Previous Exhibitions

November 12, 2023 - February 25, 2024

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Can a Negress in distress do this?!, 2021

On view through February 25, 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, November 12, 2023, 2-4 pm

The portraits in Products of the Heart are recent, finished between 2021 and 2023. They employ various methods of making—painting, drawing, printmaking, collage--and reveal the artist’s fascination with kinship. From the baroque, dimensional frames she incorporates into the earlier portraits to the patterned, nature-inflected backgrounds of the most recent work, Sproles builds vivid environments to establish each subject’s emotional complexity. What she describes as “displays of sentiments” transform her subjects into “monumental emblems”; portraits that stretch across the surface of the wall can also operate like landscapes. These portraits are acts of reclamation, an answer to our imprinted faith that marginalized bodies are not sites of credence and power. Of her subjects, Sproles writes: “Their direct qualm gazes remind the viewer to spectate diligently and for the subjects to secure refuge in their dreamscapes. The nostalgic overtone entwined with fantastical elements solidify the playful adoration vital for these relationships of mine to thrive. Collectively, these figures pay homage to the importance of preserving one's humanity through carefully maintained curiosity.”

About the Artist
Until recently, LaNia Sproles (American, b. 1995) lived and worked in the segregated city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin where they also received a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2017. Now based in Chicago, their work spans several disciplines including: printmaking, drawing, and collage. The philosophies of self-perception, queer and feminist theories, and inherent racial dogmas are essential to the artist’s work. Sproles examines the works of feminist artists and writers such as Octavia Butler, Kara Walker, and Rebecca Morgan. In 2020, they completed their year as a 2019 Mary L. Nohl Fellow, continued as a teaching artist-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and guest curated an exhibition hosted by NADA art fair with The Green Gallery. Sproles has exhibited several artworks with Elijah Wheat Showroom hosted by David Zwirner’s online exhibition space, Platform, and with Goldfinch Gallery and FLXST Contemporary in Chicago.

June 17, 2023 - October 29, 2023

Eneida Sanches

Eneida Sanches (b. Salvador, Bahia, Brazil 1962) is a metalsmith, printmaker, sculptor, and installation artist. Originally trained as an architect, she learned to work with brass and copper and immersed herself in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé ritual during an apprenticeship with Bahian master toolmaker Gilmar Conceição. Her work as a ritual metalsmith led her to study printmaking and, over time, to expand the boundaries of etching to make sculpture and construct installations.

Sanches has been exploring the idea of trance as a religious phenomenon and the collective social representation of Afro-Bahian culture and its histories for more than twenty years. Trance, according to Dr. Rachel Elizabeth Harding, “is an elemental experience in many African and Afro-Atlantic religions, and ultimately, it is a poetic-artistic means of communication between different planes of experience.” She continues, “Eneida sees the liminal intensity of artists—when they are operating from a certain orientation, from profound engagement with their own creativity and with the lifeforce in their work—as enabling them to transmit understandings, insights, visions, images…bringing what they see, what they experience to a plane where it can be shared.” For Sanches, the body is the locus of trance, making it a material practice—a state of immanence rather than transcendence. Material Trance brings together a selection of the artist’s prints, plates, sculptures, and installations.

Eneida Sanches arrives in Milwaukee at the invitation of artist Daniel Minter who has called her into Lynden’s Call & Response program. Minter, like fellow Call & Response artists Portia Cobb and Scott Barton has spent time in the Bahia, an important center of African Diasporic culture. Sanches will be in residence for eight weeks.

About the Artist
Eneida Sanches (b. Salvador, Bahia, 1962) lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. She has a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Her return to the visual arts was the result of her apprenticeship to the Bahian master toolmaker Gilmar Conceição, from whom she learned to make the brass and copper liturgical objects used in Candomblé ritual. In 1997, she began to study printmaking, first through classes in the master’s program at UFBA and later by participating in workshops at the MAM Bahia (Bahia Museum of Modern Art). Sanches coordinated the ACBEU Gallery in Salvador from 2002 to 2009. She was a member of the executive board of the Instituto SACATAR (a nonprofit artist residency program on the Island of Itaparica) from 2004 to 2011. From 2004 to 2015, she coordinated the Circuito das Artes Bahia e Circuito Triangulações, presenting multiple Bahian artists across museums and galleries in Salvador. She has participated in several artist residencies.

Sanches started exhibiting her work in 1994 in the group exhibition, Face of the Gods, at the Museum for African Art, in New York; since then, she has participated in exhibitions in Brazil, Portugal, and Copenhagen. Solo exhibitions include Divination (Denmark), Princeton Arts Council, Princeton, New Jersey (2001) and Trance: Dimensional Dislocations, São Paulo (2018). In late 2022 she opened an exhibition with Daniel Minter, Through This To That, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Her work is in the collections of the Caribbean Cultural Center, New York; Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; Museum of Modern Art Bahia; Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, the Netherlands; Nafasi Artspace, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Museum of Modern Art São Paulo.

May 7, 2023 - May 28, 2023

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Throughout the month of May, art collective-in-residence Open Kitchen (OK) will gather around a pedagogically speculative installation celebrating spring ephemera. A rotation of ceramic sculptures and wares will accompany three public courses coinciding with a forthcoming publication, The False Expectations of Food; stories and recipes from one ruin to another.

Conceived as a backdrop for the lectures, the ceramics range from the semi-functional to the sculptural, studies of natural forms and movement. They are transformed into mysterious “objects left behind” between public engagements, asking us what has taken place, or will take place, in this space.

Course One: The False Expectations of Food, Introduction/Reading
May 7, 2023, 11 am-12:30 pm
Free but registration required. Click here to register online.

In OK’s research as Lynden artists-in-residence, collective members work towards a field guide that explores our everyday relationships to what we eat. We ask ourselves, what do we expect from food amidst a seemingly disastrous constellation of social, cultural, technological, political, economic, and environmental conditions creeping into our digestive ways?

Course Two: Early Lessons in Beekeeping
May 20, 2023, 11 am-12:30 pm

Registration is closed. To be added to the waitlist, email staff@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Please include your name and the number of attendees.

In preparation for (and eager anticipation of!) a new learning branch at the Lynden Sculpture Garden —the Lynden Apiary— Open Kitchen collective members Rudy and Alan Medina will lecture informally on the many (and one) way/s of beekeeping. The lecture will drift from one imagination to another across histories and peoples, into the curious and generous patterns of bees.

Course Three: Gut-Farm, *Mmmm!
May 28, 2023 2-4 pm
Fee: $25/$20 members.

Registration is closed. To be added to the waitlist, email staff@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Please include your name and the number of attendees.

A course reviewing Open Kitchen’s 2022 residency at BiSCA (Bishkek School of Contemporary Art) and participation in the Eco-Festival TRASH-4: Follow the Trash River in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

From the open all for the Trash Festival
The eco-festival focuses on water and garbage issues in Bishkek and aims to create reflection and discussion. Together with activists, scientists, artists, citizens we are going to create a platform for communication that explores methodologies of how we can solve global environmental problems on a local and global level through reflections, experiments, art-intervention, analysis, installations, publications.

The review will begin with the reading of an open letter titled Letter to Altyn-Kazyk, its Friends and Ours (to be featured in BiSCA’s Aralash Zine). This letter reflects on OK's time in the Altyn-Kazyk neighborhood of Bishkek, where a community intersects a river, agricultural fields, and a toxic landfill.

In conjunction with this reading, *Milwaukee masa mole mill! will host a spring mole tasting with ingredients sourced from art collective Postane (Istanbul) and from OK’s 2022 residency in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The mole will be paired with fresh masa tortillas (from our 2022 Lynden-grown corn) and a Turkish plum, Kyrgyz mountain honey, and backyard-borage tea.

Open Kitchen’s residency in Kyrgyzstan was supported by the Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund. Support for Milwaukee-masa-mole-mill is provided by The Open Fund, through the Poor Farm, with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

About Open Kitchen
Open Kitchen (OK) is a Milwaukee-based art collective founded in 2017. OK stages events, installations, and a residency program that engages the public in critical cross-cultural conversations on food, identity, and ecology. Each of the programs takes shape through regional and seasonal food-related research projects, gastronomic gatherings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific happenings.

June 26, 2022 - April 30, 2023

Image credit: Sayokla Kindness Williams (detail).
Image credit: Sayokla Kindness Williams (detail).

If you were the messenger of healing, what would you want to do or say?
What does it mean to learn about healing from each other?

Although Call & Response artist Arianne King Comer has been physically absent from Lynden for the past two pandemic years, she has been everywhere in our work: sitting on the HOME Refugee Steering Committee, collaborating with Daniel Minter, and working with local refugees, steering committee members, Call & Response artists, and friends and colleagues from across the country on an exhibition of wearable art. Community engagement specialist Kim Khaira has been coordinating the project on the ground in Milwaukee, procuring sewing machines, pairing designers with seamstresses, staffing translators for virtual meetings with King Comer, and taking refugees to the fabric store for supplies.

The “healing coats” produced through this process incorporate cultural and personal symbols of healing. By bringing the coats together in the gallery this summer, we bring together “many voices that speak freely to one another.” By collaborating across the Call & Response and HOME communities, we demonstrate the intentional intersectionality of our work. We speak of our interactions and observations with each other through wearable art making, relating at a local and personal level, while creating the potential to take these ideas to wider regional, national, and international audiences through travelling exhibitions and virtual archives. Ultimately, we see this exhibition as the next stage in a conversation that began with these questions: If you were the messenger of healing, what would you want to do or say? What does it mean to learn about healing from each other? As these questions move beyond this first group of makers, we envision the call rippling outward to artists, artisans, makers, and community members in Milwaukee and beyond.

We open Healing Coats on June 26, 2022, as we celebrate World Refugee Day at Lynden. This is a Call & Response/HOME event.

June 3, 2022 - June 19, 2022

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Practices of Presence: Moving Through Lynden with Daniel Burkholder
Saturday, April 16, 2022 - 10-11:30 am
Saturday, May 14, 2022 – 2-3:30 pm

Saturday, June 4, 2022 – 1-3 pm: Opening reception; artist Q&A at 1:30 pm

From September 2020 to May 2021, artist-in-residence Daniel Burkholder explored the grounds of the Lynden Sculpture Garden through his practice of embodied screendance. This approach combines dance, mindfulness, somatic modalities, and improvisational movement captured by a stationary video camera during 20-30-minute sessions. Returning weekly to the garden allowed Burkholder to experience the sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic changes that occur over the course of three seasons: from the changing colors of the autumn, to the sudden snowstorms of the winter, to the gentle transformation of buds into flowers in the spring. The artist kept returning to the questions of how to be in relation to a site, how this relationship develops over time, and how movement anchors this practice. This video installation compiles excerpts from the video footage to offer an opportunity for visitors to reflect, meditate, and experience the environment as it changes from one scene to the next.

Visitors are invited to stand, sit, lie down, meditate, nap, or move in relation to the video. The artist has also provided two prompts for those who want to experience some of the practices of presence that informed the work.

About the Artist
Daniel Burkholder choreographs, improvises, performs, teaches, designs lights for theatrical performances, and practices the Feldenkrais Method and Mindfulness. His choreographic/improvisational work spans theatrical performances, site-specific events, immersive media, and screendance, and has been presented at numerous venues throughout North America and internationally. His current work includes: On-Site, a series of embodied screendance experiments; Embodied Truth: finding ways to move together, a collaboration with Kimani Fowlin examining race and gender through the lens of parenting; and, act/re/act, a podcast exploring improvisation through conversations with remarkable artists. Burkholder is currently an associate professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the director of the MFA in Dance program.

