of the exhibition refers to the very small and incidental things that make up larger and seemingly more significant things.”
As in much of her recent work, Tomaszewski begins with video of mundane behavior and shifts the context to infuse the quotidian with both longing and anxiety. “The rhythms of daily life play out under the suggestion of ominous consequences,” she notes. In the gallery installation, figures walking in the garden approach and mirror viewers watching the projected image.
Tomaszewski’s interest in the way technology influences perception is reflected in two series of drawings in the gallery, one white and one black. The drawings explore the human desire for knowledge and understanding, as well as the absurdity and even futility of that pursuit. The white drawings of swarms are taken from YouTube videos of flocking starlings. The black drawings began with images of supernovae from the Hubble telescope. For Tomaszewski, the drawings delineate the perceptual distance between the actual event and the viewer: a distance first eradicated by technology and then re-created by it.
The sounds of Drams, Whits, Scintillas stretch between flux and stasis, personal and indirect. Like a flock, the sounds alternate between periods of ambience, excitation and stillness. Schlei has anchored his outdoor work to Tony Smithʼs sculpture, allowing Smithʼs minimalist quiet to penetrate the aural landscape. The highly reflective surfaces of the Smith grouping and the multiple sound channels encourage viewers to move around the work, altering their relationship to the array of sound. Both the three- dimensional and four-dimensional pieces reference the structure and patterns inherent in their conception: taking the five separate pieces of Smith’s sculpture as a starting point, Schlei has organized his sounds in five-note clusters and groups of five. Within the gallery, the sound is restless, while outside the emphasis is on stillness. A computer algorithm creates currents that push sound particles the way the wind disperses a pile of leaves, or the way a flock of birds explodes out of a tree. It is also a system of frozen moments: snapshots created in the mind to hold a place or time. “These moments are connections between temporal locations,” observes Schlei. “They make us confront our own connections with the places we visit.”
About the Artists
Lynn Tomaszewski's award-winning work has been shown in solo and group shows throughout the United States and Europe. Her paintings, drawings, installations, and video work explore how technology alters perception. Large groups of figures are presented as a unified field and in this way function as visual field theory rather than portraiture. Tomaszewski’s work is in the public collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, California. She is a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. http://www.lynntomaszewski.com/
Kevin Schlei composes electronic and acoustic music that plays with sounds through systems of manipulations. His works include live algorithmic pieces in multichannel environments, interactive installations, and custom software instruments. Recent works include Close Up Distance, an ambisonic surround sound piece that pushes the illusion of multi-space shifting, and Languid Flow of Imaginary Vapors, where saxophones melt with wispy synthesized tones to create a fog of sound colors. He is a founding member of the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO) and he has exhibited his installation work and custom software throughout Milwaukee. He has also collaborated with dance and theater organizations such as the Milwaukee Ballet, Danceworks, and Milwaukee Shakespeare Company, and presented his work in the Spark, BEAF and NIME festivals.
Schlei teaches computer music at the UWM Peck School of the Arts where he is the Electro-Acoustic Music Center Technical Director. He also develops software instruments for the iPhone and iPad, including Invisible Drum Set, under the developer name Bit Shape. His latest research into multi-touch instrument technology was presented at the New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference in Sydney, Australia. http://kevinschlei.com/
Opening reception: Saturday, February 26, 4:30–6:30 pm (after the Winter Carnival) Closing event: Wednesday, June 29, 6:30-9:00 pm 6:30 pm: Join the artists for a picnic (bring your own picnic) 7:30 pm: Book release, video screening, and lighting of their outdoor sculpture.
Details here.
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg continue to explore scale, illusion, and the dialogue between interior and exterior space in an exhibition that focuses on combustion. The miniature 19th century wooden farmhouse that has been a recurring character in their narrative will make a ghostly, stripped-down appearance on the grounds of the sculpture garden—itself a farm in the 19th century. “Coal-and-ice” is an outline of a foundation dug several inches into the cold, wintry soil. During the opening, the artists will fill the trench with coals and set it alight, leaving a residue of ash in the shape of a house. This remnant will bear an uneasy resemblance to a series of burned or burning, charred and smoke-stained houses—sometimes no more than piles of rubble—captured in large-scale photographs in the gallery. The artists exploit the photographic medium to create the illusion that these are images of real houses, real remains, but subtle clues—scale conflicts, odd or impossible viewpoints, the miniature foundation outside—point to their fictional origin.