January 23, 2022 - May 29, 2022

Scott Barton
Buried in the Heart-Knucklebone-Kosmogram: Henrietta Snipes Gullah sweetgrass basket; vintage Waechtersbach cobalt blue china; four vintage Japanese gold leaf porcelain bowls filled with: dendê palm oil, honey, blood, rum, pickled egg, chicken and duck wishbones, and fingernail polish; four glass cloches; Italian linen napkins. Photo courtesy of the artist.

On view: January 23-May 29 2022
Saturday, May 14, 2022 - 3-5 pm: Artist talk followed by reception. Click here for more information.

Click here to view the exhibition virtually.

Watch Meeting the Elders in Conversation, 2021 here.

Watch The Four Moments of the Sun: A Commensal Bricolage Imagined and Created in Honor of Ahmaud “Maud” Marquez Arbery, Breonna Shaquelle Taylor, George Perry Floyd Jr., and Jacob S. Blake Jr., 2021 here.

Listen to the sound installation for Poundcake and Coffee, 2022, here.
In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched during a visit to relatives in Mississippi following an accusation by Caroline Bryant that he had made sexual advances to her in the family grocery store where she worked. Poundcake and Coffee is a representation of the 2008 meeting between Carolyn Bryant Donham, her daughter-in-law Marsha Bryant, and historian Timothy Tyson at which Donham reportedly recanted some of her original 1955 trial testimony. Roy Bryant, Donham’s husband at the time, and his half-brother J.W. Milam were acquitted of the murder of Till. After the acquittal, Bryan and Milam admitted that they had abducted and lynched Till. The audio file contains portions of 1955 trial transcript and 2008 interview with Timothy Tyson read by Susan Glisson (Carolyn Bryant Donham) and Charles H. Tucker (District Attorney, Timothy Tyson); narration by the artist. Tracy Collins, technical consultant.

There can be no reconciliation and healing without remembering the past.
— Bryan Stephenson

There is, was, or will be one day when our dearest ones are going home. Then they enter into an embrace with all of the ancestors that have left before them. While in the transition from this life into death the family and community are all in mourning although a funeral is frequently not seen as finite in the African Diaspora. Funerals provide a moment to commemorate the dead—yet we don’t die; we rest. For many Diasporic people death is not the end of life, but a phase in the cycle of the Kongo Cosmogram, the "four moments of the sun,” and its Kalunga line separating life and afterlife.

A major aspect of honoring the dead and the living is encapsulated in the foods and meals of mourning, ebó (offertory), sacraments, and gustatory rites for both entities. The repast is foundational as a site of memory to generate a protocol that fosters and enshrines collective memory. Our repast rites for the dead are concurrently touchstones for the living: providing a bridge between the realms, and an ongoing dialogue with our heritage traditions. The poetics of the repast event as a “FoodAct” are culturally significant moments in the logical relationship between food, ritual, and memory, where the symbolic in ritual practice is transcribed overtop everyday existence. Whether considering Aráòrun, from the Yoruba, or our own funerary and repast rites for honoring the dead, an ongoing dialogue is opened with Diaspora heritage traditions.

This literal and symbolic repast individually and archetypically honors the deaths of Ahmaud “Maud” Arbery, Breonna Shaquelle Taylor, and George Perry Floyd Jr., and the maiming of Jacob S. Blake Jr. By creating and sharing a meal we also honor the multitude of individuals killed by state sponsored or private violence. This repast, begun sixteen months ago during the hard lockdown, focuses on dishes that the four individuals would have enjoyed eating or cooking. The repast was shared with four of my neighbors, Harlem elders, also in the roles of individuals and archetypes. Within their lives and their works, these four individuals are dedicated to civil rights, Black culture, the politics of identity and respect for Black life, and restorative justice. They are Charles Daniel Dawson, Marie Dutton Brown, John Pinderhughes and John Dowell. The resulting video documentation is part of the exhibition.

Scott Alves Barton, September 2021

This is a Call & Response event. Scott Alves Barton’s collaborators on this project include Arianne King Comer and Harlem Needle Arts.

About the Artist
Scott Alves Barton holds a PhD in Food Studies from New York University and is a faculty fellow in Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame. He had a 25-year career as an executive chef and culinary educator. Ebony magazine named him one of the top 25 African American/Diaspora chefs. His research and publications focus on women’s knowledge, the intersection of secular and sacred cuisine as a marker of identity politics, cultural heritage, political resistance, and self-determination in Northeastern Brazil. Recent publications include “Radical Moves from the Margins: Enslaved Entertainments as Harvest Celebration in Northeastern Brazil,” in The Body Questions: Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots, and “Food and Faith,” in Bryant Terry’s Black Food: Stories, Art and Recipes from the African Diaspora. Barton’s previous Call & Response residencies include a collaboration with Portia Cobb, The Garden Project: Imagining Eliza and Lizzie and Juba/Sanctuary. Barton is currently writing a companion manuscript for this exhibition, Reckoning with Violence and Black Death: Repasts as Community Ritual.

October 2, 2021 - December 22, 2021

KOMERICAN_Cover

On view: October 2-December 22, 2021
Opening reception: Saturday, October 2, 2021

Building capacity is currently limited to ten people at a time.

View the exhibition virtually here.
Click here to see a slideshow of the exhibition.

What does it mean to be a Korean-in-Wisconsin—a Komerican--artist today? Komerican brings together ten very different artists: Yeohyun Ahn, Yeonhee Cheong, Kyoung Ae Cho, Okja Kwon, Emma Daisy Hyun Ah Gertel, Mokwon Subsoo Lim, JinMan Jo, Minkyu Lee, Jason S. Yi, and Rina Yoon. They span generations and work across a wide range of media, both collectively--computational graphic art, printmaking, painting, drawing, fiber, sculpture--and in their individual practices. Their creative research is informed, in varying degrees, by materials, ideas, and processes.

Yet they have been brought together, by curator Kyoung Ae Cho, in the context of Korea Day, and at a time when attitudes and actions toward Asian American Pacific Islander communities and individuals are receiving unprecedented attention, particularly in relation to the hate and violence directed at them in the wake of the politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the recent interest, the artists in this exhibition have been navigating American life as Asians for years, often decades. Jason S. Yi, who came to the United States at the age of eleven, describes the “precarious straddling of the two distinctly different but equally influential cultures.” That balance between the two cultures shifts from artist to artist, shaped by circumstances and outlook. Mokwon, a recent immigrant to the United States with a long career as an artist in South Korea, looks forward to sharing her work and the philosophy of traditional ink brush painting in her new home. Emma Daisy Hyun Ah Gertel and Okja Kwon, both Korean adoptees, speak of “floating” and “in-betweenness” as they struggle to forge a Komerican identity.

For artists JinMan Jo and Minkyu Lee, displacement has fueled a desire to address the human experience in universal terms. “Living within American culture, “Lee writes, “inspires me to explore the universal nature and structure of human beings.” In his working process, Jo experiences “both the conflict and the dignity inherent to the human condition.” Gertel, too, wants to build human connection through “shared emotional experiences, like joy.”

Several of the artists approach the subject of displacement obliquely, finding in the natural world an antidote to the alienation and loss of identity that are often the migrant’s lot. As Mokwon’s work demonstrates, the landscape is a traditional subject for Korean brush painters. For severalartists in this group, nature offers a respite but also personal validation and a place to explore difference. “Thirteen years ago,” writes Yeonhee Cheong, “I met the Wisconsin prairie and fell in love with it” because it offered “deep solace.” “It told me that I am good as I am,” she continues, easing the tension and anxiety of being “a foreigner and a non-native speaker.” For Kyoung Ae Cho, the differing attitudes toward nature in her old and new homes shape a practice that aims to reconcile her Korean upbringing with her experience of living in the United States. Okja Kwon uses plants and other organic forms to talk about social place, Yeohyun Ahn responds to an inspirational religious song by creating a work based on flower imagery. As a Korean American artist and a Buddhist, Rina Yoon feels compelled to “address the interconnectedness of nature and the human body.” In her Mulgil series she explores the idea that “the same river that runs deep below and above the surface of the earth runs through our bodies, too.”

For Cheong, the diversity and communality of the Wisconsin prairie made her question who had the right to judge her, “to decide that I am not good enough, or even a ‘weed’ to be pulled out.” All of the artists in KOMERICAN have, like Cheong, put down roots in Wisconsin. As Yoon concludes: “Nature, like the human body, is both fragile and resilient.”

This is a HOME event.

A publication has been produced in conjunction with the exhibition and is available without charge.

The Korea Day celebrations are hosted by the Korean American Association of Milwaukee and the Korean American Faculty and Staff Association at UWM with the generous support of the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Chicago; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts, Center for International Education, and Language Resource Center; the US Department of Education Title VI National Resource Centers; and BMO Harris. For a complete schedule, click here. For the Facebook event, click here.

About the Artists

Yeohyun Ahn (b. 1974) is an artist, designer, educator, and researcher integrating creative coding and diversity into graphic design and digital art. She leads several research projects: TYPE+CODE and Inclusive Graphic Design. Her new project, Social Homelessness on US Campuses, is a multidisciplinary art and design project to bring awareness to Asian female faculty in America. Having immigrated to America as a designer, Ahn has a heightened awareness of social inequity, discrimination, and marginality. Her projects have been featured in the Washington Post, PRINT, the New York Times Magazine, Creator’s Project, Designboom.com, among others, and published in Graphic Design: The New Basics and Type on Screen (Princeton Architectural Press) and Data-Driven Graphic Design (Fairchild Books). A former freelance graphic artist for the New York Times Magazine, Ahn has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago State University, and Valparaiso University. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Yeonhee Cheong (b. 1974) is a Madison, Wisconsin-based visual artist who studies the visual language of human bodies in society. She deploys various media including printmaking, painting, and fiber art. Born in South Korea, Cheong studied fashion design at Seoul National University and Fashion Institute of Technology, and she worked as a fashion designer before pursuing an MFA in Design Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Cheong has been invited to exhibit her work in Madison by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Overture Center for the Arts, and Art and Literature Lab; and by the Surface Design Association, the International Textile Apparel Association, the Indianapolis Art Center, and the InKo Centre in Chennai, India. She was a finalist for the Forward Art Prize from the Women Artists Forward Fund and received the Best of Show award for her work in Clotheshorse at the Indianapolis Art Center. She recently won a juried public art commission for a work she installed at the Pinney branch of the Madison Public Library.

Kyoung Ae Cho (b.1963) received her MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and her BFA from Ducksung Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. Cho has exhibited extensively at venues including the Tweed Museum of Art, MN; the Muskegon Museum of Art, MI; the Belger Arts Center, MO; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, WI; The Gallery at Montalvo, CA; the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, IN; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; the Evanston Art Center, IL; the University of Kentucky Art Museum, KY; the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, HI; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; and the National Museum of Modern Art, South Korea. Cho is the recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, a UWM Foundation & Graduate School Research Award, the Lillian Elliott Award from the Textile Society of America, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Cho lives in Milwaukee and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Emma Daisy Hyun Ah Gertel is a visual artist and muralist known for creating playful works using vibrant color that depict plants and girls. She draws on her education in fashion design, community arts, and cultural development. For over a decade she served as an arts facilitator, creative director, and then co-executive director for a youth arts nonprofit. Her collaborative organizational work has received accolades including a Mayoral Design Award. Much of her current work explores the spaces in between, and is a reflection on acceptance, belonging, and identity as a Korean adoptee. Daisy maintains a studio practice in Milwaukee and her murals can be found across the country in tourist destinations, schools, businesses, and private residences. She aims to create works both public and private that encourage human connection through beauty, inspiration of possibility, and celebration of life with the ability to spread joy.