McCaw and Budsberg have collaborated for a decade on a practice that encompasses sculpture, performance and site-specific installation. Their recent work incorporates models that enable them to consider notions of scale, deception and suspension of disbelief while examining the psychology of place, ancestral memory, and the passage of time. McCaw and Budsberg are also founding members of the WhiteBoxPainters, a performance art group specializing in large-scale, temporary public projects.
McCaw currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch University. Budsberg is a supervisor at the Steve Lacey 3-D Lab at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He is also a musician, and has built numerous set pieces for the theatre/film industry. The two received the Mary Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Established category in 2008.
Recent exhibitions include a solo show at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin; the Nohl Fellows Exhibition at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Descendant, a solo exhibition at the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, Wisconsin; and Current Tendencies: Ten Artists from Wisconsin at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee. In May 2011, McCaw and Budsberg will be in residence in Wendover, Utah with the Los Angeles-based Center for Land Use Interpretation.
As a collector, Peg Bradley embraced Pop Art, particularly the prints of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. A selection of Pop works on paper will be on view in the gallery, and many new works will be on display on the first floor of the house. Some—a large painting by Peter Max, silkscreens by Biasi & Landi and small sculptures by Vasa—shed light on the Pop era; others—a charming Milton Avery drawing of croquet players, a beach scene by American Impressionist Edward Henry Potthast—demonstrate Peg Bradley’s affection for bright yet intimate works.
Eddee Daniel has been observing and photographing construction fences in the landscape for several years, attracted by their obtrusive orange color and the questions they raise about function, aesthetics—particularly in natural areas—and access. When he exhibited these photographs in 2009, Daniel created a more immediate experience for the viewer by simultaneously installing construction fences inside and outside the gallery space. At Lynden, Daniel continues to explore the fences’ ambiguous functionality, this time amidst the natural landscaping and permanent artworks of the sculpture garden. His collaborator, Philip Krejcarek, is constructing sculptures that evoke ladders. Unlike the fences, these ladder-like forms are defiantly non-functional. Daniel’s and Krejcarek’s project ranges from the surreal to the whimsical as it explores the relationship between creating and constructing and plays with the very notion of collaborative sculpture.
In the gallery, Daniel presents selections from his Accidental Art series—photographs depicting fences erected by construction contractors in natural areas—and Krejcarek continues to subvert the functional with a series of small sculptures from his Architectural Structures series. In these works, Krejcarek combines the non-utilitarian quality of sculpture with the practical concepts of architecture. Krejcarek was addressing sociological issues—“cities, houses, and relationships”—when he made the work in 1999, and the particular examples on view here challenge our expectations of interior and exterior, inside and outside, in the realms of architecture and human relations.
Eddee Daniel is a fine art photographer, writer, activist, and arts educator. He has been practicing and teaching photography for over 30 years in the Milwaukee area at institutions including Carroll University, Mount Mary College, University of Wisconsin—Waukesha and Marquette University High School. Daniel received his formal training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and over the years his work has evolved to respond to his work in social justice and environmental preservation. He has exhibited locally and nationally; his book of photographs and stories, Urban Wilderness: Exploring a Metropolitan Watershed (2008), received the Kodak American Greenways Award. In addition, Daniel’s work has been published in Family: a Celebration of Humanity, by William Morrow, Popular Photography, The Photo Review, Phototechniques, Art in Wisconsin, and New Mexico Photographer, among others. www.eddeedaniel.com
Philip Krejcarek is a professor of art and chair of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Carroll University where he teaches photography. He has been a professor at Carroll since 1977. He is the author of An Introduction to Digital Imaging and Digital Photography: A Hands-On Introduction, both published by Cengage Learning. He is a recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board grant and his work is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, and the Denver Art Museum. His sculpture and photographs are also included in the Waukesha Public Library collection. Krejcarek’s work has been purchased through the Wisconsin Arts Board Percent for Art Direct Purchase Program for public buildings.