JinMan Jo (b. 1972) has shown his work throughout the United States and in South Korea. He has been invited to participate in 30 solo exhibitions and more than 60 group exhibitions. He has given numerous visiting artist lectures and workshops at other institutions since joining the art departments at Utah State University, Western Oregon University and, most recently, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His work is included in collections at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea, as well as multiple private collections. He has twice been honored with the Outstanding Achievement Award in contemporary sculpture given by the International Sculpture Center in conjunction with Sculpture Magazine.

Okja Kwon (b. 1981) is a Korean-born, transracial adoptee artist who communicates through intimate illustrative image-making. She explores the erasure of self in relation to the constructs of nationalism and belongingness. Kwon’s work whispers ideations of (re)imagined recollections of the fragmented memories of in-betweenness, loss, and the repair and rebuilding of relationships. Kwon has exhibited artwork in various state, national, and international galleries and educational institutions. She holds BFA degrees in Painting & Drawing and Narrative Print & Forms and an MS in the Cultural Foundations of Education—for which she wrote about the cultural and legal implications of family detention at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, Texas. As a scholar, Kwon writes about how the intersection of decoloniality and legal linguistics is a repertoire that contributes to ideas of nationalism, impacting those deemed “other.” Kwon teaches critical thinking and writing in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Minkyu Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1976. He received a BFA (2002) and an MFA (2006) from Seoul National University, and an MFA (2008) from the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He was a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts (2007), and has been actively showing his work in national and international venues such as Design Miami (December 2021), Art Wynwood (Miami, 2016), World Ceramics Exposition (South Korea, 2015), ZONA MACO Mexico Arte Contemporaneo (2014), SOFA Chicago (2013), Ceramic Space & Life (South Korea, 2009), 28th International Ceramics Competition of L’Alcora (Spain, 2008), 1st Jingzhe International Ceramics Exhibition (China, 2007), and the Sidney Myer Fund International Ceramic Art Award (Australia, 2006). He is a lifetime member of the International Academy of Ceramics (IAC) and is an associate professor and chairperson of the art program at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

Mokwon, Subsoo Lim (b. 1940) is an eminent South Korean artist widely known for the practice of traditional ink brush painting, a distinctive style that draws its artistry from masterful brush strokes. Over the past forty years, Mokwon has been active both as an artist and educator. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with ten solo exhibitions and over 200 group and invitational exhibitions in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, South Africa, and the U.S. Mokwon has also served as juror and advisor for several national art competitions in South Korea, such as the National Fine Art competition and the Shilla Art Award competition. As an educator, Mokwon has founded two artist associations in South Korea, Yeonji and Gayeon, for professional women painters who themselves have staged shows in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Japan. Five years ago, Mokwon moved to Milwaukee to live near her daughter. She has since exhibited her work in Illinois, California, and Wisconsin. Mokwon has an MFA in Korean Painting from Hongik University in Seoul and currently teaches brush painting at MIAD and the Korean Cultural Center in Chicago.

Jason S. Yi (b. 1963) has exhibited nationally and internationally. Notably, his work was included in the international biennial exhibition at the Inside-out Art Museum in Beijing in 2013 and Sculpture Milwaukee 2017. His awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2014), the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship (2007), and the Kamiyama Artist in Residence Fellowship (2003), sponsored by the Japan Foundation. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Kamiyama Museum of Art in Japan, the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation in New York. The artist lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Rina Yoon (b. 1965) is a Korean-born visual artist and a professor of Fine Art at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in Wisconsin.Yoon received a BFA in Fine Art from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and an MFA in Printmaking from Washington University in St. Louis. Yoon focuses on non-traditional printmaking methods including large scale prints, paper installations, and multi-media work combining video and sculptural elements with printmaking. Driven by curiosity and sensitivity to materials, Yoon often embraces slow processes to allow time for reflection and meditation. Yoon’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States as well as in South Korea, China, India, Italy, and Poland.

June 20, 2021 - September 26, 2021

Photo: Daniel McCullough
Sixteen Paths, 2021. Photo: Daniel McCullough.

Daniel Minter: Rootwork
June 20-September 26, 2021
Artist Reception: Saturday, July 24, 4-6 pm

View the exhibition virtually here.

Rootwork – to make repair well below the surface. To go deeper. To seek
the source of an issue. To look beyond the symptoms to identify the cause.

Rootwork (African American vernacular) – to use remedies rooted in
African spirituality to solve problems and influence nature. To use roots,
plants, and herbs for healing and influencing events.

Rootwork is the third iteration of “a distant holla,” an assemblage and collaging of Daniel Minter’s carvings, paintings, objects, and material created over a span of time but related by an ongoing personal narrative. Rootwork also includes new work but, as Minter says, “it’s all a continuum.” This collage-like approach to presenting his work runs counter to traditional ways of exhibiting art, with each work occupying its own space. “I've always wanted to commit things closer,” Minter observes. “I am working toward a practice where every piece that I make can have an intimate connection to whatever is connected to it. The notion that all things are connected is important to me.”

Rachel E. Harding, writing in the two essays appended below, describes Minter’s work as “an artwork reuniting Black people with their totems – the mythic resources and cultural sinew embedded in our historical experience” (2005) and as “a navigation system” (2019). According to Harding, Minter describes his art as “a technology; a mode of creativity that uses African diasporic sensibilities to enable an alternative understanding about the world; a way to recognize and access ancestral resources for individual and collective struggle.” Harding sees Minter’s work as both a strategy and a pedagogy, “instructing viewers in the essential elements of its language and suggesting ways to engage its multiple meanings” (2019).

The artist wants people to see the connections, not just between different works but between the themes and issues embedded in them. He intentionally repeats images, which he refers to as “keys,” in his work, where they appear in many forms, from tiny block prints to larger paintings. But always, this visual language--made up of “water and wind; fish and boats; musical instruments; brooms, axes and other implements of labor; bottles and bowls; Black people’s faces, bodies and hair; traditional foods like okra, black-eyed peas and greens; turtles; birds; and various representations of Spirit, the continuity of the lifeforce, and the power of healing in the world” (Harding, 2019)--is building and layering together a single concept.

Not only for African Americans, but for all of us, Daniel Minter is collecting the remnants, the totems, the simple images spilling with meaning, and giving them back to us as treasures, as lessons, as keys to our healing and our joy.
Rachel E. Harding, Daniel Minter’s Keys: Deciphering and Honoring Ordinary Blackness

This exhibition was a chance for Minter to use various mediums and techniques--carving, painting, printmaking--to name the things that are important to him: “The other realities that I see.” Minter adds, “I enjoy working with the materials at hand. Different materials are a way for me to express different sides to the story. Sometimes this requires soft, delicate, detailed work. Other times, it requires broad movement, heavy lines, rougher lines, or a different material altogether.”

Harding recognizes a “necessary usefulness and nurturing” in Minter’s work. She quotes Minter as saying, “My idea of the purpose of art is to give people ways of using their culture to solve everyday life problems.”

She continues, in her 2019 essay: “This emphasis on the utilitarian in his art is reflected in the metaphoric range of Minter’s symbols. Growing up in the small farming community of Ellaville, Georgia in the 1960s and 1970s, Minter’s vision and work emerged from the soil, sites, implements and histories of Black southern life. Minter’s art is heavy with gross materiality – thick planks of wood, found objects, metal, wire, stone, the heft of human presence in the world; and particularly, the physical and psychic weight of Black embodiment in the Americas, especially in the US Blackbelt South. And at the same time, there is an astonishing ephemerality in the work. Sometimes these two tendencies exist side by side, interwoven and conversing, in continuum.

“In some important ways, Minter’s mode aligns with that of other Black creatives – scholars, writers, musicians, dancers and visual artists – whose approach, sometimes considered afropessimist, acknowledges and explores the depth and breadth of the inherent antiblackness at the heart of modernity; its historicity; and the fact that it is not likely to disappear from the earth anytime soon…. What we see in Minter’s work is the profound recognition of the assault on, and the precarity of, Black life; melded to an equally essential emphasis on “another tone.” In fact, his greater accentuation is on the alternate timbres, which are also conceptual tools; those vital, transformative modes of being, that are cultivated over generations and that carry another meaning of the possible (an afrofuturist vision) at their heart. Minter’s art is the labor of tender excavation, unearthing the wisdom buried in the culture – sometimes deep in the terrain of memory, sometimes flat-footed in plain sight all around us. Minter’s vision helps us recognize and reinterpret the strengths and possibilities in a radically inclusive African American and Afro-diasporic vision of the world.”

Read more about Daniel Minter’s work:
Rachel E. Harding, Ph.D., Daniel Minter’s Keys: Deciphering and Honoring Ordinary Blackness, 2005
Rachel Elizabeth Harding, Quantum Exchange: The Diasporic Art of Daniel Minter

This exhibition and the residency of which it is a part, In the Healing Language of Trees: a natural act of transformation restructured for curing many ills, are supported by the Joyce Foundation through a 2021 Joyce Award to Daniel Minter and Lynden Sculpture Garden; the Brico Fund; the Chipstone Foundation; and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.

About the Artist
Daniel Minter is an American artist known for his work in the mediums of painting and assemblage who works in varied media. His overall body of work deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, ordinary/extraordinary blackness; spirituality in the Afro Atlantic world; and the (re)creation of meanings of home. Minter’s work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries including the Portland Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The David C. Driskell Center, and the Northwest African American Art Museum. As founding director of Maine Freedom Trails, he has helped highlight the history of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement in New England. In 2018, Minter co-founded the Indigo Arts Alliance, a creative center in the city of Portland, Maine, dedicated to increasing the visibility of, and support for, Black and Brown artists. Indigo is the manifestation of a lifelong dream to create a place where art, ingenuity, social justice, and diasporic collaboration is seeded and nurtured.

July 13, 2020 - December 23, 2020

Photo: Daniel McCullough
Rose Garden

Admission by appointment only. Capacity limited to three visitors at a time. Masks required.

For same-day appointments, call 414-446-8794. Gallery hours are 10 am-4 pm; closed Thursdays.

To view a slideshow of this exhibition, click here.
To view or download a copy of the gallery notes, click here.
Read a review of the exhibition at the Shepherd Express website.

Price List and Proceeds
For a price list, please email pmorris@lyndensculpturegarden.org. Fifty percent of the proceeds of each sale will go to the Milwaukee Freedom Fund to be used for Chrystul Kizer’s defense. Learn more about Chrystul Kizer here and here.

Ariana Vaeth: New Work
Ariana Vaeth’s autobiographical paintings are rooted in intimacy. They chronicle formative relationships, honoring the people most important to her in a given moment. According to Vaeth, “these paintings celebrate the generous closeness allowed by those I am privileged to know.”

Vaeth evokes these moments of closeness through staged, performative retellings. Preparatory photoshoots capture gestures and enable Vaeth to see herself as others see her—but her inclusion in the paintings restricts her agency: “I can never fully be director or actor when producing a composition.” Instead, she exchanges control for the serendipity found in interactions among trusted loved ones. Prior to painting, she reasserts that control, constructing the final composition from elements drawn from different photographs.

In addition to portraying her closest friends and herself, Vaeth constructs domestic spaces for them to inhabit. Defined by cramped perspectives and a modified bird’s-eye view, these “by invitation only” settings are filled with props and patterns, each rug and curtain freighted with specific memories, each a piece in Vaeth’s personal narrative. Bodies are depicted in a single plane, as if to equalize personalities—everyone’s a diva in these paintings—amping up the compositional tension. Gestures--as in “Pre-Game”-- appear to burst beyond the confines of the canvas. Facial expressions—as in “Rose Garden”-- take on dramatic weight. “These are moments that are about to break,” says Vaeth. “They represent peaks—peaks that may come again, but may not.”

In the gallery, Vaeth displays seven recent paintings. (Outside the main gallery, Vaeth’s love of pattern overflows in a series of 12 x 12-inch paintings exploring pattern and texture, another, non-figurative, index of Vaeth’s memories.) These self-portraits, mostly with companions, find Vaeth participating in the rituals and inhabiting the environments of close friendship: talking, hanging out in kitchens and bathrooms, curled up on a couch. Make-up, hairbrushes, bottles of wine and local beer, bananas, pickles, abandoned coffee mugs, and the occasional dog are in evidence. And yet there is nothing mundane about these paintings, which instead convey intimacy—and especially the intimacy of young women—with an intensity that borders on the magical. Vaeth describes herself as “utilizing my most prized companions to build a piece of shelter.” In these new works she invites us, temporarily, into this glamorous, clamorous refuge.

About the Artist
Ariana Vaeth was raised in Baltimore and received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. While an undergraduate, she participated in an exchange program with the Maryland Institute College of Art. Following graduation, Vaeth completed a studio based artist-in-residence program at her alma mater and then received a 2017 Greater Milwaukee Foundation Mary L Nohl Fund Fellowship in the Emerging Artist category. She was an inaugural recipient of Fellowship.art, a program modeled on Gener8tor’s accelerator for creative entrepreneurs, and in February she received a Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Award as a promising newcomer. Vaeth has exhibited in Milwaukee at the Portrait Society Gallery, the Charles Allis Museum, and the Haggerty Museum of Art; and in Chicago at Woman Made Gallery and the Museum of Science and Industry in the Black Creativity exhibition. Her work was selected for the 2019 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

January 12, 2020 - April 12, 2020

January 12-March 29, 2020

Photo credit: Windfall, Claire Portrait, Dudley Witney.
Portrait by Dudley Witney; Windfall photo by Claire Ruzicka

Robert Murray and Jonathan D. Lippincott in Conversation (followed by a reception): Saturday, March 28, 2020 – 2-4 pm (FREE)

Lynden continues its series of exhibitions exploring small-scale works by artists in the permanent collection. Robert Murray (b. 1936, Canada) is represented on Lynden’s grounds by Windfall, a painted metal sculpture made in 1966. In this exhibition, curator Jonathan D. Lippincott brings together some of the artist’s working models as well as the Trent Series, a suite of ten woodblock prints Murray made in the 1990s. Lippincott and Murray will be in attendance the final weekend of the exhibition for a gallery talk and reception.

The Working Models, which number more than three dozen, document large-scale works from throughout Robert Murray’s career. Each model is a both a finished work in its own right and a proposal for a large-scale sculpture. A model would typically serve several purposes in the process of making a large-scale work as well: it would be a point of reference for the fabricators Murray worked with to estimate costs and time, and would be used as a visual guide in building the larger sculpture. A model would also be shown to collectors, museum directors, gallery owners, and architects, to help them visualize the work, and to plan for the installation of the final work.

The Working Models have been exhibited together in different groupings since 1983, when they were first presented at Phillips Exeter Academy. They have travelled to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, in British Columbia, the Centro Culturale Canadase, in Rome, and the Delaware Art Museum, among other venues. They provide the opportunity to consider a body of work that could not otherwise be brought together, given the logistical challenges of moving and exhibiting large-scale sculptures. Taken together, they offer an excellent overview of Murray’s prolific work over the last sixty years.
-- Jonathan D. Lippincott

Printmaking has always been a part of Murray’s practice, though an episodic one. According to Lippincott, Murray used printmaking—particularly woodblock printing, which he learned from Will Barnet at Emma Lake—as a way to explore ideas, particularly about color, that were related to his sculpture. Murray produced several series of prints in the early 1990s, cutting and building the blocks himself. The Trent Series is based on a collection of banners Murray designed for Trent University; both the prints and the banners are loosely inspired by his 1963 sculpture Fergus.

About the Artist and Curator
Robert Murray grew up in western Canada and moved to New York City in 1960. Quickly established as an important young artist, he took part in the renaissance of modern sculpture and public art that unfolded over the following decades. Murray was innovative in his use of industrial fabrication methods to create his pieces and in his deep investigation of landscape as inspiration for abstract sculpture. His synthesis of the rich tradition of landscape painting in Canada and the exciting vision of New York abstract expressionist and color-field painting has resulted in an extraordinary and unique body of work. Murray was awarded the Order of Canada in 2000 and received the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2018.
robertmurraysculpture.com

Jonathan D. Lippincott is the author of two books, the newly published monograph Robert Murray: Sculpture, and Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s. He has written about art for , On-Verge, and Tether: A Journal of Art, Literature, and Culture. He has curated shows including Chromatic Space, the eightieth-anniversary exhibition for American Abstract Artists, at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center in New York City, and Celestial and Terrestrial, at the New Arts Program in Kutztown, PA. Lippincott is the associate director of the non-profit publisher Library of American Landscape History, the leading publisher of books that advance the study and practice of American landscape architecture.
lippincottbookdesign.com

August 11, 2019 - December 23, 2019

Rosemary Ollison, Mama, 10 x 14 feet (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Portait Society Gallery.
Rosemary Ollison, Mama, 10 x 14 feet (2019). Courtesy of the artist and Portait Society Gallery.

Opening reception: Sunday, August 11, 2019 – 3-5 pm (FREE)
Fashion show: Beyond Fashion: Saturday, August 24, 5-7 pm; free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
Gallery Talk & Jewelry Sale: Saturday, December 14, 2019, 2-4 pm; free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.

Rosemary Ollison has transformed each of her apartments into an artist environment, deploying layers of pattern, duct tape sculptures, curtains of woven leather, crazy quilts, and inventive drawings. At Lynden she creates an immersive environment within the former home of Harry and Peg Bradley. Spreading beyond the gallery, where a nineteen-foot leather quilt will hang, Ollison will transform Lynden’s dining room, preparing it for an imaginary dinner party. Ollison is a 77-year-old self-taught artist and 2018 Nohl Fellow in the Emerging category. At 16, Ollison moved to the Midwest from an Arkansas plantation, and she began making art in 1994 while healing from an abusive marriage. She collects glass, leather, bracelets, beads, bones, and jewelry from thrift shops and rummage sales and repurposes these materials into sculptural and wearable works. This is a Call & Response event.

April 28, 2019 - July 28, 2019

Evelyn Patricia Terry, In America, Wandering and Saving Souls
In America, Wandering and Saving Souls, 2018. Pastel, ink, thread, acrylic paint on rag paper, 15 3/8” x 10 3/4" (unframed). Photo by Fonde Patrice Bridges with Dean Johnson.

Opening reception: Sunday, April 28, 2019, 3-5 pm FREE
Altered Books: A Workshop with Evelyn Terry, Sunday, May 19, 2019, 10 am-3 pm. More info: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/education/altered-books

“America”—from its origins to present day news reports of racial and ethnic interactions--is a recurrent theme in Evelyn Patricia Terry’s work. Over the course of more than fifty years, she has made several bodies of work that address the “conundrum of co-existence that repeatedly occupies the news, my thoughts, and many conversations.” In America’s Favor/Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed!), the most recent in a series of exhibitions on the theme, Terry brings together different bodies of work: an iconic table installation, artist books, and mixed media works that layer drawings and other forms of mark-making on sewn rag paper pieces. Terry has mined her five-decade history as an artist to create the exhibition by repurposing the torn and cut sections of etchings, screen-prints, monotypes, and randomly printed rag paper scraps that she has accumulated as a printmaker, and by referencing items in her personal collection, from ethnic dolls to the work of other artists.

In the rear of the building, Terry will be exhibiting nine works from her Play the Race Card series. The series dates from 2006-7, when Terry began using torn canvas strips recycled from previously set-aside paintings. Focusing on two politically and emotionally charged color groupings, "red, black and green" and "red, white and blue," on a backdrop of other colors, this work promotes race conversations as commonplace topics like weather--absent the political biases, empowerment drain, and emotional damage harbored.

Terry has returned to “America” several times over the years, and its episodic manifestations can be read as a kind of diary. In 1996, working with the Haggerty Museum of Art, Terry created her first table installation, Guess/Guests Who Came to Dinner, at the (former) Watts Tea Shop. This original dinner table featured mismatched plates, assorted stemware, various ethnic dolls, and a Reverend Josephus Farmer Statue of Liberty sculpture from her art collection. For Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed), made for Pure Black, an exhibition Terry co-curated with Della Wells at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union Art Gallery in 2004, she expanded the installation, placing written words and healthy raw foods--ginger, garlic, lemons--on each plate.

She took up the theme again in two series of artist books America’s Favor (named from her 1972 screen print edition) and America: Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed)—named after the table installation. Most recently, Terry was invited to display the table installation at the Mobile Design Box, a local alternative space, and to fill the empty walls with two-dimensional work that could be hung with pins or tacks. Working on short notice and with these restrictions, Terry elected to use the space as a studio to produce a new body of work. Searching out all the marked-up rag paper pieces she had fortuitously filed and saved over the years, she created vertical and horizontal substrates by randomly sewing several pieces together. She enhanced these sewn compositions with new marks and figurative drawings of her female and male ethnic doll collection in their “country of origin” dress, building thematic connections to the table installation. The figures are drawn alone or coupled, sometimes in strange inter-ethnic relationships and sometimes together with “their own kind.” Text, too, has been an essential and continuous element in the “America” series, appearing on plates, across book pages, on cards, and in titles that provide clues to the artist’s thoughts. For this exhibition, Terry will be producing new books and mixed media works.

America's Favor/Guests Who Came to Dinner (and Stayed!) is the latest entry in Terry’s diary, an up-to-the moment index of the artist’s aesthetic and material interests, her personal concerns, and her approach to embracing the world she lives in.

About the Artist
Evelyn Patricia Terry is a full time professional visual artist, presenter, writer and art collector based in Milwaukee. She works across many media: printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, and public art. During her long career, she has garnered awards, fellowships, grants, and commendations for community work with students and other artists. Concentrating on printmaking, she earned both a BFA and an MS in Visual Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after Ruth Milofsky, a UWM arts education professor and mentor, set up a fund to give her a deadline to go back to school so she might be better prepared as an artist.

In 2012, Terry received the Wisconsin Visual Artist Lifetime Achievement Award from a Wisconsin consortium of art and humanity organizations. In 2014 the Milwaukee Arts Board honored her with their Artist of the Year Award. Terry’s work is internationally exhibited and collected; over 400 private, corporate, and public collections own her artwork including the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University, the Racine Art Museum and the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College. From 2016 through 2018, several universities—including UWM, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Duke University--acquired Terry’s hand-constructed artists’ books. In 2009, influenced by Dr. Margaret Burroughs, a visual artist, poet, and founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History, and by Chicago art consultant Susan Woodson, Terry founded the Terry McCormick Contemporary Fine and Folk Art Gallery, a home-based gallery, following the death of her partner, self-taught folk artist George Ray McCormick, Sr.

December 9, 2018 - April 14, 2019

www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/exhibitions/clement-meadmor...
Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Saturday, March 23, 2019 at 2 pm: Gallery talk and reception with Ellen Goldberg and Hugo Rivera, of Meadmore Studios LLC, and Jonathan Lippincott, author of Large Scale.

Clement Meadmore (American, b. Australia, 1929-2005) is represented in Lynden’s permanent outdoor collection by two exuberant monumental works, Upstart (1967) and Double Up (1970). Clement Meadmore: The Models continues our exploration of the work and creative processes of artists in our collection, many of whom were also making smaller sculpture, furniture, or works on paper. In this exhibition, organized in collaboration with Meadmore Sculptures, we display eight models—some of them used to this day to fabricate Meadmore’s large-scale works.