The exhibition in the gallery includes paintings, small sculptures and works on paper by Milton Avery, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Barbara Hepworth, Alex Katz, Marino Marini, Joan Miró, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Pablo Picasso, James Rosati, Jacques Villon and Fritz Winter.
Additional works from the Bradley Family Foundation Collection are hung throughout the first floor of the house.
Linda Wervey Vitamvas will be showing two large works that bring together a multitude of diminutive ceramic pieces. Surface Tension, on view in the gallery, consists of more than 350 glazed porcelain pinch pots on a narrow, 20-foot glass shelf. The pots have the feel of shells that have been collected, stacked, and arranged in an orderly fashion. "Molecules in a liquid have attractive forces that hold them together, so the surface layer behaves like a thin elastic skin," Vitamvas observes. "As I rolled the glaze around the inside of each tiny piece I became mesmerized by this phenomenon and obsessed with the phrase describing it, sufrace tension." Vitamvas will also show several porcelain objects inspired by botanical drawings and the elaborate biological renderings of Ernst Haeckel. "There is a resemblance to form and anatomy that is familiar to me from my medically-inspired work," notes Vitamvas. "There is an uncanny similarity in reproductive form that exists in both the animal and plant kingdoms."
Vitamvas's outdoor piece responds to the environment of the sculpture garden and corresponds to her work in the gallery. Instead of a glass shelf, Vitamvas uses a 20-foot I-beam to display small pinch pots made from local clay. This piece echoes the scale and industrial materials of several of the sculptures on site. The pots will not be fired and will disintegrate as they are exposed to the elements, speaking to the transience of their appearance in the sculpture garden. Vitamvas will document the disintegration, creating a permanent record of their existence.
A native of the Milwaukee area, Linda Wervey Vitamvas earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and practiced psychiatric, obstetrical and surgical nursing for much of her life. Her persistent love of art led her to integrate her scientific knowledge and experiences with the study of art. She has studied in non-traditional settings, both locally and abroad, and has formalized her education by earning her Master's and Master of Fine Art degrees from the UWM. Vitamvas has won awards in the 2009 Wisconsin Biennial, Forward: A Survey of Wisconsin Art Now, and the 2005 and 2010 Kohler Eight Counties exhibitions. Her work was featured in a solo show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, Wisconsin. She is currently exhibiting in the 2010 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Vitamvas is represented by Elaine Erickson Gallery in Milwaukee and resides in Bayside where she works as a ceramic sculptor. She may be found on the web at: lindavitamvas.com
Kevin Giese
Kevin Giese tackles our complicated relationship to the natural world directly in his outdoor work, Immigrant. "Fifteen years ago I discovered the beautiful orange heartwood of mature buckthorn trees," says Giese. "I quickly learned that they are considered invasive." First introduced in this country from Europe in the 1900s, buckthorns-with their elegant curves and small stature--were prized as ornamental trees. Giese has worked with the wood in many forms, from furniture to installation. The trees for this piece were harvested from the Lynden grounds. "As a naturalist I lament the losses inflicted on our native habitat by these trees. As an artist I am intrigued by the dynamic between their visual beauty, strong resilient characteristics and their pariah status: unwanted, disliked, overlooked...Ultimately, it is we humans who are the invaders, dominating any landscape we occupy."
Giese will show a number of earlier works in the gallery. These include Still Living, an installation composed of eighty ash strips held under tension-a work that emerged from a dream about building a bamboo fishing pole-and Original River, a hollowed-out, riverine tree trunk filled with thousands of quartz pebbles sifted from Mississippi River sands over the course of two years.
Kevin Giese is an associate lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1992 and his MFA in 2007. Over the course of many years, Giese has produced work that is shaped by Buddhist philosophy, a deep knowledge of and affection for the natural world, and an extensive understanding of traditional wood joining techniques. Giese views his artistic project as one of repair and re-presentation of natural objects; he employs processes that echo nature's slow and repetitive rhythms as he reconstructs pieces of the physical world in his sculptures and installations. Giese has had solo shows at the Northwestern Mutual Life Gallery at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee and at the Wriston Art Center at Lawrence University in Appleton. He has shown most recently at the Dean Jensen Gallery; at Inova at UWM as part of an exhibition of work by his teacher, Joseph Friebert; and at Cedar Gallery in Milwaukee. His web site is: kevingiese.com