August 26, 2018 - December 2, 2018

www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/exhibitions/tyanna-buie-imp...
Tyanna Buie, Power Pose #3, 2018. Image courtesy of The Alice Wilds Gallery.

Opening reception: Sunday, August 26, 2018 – 3-5 pm (FREE)
Related Events:
Call and Response: A Conversation with Tyanna Buie, Folayemi Wilson, and Portia Cobb, November 17, 3-4:30 pm

Free to members or with admission to sculpture garden.

Photographs and other material evidence of Tyanna Buie’s disrupted childhood are rare. In these new works, Buie continues to rely on the collective memory of her family to make connections between the past and present. She gathers memorabilia and re-visits and revives previous impressions from familial accounts and recollections to create large-scale monotypes and screen prints. For Im•Positioned, Buie places these personal investigations in a larger context, responding to the work of other artists in residence at Lynden for Call & Response: echoing the family references in Folayemi Wilson’s Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities and capturing Reggie Wilson’s bodies in motion. Buie was a 2012 Nohl Fellow, and this exhibition has been organized in conjunction with the 15th anniversary of the Nohl Fellowship. This is a Call & Response event.

About the Artist
A Chicago and Milwaukee native, Tyanna Buie received her BA from Western Illinois University, and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While she has attended residency programs throughout the country, exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, she has maintained her connection to the community by hosting printmaking workshops and demonstrations, and participating in Healthy Neighborhood Initiatives through the production of public art for underserved neighborhoods and communities.  In 2012, Buie received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship as an emerging artist, and in 2015 she received the foundation’s Love of Humanity Award. She is also is a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic and has been acquired by major institutions and private collections. Buie is currently living in Detroit, where she is an assistant professor and section chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies.

July 3, 2018 - August 23, 2018

1-ArianneKingComer_Ibilie_photo_SaraRisley

Ibile is a Yoruba word for “the messenger of our ancestors.” Arianne King Comer makes textile works—paintings--using centuries-old resist-dye processes. These works come from her spirit, represent her ancestors' call, and reflect the South Carolina Low Country that she calls home. When Comer arrives for her residency in early July, her solo exhibition, Ibile’s Voice, will slowly transform as her paintings are joined by the works of the community members who join her around the dye vat. This is a Call & Response event.

June 3, 2018 - July 3, 2018

Arianne King Comer
Indigo in the Low County, Arianne King Comer

Free to members or with admission to sculpture garden.

Ibile is a Yoruba word for “the messenger of our ancestors.” Arianne King Comer makes textile works—paintings--using centuries-old resist-dye processes. These works come from her spirit and represent her ancestors' call. Many of the landscapes included in this exhibition of fourteen painting depict the South Carolina Low Country that Comer calls home. Among the works, most dating from the past two years, are still lifes, abstracts, and two intimate scenes of Lynden made during her residency last summer. This is a Call & Response event.

May 12, 2018 - May 20, 2018

In honor of this year’s World Bonsai Day and the re-opening of the Bonsai Pavilion, Lynden will host a special temporary exhibit of bonsai by members of the Milwaukee Bonsai Society.

The exhibit will open on Saturday, May 12, 2018, at the Bonsai Pavilion, with a demonstration by bonsai artist Jennifer Price at 1 pm. A reception will follow at 3 pm. The exhibit will remain on view through Sunday, May 20, 2018.

For more information on the demonstration: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/calendar/world-bonsai-day

For more information on the Bonsai Pavilion: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/Bonsai

February 25, 2018 - May 27, 2018

Katheryn Corbin: Migrant, February 25-May 27, 2018
Migrant

Opening reception: Sunday, February 25, 3-5 pm
FREE

Birding with Katheryn Corbin & Poet Chuck Stebelton, Sunday, April 29, 2018, 8:30-10 am
Free to members or with admission.

Artist's tour of the sculpture garden: Sunday, May 13, 2018, 3 pm
Free to members or with admission.

Katheryn Corbin makes work that responds to the climate: physical, cultural, political. In this exhibition, she shows a series of nearly-life-sized figurative ceramic sculptures, as well as sawdust-fired vessels made during a residency at Lynden.

During her residency, which began in June 2016, Katheryn Corbin began to connect the migration of the birds and butterflies she saw at Lynden with news of the worsening international refugee crisis. While much of her time at Lynden was spent making vessels that she fired by burying them in sawdust in a trash can out on Lynden’s grounds (a 24-hour process that provided plenty of time for observing the landscape and its inhabitants), she also used the studio to make ceramic sculptures. Corbin began making full-length ceramic figures in 2006, and she has returned to the practice sporadically since then. The hollow figures are made in two, and sometimes three, parts, so they can be fired separately in the kiln. After firing, Corbin paints the surfaces. Her earlier figures use dark line to define the pale, almost monochromatic forms. In early 2017 she made two migrant figures at Lynden, one carrying a child on her back, and used their surfaces to explore pattern and color.

Nine painted figurative sculptures fill Lynden’s gallery, arranged in tableaux. Corbin views these sculptures as actors in dramas, and she contextualizes them with props: pots, a small watercolor, skirts, a folding window. Drawing on her interest in the movement of butterflies and a photograph of a performance she saw in a newspaper, Corbin created “Chasing Butterflies,” a vignette of two half-figures with tulle skirts and a small, Pierrot-like boy stationed among butterflies and flowers. This interest in movement and migration recurs just outside the gallery, where a digital print, an enlargement of a watercolor of a dead bird, hangs; she has also included a large painting of Japanese magnolia blossoms in the front entrance, a nod to the tree not far beyond Lynden’s patio.

Several of Corbin’s sawdust-fired pots are dotted across the gallery. Two large vessels have found their way into the dining room, where they share space, and an interest in organic forms, with Isamu Noguchi’s Sinai.

It is not unusual for the natural world to make its way into work produced during and after a Lynden residency, but as Corbin’s exhibition illustrates, time spent at Lynden by artists-in-residence can impact work in unexpected ways. For Corbin, the opportunity to devote time to thinking led to new ways of connecting ideas and approaching an established practice. She began her residency on the functional side of her ceramic practice, with the goal of investigating the chance processes of sawdust firing in conjunction with other forms of surface embellishment, such as painting and drawing. The timeframe—more than a year—created opportunities for her to expand her project, to explore different mediums (she made paintings, drawings, sculpture, and photographs in addition to the pots), to respond in a timely way to the world she was living in—both at Lynden and at large--and to discover new links between her functional and sculptural practices.

About the Artist
Katheryn Corbin spent her childhood in Detroit, Michigan, and her adult years in Illinois and Wisconsin. She received her MFA in Ceramics from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her BA in Art and English from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. Her ceramic work, which includes functional and sculptural approaches to clay, has been exhibited in galleries and markets on the East Coast, in the South, and throughout the midwest. Her figures, both on the wall and life size, are in the collection on the campuses of Epic Systems in Verona, Wisconsin, as well as in numerous private collections. Corbin has taught in both public and private museums, schools, and universities, and teaches ceramics workshops at Lynden.

November 5, 2017 - February 18, 2018

Barbara Hepworth, Corymb, 1959. Image: (c) Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Reece Ousey.
Barbara Hepworth, Corymb, 1959. Image: (c) Bowness, Hepworth Estate. Photo: Reece Ousey.

As winter closes in, we will fill the gallery with smaller works by the artists whose sculptures punctuate Lynden’s landscape. Among the works: a recently-acquired set of five Tony Smith posters for The Wandering Rocks, just outside the window; a wall relief by Heinz Mack; and sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, James Rosati, and more.

July 9, 2017 - October 29, 2017

IMG_5874
Reflector (2017)

Opening reception: Sunday, July 9, 2017, 3-5 pm

A publication with an interview with Gabriel Ritter, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and an essay by Scott Cowan, will be published.

Katy Cowan: reflected-into-themselves-into-reflected includes seven new sculptures that begin in the gallery and spill out onto Lynden's grounds, as well as a series of preparatory drawings. The exuberant forms of Cowan’s painted wooden sculptures--prairie plants and landscapes will come to mind--fill the gallery, and bronzes, slipped into unexpected locations outside, provide a playful and subtle commentary on the not-quite-wild environment at Lynden.

Cowan describes her three bronze works on the grounds as a “gentle intrusion” into a space defined by monumental sculpture and a manmade landscape. When she began work on this exhibition, she recognized that “the powerful setting of Lynden” was impossible to ignore. Her use of bronze brings her work into immediate conversation with the permanent collection; she further complicates the dialogue by intentionally inserting the female body, and particularly the female hand, among the works of many male sculptors. This counterpoint between made and wild, male and female, past and present has led her to experiment with the bronze—a material with a very long history—investigating how to make works that are active from a substance frequently used for sculptures that are passive, permanent, and “almost perfect in their materiality.”

Cowan’s response is to pack her molds with markers of domestic life, references to the human body, and the studio cast-offs of a working sculptor; to embrace accidents; and to apply paint freely to surfaces. At the same time, she focuses on site and engages directly with the physical environment at Lynden: ponds, trees, fields. Staircase Descending a Nude quietly joins a wooden crutch supporting the sagging branch of a large beech tree, sharing its load, but a close look reveals a hyperactive surface of protruding hammers, noses, and bulging fingers. For Reflector, a work in Big Lake, she plays with the water’s reflective surface, implicating the viewer in the piece. reflected-into-themselves, a cast rope with text standing in a prairie, asks what it means to be a still life in a dynamic environment that never ceases to grow and move. It calls attention, Cowan notes, “to the difficulties of portraying the space you are in.”

In the gallery, the wood sculptures simultaneously reference domesticity and the world beyond the windows. For Cowan, the sculptures of prairie plants allude to the flowers she keeps in vases in her home. She returns to the complicated ontology of still life, creating a charged relationship between the living still life in her vase, the wooden still life on the pedestal, and the abundant life on Lynden’s grounds. The surfaces of these wooden works are variously inscribed with watercolor, enamel, and acrylic paint, lacquer, oil, colored pencil, and graphite--materials that they share with the drawings that trace the evolution of individual pieces.

Ultimately, Cowan views the exhibition as an extended reflection, and an ode to “very pensive beautiful moments that are particular to Wisconsin.” The phrase “reflected-into-themselves”--and Cowan’s palindromic title--comes from Hegel via Frederic Jameson. The phrase itself reflects the difficult passage of ideas, often nouns encapsulating a single idea, from German into English. Cowan has adopted it--and Hegel’s sense of reflection as an illuminating, dialectical process--as slightly awkward shorthand for a constellation of ideas that inform this exhibition in which all the sculptures are in dialogue; reflection describes both the properties of materials and the process of viewing; and sensitivity to site, or placement, reflects the artist’s conceptual practice.

About the Artist

Katy Cowan (b. 1982 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin) received her BFA at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington and her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Last fall, she was included in the Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and recently opened her third solo exhibition at Cherry and Martin in Los Angeles. Cowan’s work has been included in the cross-medium exhibition Condensed Matter Community organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Physical Sciences Laboratories and in as if form were some pitcher at Fourteen 30 Contemporary in Portland, Oregon. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Kate Werble (New York) and The Green Gallery (Milwaukee). Other group exhibitions include Cherry and Martin; the Poor Farm (Manawa, Wisconsin); Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, California), and Los Angeles Nomadic Division. She has lived and worked in Milwaukee since 2014, and is moving to Riverside, California, at the end of the summer. Cowan is represented by Cherry and Martin.

March 4, 2017 - June 25, 2017

Cecelia Condit - Giraffe and Zebra
Cecelia Condit, Tales of a Future Past (2017), video still.

Opening reception: Saturday, March 4, 2017, 3-5 pm
Free and open to the public.

Bird walk with Cecelia Condit & Chuck Stebelton: Sunday, April 23, 2017, 8:30-10 am
Click here for more information.

Fear and displacement are central to Cecelia Condit's work, which dissects the entanglements that connect self, society, and the natural world. Condit is a storyteller, particularly of psychologically inflected contemporary fairy tales, whose work--like all the best fairy tales--oscillates between beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty. Her videos document the frailty of personal identity in the face of the primordial unknown that sits just outside the frame, a charged space loaded with irony and danger.

Condit's exhibition at Lynden reflects her increasing interest in landscape and the natural world. Her most recent two-channel installation, Tales of a Future Past (2017), explores extinction through the story of a lone giraffe who collects small animal forms that evoke treasured memories, hope, innocence, and grief. When an aggressive zebra crosses her path, the giraffe’s fragile world is threatened. In Tales, Condit considers time and space in relation to landscape and our planet, moving from the insistently personal to the universal, and from fairy tale to myth. Also on view will be virtuosic photographs that subvert scale and time to create fictitious landscapes.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews the exhibition here.

About the Artists

Cecelia Condit has shown internationally in festivals, museums and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Centre Georges Pompidou Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France. She has received numerous awards including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, American Film Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists. She is currently a professor in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Renato Umali (composer, Tales of a Future Past) is a graduate of Northwestern University's School of Music, where he studied piano performance and analog and digital synthesis. In 2003, he earned a master's degree in Film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts. He currently conducts piano lessons at home and at the Brass Bell Music Store, and teaches film courses, including one studying and constructing film scores, for the UWM Film Department.

November 13, 2016 - February 19, 2017

(L) Pat Hidson, Slide. Photo: Jim Brozek. (R) Tori Tasch, 3 Months of Centerfolds
(L) Pat Hidson, Slide. Photo: Jim Brozek. (R) Tori Tasch, 3 Months of Centerfolds.

Opening reception: Sunday, November 13, 2016, 3-5 pm

Pat Hidson and Tori Tasch shared a year-long residency at Lynden that ended in May. It was the first time that Hidson, who is primarily a painter, and Tasch, who makes books and prints, had worked together, but they built their collaboration around their shared concern for the environment and a deep interest in the natural world. For this exhibition, each artist returns to her solo practice, with the occasional nod to the residency in the shape of printed seed packets and cyanotype flags.

The garden--a place where Hidson spends a lot of her time--is central to the imagery and geometry of her exuberant two-dimensional works. Her paintings distill experience into intuitive forms; color, movement, pattern and texture--Hidson uses acrylics, oils, glitter, and metallics--convey a sense of living matter. The drawings combine delicate details from nature with abstract forms. Similarly eclectic in their materials, their white backgrounds keep them anchored in a contemplative place.

For Tasch, creating books is a daily ritual and ecological investigation. Her passion for repurposing materials and using layered printmaking processes merge in a series of unique handmade books featuring found objects and pamphlet stitched pages. The biodiversity at Lynden inspired Tasch to create a series of diminutive insect books that she paired with found objects from the site. Increasingly, each book is a specimen, a small sculpture made individually, but displayed as part of a collection. For the exhibition, Tasch installs her Centerfold Series of 365 butterflies, one for each day of the Lynden residency. Like centerfold models, butterflies are lithe, beautiful, and graceful; each butterfly is fabricated from old centerfolds and repurposed pages from science textbooks. The butterfly-books are symbols of transformation; when they are shown together, they mark the passage of time.

About the Artists

Pat Hidson was born in Edmonton, Alberta. She began her art training with her artist grandmother, Dorothy Ryland. After attending many years of art classes at the Edmonton Art Gallery, she was fortunate to have a marvelous high school art teacher, Mrs. Darevich, who inspired her to attend the University of Alberta. Hidson planned to be a high school art teacher, but after her third child was born here in Milwaukee she began to do pastel portraits to make money to support her art classes at MIAD, as well as trips with the children. Many exhibitions later she has still not gone back to that teaching career, but sharing her skills with generations of adult students in her studio has been a joy. Tori Tasch is a mentoring artist at RedLine Milwaukee (where she has a studio), an art educator working with K4-8th grade, and a printmaker who maintains a vibrant studio practice. She serves on the board of Milwaukee Area Teachers Of Art, and is the Southeast Exhibitions Chair for Wisconsin Visual Artists. Tasch lives in Merton with her two dogs and husband of 30 years.

October 1, 2016 - October 2, 2016

   

Artist-in-residence Yevgeniya Kaganovich brings her durational project to a close with an exhibition--indoors and out--of all the interconnected, plant-like forms that she, her students, and community members have made from recycled plastic bags over a period of four years. There will be a closing reception on October 1, and visitors are welcome to return on Sunday, October 2, to adopt a plant or two; what remains will be recycled.

About the Artist

Yevgeniya Kaganovich, born in Belarus, is a Milwaukee-based artist, whose hybrid practice encompasses jewelry and metalsmithing, sculpture and installation. She received an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kaganovich has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally since 1992. Her work has received a number of awards and has been published widely. Kaganovich is an associate professor in and chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she heads a thriving undergraduate and graduate jewelry and metalsmithing program.

June 26, 2016 - October 30, 2017

Fo Wilson - Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities

Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities is an ongoing project of the Lynden Sculpture Garden and is open to the public April through October (weather permitting). The Cabinet remains at the center of our education and public programming, with new programming each summer. Call and Response programming available here: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

We have published a broadside to accompany Eliza's Cabinet. It is available without charge at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. To view or download a PDF of the broadside, click here.

Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities, 2017
Performances
July 23: Arsene Delay
August 5: SistaStrings
August 19: Benjamin Seabrook
Residencies
Arianne King Comer: IBILE!: Ancestral Call in Cloth
Portia Cobb: Rooted: The Storied Land, Memory, and Belonging
Events
August 5: Free Family Day: Many Elizas

Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities, 2016
Performances
July 8: Tomeka Reid (Watch video of the performance here.)
August 6: Viktor Le
August 13: Honey Pot Performance (Watch video of the performance here.)
September 17: Anna Martine Whitehead
October 29: Symposium

In the summer of 2016, Chicago-based artist Fo Wilson unveiled Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities on the grounds of the Lynden Sculpture Garden. The full-scale structure is both wunderkammer and slave cabin; it imagines what a 19th-century woman of African descent might have collected, catalogued and stowed in her living quarters. What did she find curious about the objects and culture of her European captors? Southern plantation life? The natural world around her? Informed by historical research, but represented in the past, present and future simultaneously, Eliza--animated by an Afro-Futurist vision that embodies a hopeful version of an African American future--presents an imagined collection of found and original objects, furnishings and artifacts.

With Eliza's Cabin, Wilson positions the Black imagination as an essential element in Black survival and self-determination. The fictional Eliza not only assumes the role of collector, anthropologist and naturalist; as curator of her wunderkammer she asserts her right to creative and artistic forms of social commentary about her time. Through Eliza--and the materialization of her interior world--participants have the opportunity to experience history from the point of view of the “other,”as well as through the eyes of an artist who takes history as one of her materials and employs contemporary media and installation strategies to disrupt the viewer's assumptions about the institution of slavery.

In this project, architecture and material culture become important agents for the inclusion of voices in American history that are usually marginalized. Eliza's collection includes more than 100 found and original objects and specimens, some that relate directly to the period and others that traverse time. In Eliza's world, the symbolic architecture or enslaved space becomes a vehicle for and expression of freedom, as well as a container for her fanciful interpretation of an alien world and her critical assessment of her perilous situation.

From June 2016 to October 2016, Fo Wilson exhibited her ongoing series, P.S. I Love You in the gallery. In this series, Wilson takes early 20th-century found postcards that sentimentalize stereotypes of the "happy servant" in the economies of Southern plantation culture and, using collage and mixed media, restores their dignity. The postcards will be shown in an interactive sound environment, a collaboration with Joel Mercedes, constructed from the recorded narratives of former enslaved people archived in the Library of Congress's "Voices from the Days of Slavery."

13.wilson-hodedo copy

Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities is a collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation and is made possible through the generous support of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Columbia College Chicago, and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Press

Bomb Magazine – OHP Excerpt: Folayemi Wilson by Ayanah Moor
Culture Type - For Your Summer Agenda, 49 U.S. Exhibitions Featuring Works by Black Artists
The International Review of African American Art Plus - A Look Inside: Eliza's Cabinet of Curiosities
Art City Asks: Fo Wilson
Wisconsin Gazette - A cabinet of curiosities in a cabin
Art City: Using objects to explore, reimagine a slave's world
Arts Without Borders: A "peculiar curiosity" lurks in the Lynden Scupture Garden's back woods

About the Artist

Fo Wilson uses constructed space and furniture forms to create experiences that reposition historical objects and/or aesthetics in a contemporary context and offers audiences new ways of thinking about and interacting with history. Wilson earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago. A grant recipient of Creative Time, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Propeller Fund, her design work is included in the collection of The Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design. Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships at ACRE, Haystack Mountain Center for Craft, Purchase College, and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. She leads a team that has been awarded a public art commission for the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, a project of the Chicago Parks District and The Field Museum, and is a 2015 3Arts Award awardee.
More info: fowilson.com

March 13, 2016 - June 5, 2016

KimCridler_BurOak detail kendall
Field Study 15: Bur Oak (detail), 2011

Women, Nature, Science
Kim Cridler: The Descriptive Line
March 13-June 5, 2016

Artist Talk: Friday, May 27, 2016 at 1:30 pm. This event is free.

Trained as a metalsmith, Kim Cridler creates works that utilize the history, making, and meaning of objects of utility and ornamentation. Cridler uses drawing as a practice of "noticing," and this directly informs her recent work, in which the steel wire or rod becomes a line of inquiry into form, content, and the potential of narrative. The works on display at Lynden include "Field Study 15: Bur Oak" (2011), a large-scale sculpture of a branch draped across an architectural steel vessel that occupies much of the gallery floor. At the end farthest from the vessel, the branch continues to shed its paper-thin bronze leaves. "Field Study 16: Felled Mulberry" (2012), stands outside the entrance to the gallery, and again examines the relationship between the natural and the man-made. These and the other urns and bowls in the exhibition--formed from intersecting lines of steel--signal function but, with their wide open spaces, steadfastly avoid it. Hidden among the smaller objects and vessels are butterflies, bees, snakes, berries and flowers fabricated in a variety of materials that call attention to their narrative and ornamental functions.

Cridler's exhibition at Lynden has been arranged in conjunction with the ZOOM symposium, May 25-May 29. Over the course of four days, 250 makers, writers and innovators will gather at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and venues around the city for lectures, hands-on workshops, exhibitions, and panel discussions.

Kim Cridler will deliver the symposium's keynote address, "The Descriptive Line," on Wednesday, May 25, 7:30-8:30 pm at the Peck School of the Arts Kenilworth Square East building, 1915 East Kenilworth Place, 6th floor. This lecture is free and open to the public. Architect Sim Van der Ryn wrote of ten patterns that make up our physical world at all scales including lattices, meanders, and the fractal. How does craft, rarely original yet always in motion, inform how and why we make? This talk will reflect on the conceptual and formal interests Cridler has drawn from the decorative arts, vernacular art forms, and ideas about craft. She will touch on issues of repetition, ideas about beauty and originality, and the essential struggle towards change in the development of her studio and public art works. More information here: http://www.zoommilwaukee.com/lectures/.

In the back of the house we are exhibiting watercolors by Dudley Crafts Watson (1885-1972), the first director of the Milwaukee Art Institute (1913-1924), the forerunner of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Watson, a painter, art critic and lecturer, was born in Lake Geneva and moved to Chicago as a small child. When he returned to Wisconsin to assume the directorship, he was already a well-known art lecturer who had completed several national tours. In 1924, back in Chicago, he became the guardian of the young Orson Welles following the death of the future filmmaker's mother, one of Watson's cousins. Watson joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after completing two years of study there. He returned to the faculty after his time in Milwaukee, and was known for his marine and floral landscapes. The Milwaukee Sentinel of November 9, 1913, identified Watson as the "creator of the music picture symphony," and all four of the abstract watercolors on view, dating from 1963, have musical themes.

Read Kat Minerath on the exhibition in the Wisconsin Gazette.

About the Artist

Kim Cridler has applied her use of steel, structure and ornament in large-scale public art projects and commissions for public spaces. She was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, earned an MFA in Metals from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and studied at Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. Cridler has taught in art programs across the country including the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, San Diego State University, Arizona State University, and the Penland School of Crafts. More information: http://www.kimcridler.com/

October 25, 2015 - February 28, 2016

Scott Wolniak: Landscape Record, October 25, 2015-February 28, 2016
Tablet 1

Opening reception: Sunday, October 25, 2015 - 3-5 pm
Artist-led tour of the sculpture garden and a video program: Saturday, January 30, 2016, 2 pm
Exhibition on view through February 28, 2016

Scott Wolniak: Landscape Record includes a selection of recent work from related, ongoing projects: graphite drawings on paper, carved and painted plaster tablets, and small sculptures. Among the drawings is a large commissioned work, Tree - Lynden Sculpture Garden.

Scott Wolniak deploys rigorous, transformative processes to complicate relationships between found and made, slow and fast, appearing and disappearing, surface and interior. His latest carved plaster tablets and graphite drawings arrive at similar aesthetic states but from opposite directions: the painted tablets respond to surface texture and chance operations, excavating compositions through deconstructive sgraffito techniques, while the drawings depart from landscape imagery and are built up into complex, almost-recognizable images created through a process of repetitive mark-making, erasure, and re-drawing. For Wolniak, there is a meditative effect in repetitive action, and the accumulation of intricate, layered marks yield phenomenological fields: "Millions of small gestures add up to create spatial energy that is not necessarily about my hand."

Curator Nicholas Frank describes Scott Wolniak as an observer of the sculptural qualities of everyday urban decay: "the crumbling and breaking apart of foundations and underlayments, the grid loosening into gravel, rust and dust." This observation (and concomitant collecting) has informed an expansive practice that includes drawing, sculpture, video and painting, and is most apparent at Lynden in the sculptures and series of plaster tablets or sculptural paintings. Frank identifies Willem de Kooning's Excavation, 1950 (which hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago in Wolniak's hometown) as an antecedent, "marking a passage between figure and ground, image and abstraction, form and formlessness. It is a painting that teaches a painter how to paint by baring its process. De Kooning digs into his plastic surface and pulls out shapes that coalesce into images and figures even as they dissipate and dig back into their ground."

The process of Wolniak’s recent paintings is harder to trace by eye, given the visual complexity of their layered surfaces, but the evidence is there. Chicken wire and plywood peek through deeply dug strata of plaster. Color informs and evades the actions of painting and removal in the final surfaces, which bedazzle and evoke patterns of abstraction from many histories. Like cities, the tablets tend to bury their histories under gleaming new construction.

"Wolniak is not engaged in creating urban allegories, nor natural landscapes," continues Frank, "but his abstraction reveals a richness in paying such close attention to what might have seemed insignificant detail, or chance finds. In much of his work, including the growing set of recent drawings that render natural forms as buffeted scrapes of patterned graphite, he chances at everyday transcendence, a kind of psychedelic regard of the commonplace."

About the Artist
Scott Wolniak is a multi-disciplinary studio artist based in Chicago. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and currently teaches at the University of Chicago. Wolniak has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Cultural Center; Hyde Park Art Center, Valerie Carberry Gallery, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, Peres Projects, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 65Grand, and Judith Racht Gallery, among others. His work has been reviewed in ArtForum, Art in America and Art News, and featured in New American Paintings.

June 14, 2015 - September 20, 2015

Torop_crabapple

Opening reception: Sunday, June 14, 2015, 3-5 pm
Westward, A Picnic with Artist Dan Torop, Wednesday, June 17, 2015, 6-7:30 pm

Copies of the Dan Torop: Frozen Period catalogue are available for purchase online for $25 plus $5 shipping. Please use the "Buy Now" button below to make an order.





Frozen Period

In a series of extended residencies at the Lynden Sculpture Garden beginning in the summer of 2013, Dan Torop made photographs on the grounds which integrate an historical text--Meriwether Lewis’s June 14, 1805 diary entry describing a day and night in the environs of the Great Falls of the Missouri River--with present day visual explorations. Mindful of ecologist Aldo Leopold's description of a nearby landscape, Torop responded to the passage of seasons, animals, and objects across the site, sometimes intervening, always observing.

Frozen Period refers to both a season and an historical epoch. Torop created many photographs during the winter of 2014, when the frigid grounds became an unfamiliar and difficult terrain. The harsh weather, the darkness, and the strict geographic limits of the project became important constraints in which it flourished. But all of the work Torop created was informed by a sense of the "frozen period," the time between the death of the sculpture garden's owner and creator, Peg Bradley, in 1978, and its opening to the public in 2010. During his months at Lynden, Torop sought out the interstitial, private times--early mornings, late evenings, nights--as ideal times to make work.

Frozen Period is both a subjective description based upon a year’s photographic work, and an examination of the very act of exploration and observation. Exemplars for this project include Chris Marker’s diary/documentary Sans Soleil and the poetic Americanist writings of William Carlos Williams, Paul Metcalf, and Charles Olson. Through rendering and modifying Lynden's spaces, Torop examines the tension between exploration and domestication, expansion and settlement, the “sublimely grand” and the “pleasingly beautifull” (Lewis, June 14, 1805).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that will set Torop’s images to Meriwether Lewis’s 2600-word text, and will include an essay by Nicholas Frank that continues the dialogue with Lynden's landscape and history. The exhibition and publication will coincide with the 210th anniversary of Meriwether Lewis’s narrative.

More about Dan Torop's residency here.

About the Artist

Dan Torop’s projects deal with the subjective relationship of the land and its inhabitants. He has exhibited digital and photographic work nationally since the mid-1990s, including the solo gallery shows Alkali Desert (2013), Skydiving (2010), Snowbound (2007), Estimated Landscapes (2005), Lost Domain (2002), and Landscapes (2001). Some of his Alkali Desert images are installed at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover Exhibit Hall 3. His publication Skydiving (2010, A-Jump Books), a sequence of landscapes and portraits, was included in the International Center for Photography 2013 Triennial’s photo books installation. His digital Ocean has been installed at the American Museum of the Moving Image and the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Torop’s work has been supported by residencies with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the MacDowell Colony, Eyebeam, and Teachers College. He has contributed articles to Triple Canopy, Paper Monument, Modern Painters, and North Drive Press; and has curated or co-curated several shows, including A Rabbit As King of the Ghosts (2006), I Just Can’t Pretend (2004), and Reading Room (2002). Torop is an assistant professor in Florida State University’s Department of Art. He has taught at New York University, City College, and Parsons the New School For Design. He has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia University’s Visual Arts MFA, a mentor for the Art Institute of Boston, and a visiting photography critic at the Yale School of Architecture. Torop received a BA and a Gardner Travelling Fellowship from Harvard College in 1994. In 1997 he received an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art.

March 1, 2015 - May 31, 2015

RobinJebavy_JOY OF LIFE
Joy of Life

Opening reception: Sunday, March 1, 2015, 3-5 pm
Artist-led tour of the garden: Saturday, April 25, 2015, 3 pm

Robin Jebavy makes still life paintings of glassware. Her project, however, is much larger: to offer the viewer an experience that evokes the original, sublime, oceanic feelings of union with the strange and mysterious “other," of self with universe. Her paintings invite the viewer to part the curtain and sense oneness with the world--a state in which we found ourselves in the mother’s womb before birth, and from which we all emerged.

Glass is essential to Jebavy's attempt to represent the unique, elusive reality perceived by a person who has experienced a preternatural suspension of the ordinary distinction between a subjective self and the objective world. For Jebavy, the substance of glass lends itself well to the painting process she uses to represent this self-world fusion. Working with layer upon layer of glassware imagery, she generates an atmospheric field of luminous, chromatically intense, intricately woven crystalline labyrinths that invite the viewer to fall into the still life, to get a sense of what she, the artist, experienced. Heightened ambiguity of perspective inspires animation. Mandala-like forms at times double as eyes or serve as active symbols of a unified self-world view; field transforms into figure, suggesting the presence of a breathing life force.

Long fascinated by historical and contemporary still life paintings and their narrative, formal, and conceptual repercussions, Jebavy has a particular interest in Dutch Golden Age paintings. In them she finds the great paradox of Baroque art: that emotional extravagance, decadence, and alluring sensual appeal can be governed by rigid compositional control and technical virtuosity without losing their intensity and power. "And yet however fascinating this paradox," she observes, "I notice that the handling of space and perspective in these paintings almost invariably suggests distance between the artist and the still life forms." Her goal has been to offer a new space that shifts reality from a third-person to a first-person viewing perspective; to remove the space between the artist and the still life while at the same time retaining and recalling the intellectual clarity, beauty, explosive dynamism, celebratory tone, and heightened attention to detail and ornamentation reminiscent of the Baroque aesthetic that she loves.

In her compositions Jebavy often includes glassware forms that call to mind other Baroque artworks, such as Bernini’s expansive Baldachin in St. Peter’s Cathedral, or illusionistic Italian ceiling paintings and cathedrals, building altar-like architectural spaces that are at once intimate, domestic, and banal, and monumental, metaphysical, and transcendental. In recent paintings, she has experimented with the use of ornate cut-glass forms to achieve a feeling of the “embroidered” interconnectedness of self and world.

For coverage of the exhibition by Arts Without Borders, click here.

Urban Milwaukee Dial reviews the exhibition here.

The Wisconsin Gazette covers the exhibition here.

For an interview with Robin Jebavy by Kat Murrell on Art-A-Go-Go on Riverwest Radio, click here.

About the Artist

Robin Jebavy received a B.A. in Visual Arts and Philosophy from Bennington College in 2004, and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing, with a Sculpture minor, from the University of Iowa in 2008. She has received many awards, fellowships and grants for her work. Jebavy has recently been offered a residency grant at Vermont Studio Center, a residency fellowship at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, and was selected as a Robert Johnson Fellow at VCCA for a 2014 summer residency. She has had solo exhibitions in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and in Waterford and Waukesha, Wisconsin. Her next solo exhibition will be at the ICON Gallery in Fairfield, Iowa. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions in Des Moines, Fairfield, and Iowa City, Iowa; and in Delafield, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Waukesha, Wisconsin. Robin Jebavy maintains a studio in Waukesha, Wisconsin and teaches drawing at Carroll University. https://robinjebavy.wordpress.com/

November 9, 2014 - February 21, 2015

Works by Joseph Murphy & Lisa Brobst
Works by Joseph Murphy, Lisa Probst

November 9, 2014-February 21, 2015
Opening reception: Sunday, November 9, 2014, 3-5 pm
Managing Trees: A Walk Around Lynden with Bob Retko and Todd Johnson: Sunday, November 16, 2014, 2:30-3:30 pm
Urban Wood Encounters: From Tree To Table, Saturday, January 24, 2015, 1 pm-3:15 pm

The landscape at Lynden is dotted with more than 600 trees. There were, at one time, many more: the majority of the elms on the grounds were lost to Dutch elm disease. Now, with the emerald ash borer making its way into southeastern Wisconsin, we think a lot about how to turn our ash trees into a sustainable resource. These trees have shown up in everything from the temporary art installations on the grounds to the lintels in our parking lot.

Urban Wood Encounter, now in its fourth year, is designed to introduce the public to the environmental value of urban wood within the context of an exhibition of fine furniture. Urban wood comes from the trees that line our streets, shade our homes, and define our parks--trees that are not harvested for their timber value but instead often find their way into landfills when they succumb to age, injury or disease. According to the US Forest Service, the wood "waste" generated in this country's urban areas, if processed, could produce approximately 3.8 billion board feet of lumber annually.

In an effort to advance the sustainable recovery and the best use of the products of urban forests, Urban Wood Encounter challenges furniture makers and designers to create inspiring, thoughtful, and beautiful furniture from this regionally abundant and underutilized natural resource.

Participants in the exhibition include Dan Barsch, Andrew Black, Lisa Ehrmantraut Brobst, Greta de Parry & Mike Jarvi, Michael Doerr, Fabian Fischer, Aris Georgiades, Kevin Giese, Joseph La Macchia, Aaron Malinowski, Joseph Murphy, Charles Radtke, Dwayne Sperber, and Andrew Yencha. Recent MIAD alumnus Miguel Ramirez is organizing a functional project room in the enclosed porch. He is working with fellow alumnus Erich Moderow and current MIAD student Linh Hoang. Urban Wood Encounter is organized by Dwayne Sperber and Polly Morris.

The exhibition will be accompanied by "tree to table" educational programs that follow the life cycle of an urban tree and that explore possibilities for the use of urban wood. Urban Wood Encounter is supported, in part, by a 2014 Urban Forestry Grant from the State of Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Forestry Program.

Read more about Dwayne Sperber's urban wood project via the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel here.

Read Urban Milwaukee's review of the exhibition here.

For WUWM's segment on Urban Wood featuring Dwayne Sperber, click here.

Rafael Salas reviews the exhibition at Art City here.

Kat Murrel reviews the exhibition in the Wisconsin Gazette and the Shepherd Express.

July 26, 2014 - October 26, 2014

  

Inside/Outside
Nancy Popp + Paul Druecke
July 26-October 26
Opening reception: Saturday, July 26, 5-8 pm
Related Events
Picnic with the Artists, August 21, 2013, 6-8 pm
Knitting Circle with Artist-in-Residence Nancy Popp, March 23, 2014, 2-5 pm
Knitting Circle with Artist-in-Residence Nancy Popp, July 20, 2014, 1-4 pm
Conversations with Sculpture: Modern and Contemporary, July 26, 2014, 3:30-5 pm
Life and Death on the Bluffs: A Reading with Paul Druecke, Martha Bergland and Paul G. Hayes, September 7, 2014, 3 pm

The opening of Inside/Outside: Nancy Popp + Paul Druecke on July 26 will be preceded by Conversations with Sculptures: Modern + Contemporary (3:30-5 pm), an expansive, interactive, ambulatory conversation hosted by dancer/choreographers Elizabeth Johnson and Cate Deicher and artists Nicholas Frank and Jenna Knapp. The Conversations series, which has shaped programming at Lynden in July as we prepare for a performance of Trisha Brown's "Early Works" on July 27, has been considering Brown's earliest dances in the context of Lynden's monumental sculptures--both products of the '60s and '70s. This final segment will bring the conversation up to the present by looking at the approaches Druecke and Popp take to sculpture and performance. Popp will be performing the latest iteration of Untitled (Street Performances) during the event.

The Inside/Outside series explores Lynden's evolution from private residence to public institution, and in this latest installment Nancy Popp (Los Angeles) and Paul Druecke (Milwaukee) use visual markers--lines, paths, stencils and engraved stones--to reimagine Lynden's history and spaces. In a new installment of Popp's Untitled (Street Performances) and in Garden Path, Druecke's site-specific intervention, they create a physical and conceptual dialogue between their pieces and practices. Both artists have extensive backgrounds with site-specific work, often addressing the history of a place and its cultural implications by illuminating its political and social context and exploring relationships among artist, audience, and institution.

Nancy Popp's Untitled (Street Performances) draw on the traditions of durational, corporeal performance and political intervention to explore relations between body and site. Though Popp often performs on urban streets or at building sites--where her interventions are unannounced and sometimes disrupted--at Lynden she has had the opportunity to study the grounds over the course of three residencies to choose a path through the trees. She marks her paths, whether in built or natural environments, with orange mason line, creating large-scale three-dimensional drawings with a material meant to aid bricklayers in keeping their bricks straight. Popp was immediately drawn to Lynden's trees, which she saw as living in the shadows of the monumental sculptures, and to the cracks in the glass of the former swimming pavilion, which make their way into a series of photographs in the gallery.

Popp is introducing a new element into her performance at Lynden, a hammock knit from mason line that will hang along the route. Popp layers personal meaning onto the hammock's association with relaxation and sleep. In April 2013 she suffered serious injuries in a motorcycle accident. The period of recovery, in which a community of friends and loved ones cared for her as her bones worked themselves back together, became associated with networks, webs, and knitting. The Lynden hammock is both a collective and public project, involving two knitting assistants and a series of public knitting events around Milwaukee where spectators could take a turn or talk to Popp and her assistants about the project, and Popp could make her own connections to a new community.

Paul Druecke has solicited strangers door to door, christened a park and courtyard, rolled out the red carpet, been a benefactor, initiated a Board of Directors, and memorialized the act of memorialization. Recent stints as a resident in Spaces World Art Program and a Mary L. Nohl Fellow resulted in permanent, public installations of bronze plaques that commemorate their own legitimacy; a further iteration of this project was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

In Garden Path, Druecke--operating from afar--shapes the viewer's experience by insinuating boundaries and choices into his installation. Garden Path winds eastward from the arbor entrance of Lynden's formal garden to the grass verge bordering Brown Deer Road, outside Lynden’s perimeter fence, crossing lawns, a patio, a parking lot and a prairie. It commemorates Vocation by paying homage to the often invisible workers who care for Lynden’s sculptures and grounds; but it also introduces a subtly transgressive perspective by placing a carefully manicured path, complete with planters and engraved markers, in an otherwise path-less sculpture garden, and by ultimately inviting visitors through the boundary fence and “just outside” the garden’s pastoral sanctuary. One steps through the fence and into the middle of Laundry Day, a one-hundred-foot mural that operates as a window into the imagined life of Lynden when it was a private residence, with laundry hanging in what is now a parking lot.

Druecke sees a parallel between Garden Path and his series of bronze plaques: “It’s interesting to see how effectively the path inhabits its form, inviting engagement through its vernacular function--visitors have been walking on it since I began installing it several weeks ago--but complicating that engagement with aesthetic considerations that tend to lead one away from individual sculptures at Lynden rather than toward them." The custom carpets in the entrance and gallery, a kind of continuation of the path that reference plats--and therefore boundaries--of different vintages, offer a similar complication, though in a different context. Visitors feel compelled to use the outdoor path, but by locating the carpets indoors, in a gallery, the artist has presented viewers with another set of choices. Druecke is also exhibiting two photographic panoramas and a silk-screened text piece in the gallery. The varied mediums and range of projects resonate with Druecke's interest in time, the existential insecurity that underwrites so much “mark-making,” and an exploratory reworking of boundaries between self and other.

Shepherd Express review of the exhibition: http://expressmilwaukee.com/article-permalink-23919.html
Wisconsin Gazette review of the exhibition: http://www.wisconsingazette.com/art-gaze/artists-explore-lyndens-gardens-inside-and-out.html

About the Artists

Nancy Popp is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. She has exhibited at such venues as the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; the Manifesta 9 Biennial, Belgium; the Getty Center, Los Angeles; Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center; Rowan University, New Jersey; SUNY, New York; galleries in Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, Belgrade, and Tijuana; and many other public sites and institutions. She holds degrees from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and the San Francisco Art Institute, and is a recipient of the California Community Foundation’s Visual Arts Fellowship and was a Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center. Recent exhibitions include DB14 (the Dallas Biennial), Monte Vista Projects and Gallery KM in Los Angeles as well as a group exhibition at the Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles. More information: http://www.nancypopp.com

Paul Druecke lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. A co-authored discussion of his work will be included in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Public Art, and his second book, Life and Death on the Bluffs, was recently published by Green Gallery Press. Druecke was a 2010 recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, and he is an invited Resident at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin in 2014. He has created projects with the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; The Suburban, Chicago; Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Many Mini Residency, Berlin; and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, among other venues. His work has been featured in Camera Austria and InterReview, and written about in Artforum, Art in America, Artnet.com and Metropolis.com. More information: http://www.asocialevent.com

April 13, 2014 - July 13, 2014

Opening reception: Sunday, April 13, 2014 – 3-5 pm
Picnic with the Artist: Kyoung Ae Cho: Wednesday, July 2, 2014, 6-7:30 pm. For more information, click here.


M-a-r-k-i-n-g, 2013
24 pieces, 30 x 24 inches each
Hair (collected from April 2011-March 2013), silk organza, muslin, thread, mixed materials Hand felted, hand stitched.

Click here to read a review of this exhibition courtesy of the Surface Design Association Journal.

The third in a series of exhibitions that examine--in various combinations and with some latitude for digression--women, nature and science. Kyoung Ae Cho presents recent, or recently completed, work. Much of it involves the painstaking collection of things over a long period of time, as in M-a-r-k-i-n-g, which references a Korean custom of collecting one’s own hair as it is shed in the course of daily life; or the slow accretion of small objects to produce a whole, as in her 10-foot-square quilt of artificial flowers. Cho’s practice is never far from nature: she collects fallen leaves and twigs for her hangings and closely observes the flowers and insects in her garden, recording their behavior in startling, almost voyeuristic photographs.

To download a copy of the press release for this exhibition, click here.

To read Urban Milwaukee's coverage of this exhibition, click here.

About the Artist

Kyoung Ae Cho was born in South Korea and earned a BFA from Duksung Women’s University in Seoul. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Cranbrook-Kingswood School, Penland School of Crafts and Haystack Mountain School of Craft, and is currently a professor in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Her work has been exhibited in national and international venues including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Gregg Museum of Art and Design, Raleigh, NC; Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, CA; Reading Public Museum, Reading, PA; Cheongju Craft Museum, Cheongju, South Korea; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; National Museum of History, Taipei, Taiwan; Project Space Gallery at Montalvo, Saratoga, CA; Soma Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Honolulu; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; INOVA, Milwaukee, WI; Textilemuseum, Tilburg, The Netherlands; Wisconsin Academy, Madison, WI; Reed Whipple Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, NV; South Bend Museum of Art, IN; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Snyderman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla, WA; Dairy Barn Arts Center, Athens, OH; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Evanston Art Center, IL; Carnegie Art Museum of Oxnard, CA; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kwachon, South Korea.

Cho's work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, among them Textile Fibre Forum (Australia); Fiberarts; Surface Design Journal; American Craft; Monthly CRART (South Korea); Fiber Art Today (Schiffer Publishing, Ltd.); Masters: Art Quilts (Lark Book); Quilt National 2003: The Best of Contemporary Quilts (Lark Books); Contemporary Quilt: Quilt National 1997 (Lark Books); No: Nouvel Object (Design House, South Korea); Art & Craft (South Korea); Fiberarts Design Book IV, VI & VII (Lark Books); and Art Textiles of the World: USA (Telos Art Publishing, England), among others. She is the subject of the monograph Portfolio Collection: Kyoung Ae Cho (Telos Art Publishing, England.) Cho has also received many awards, grants and fellowships, including the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Export Fund for Visual Art Award; the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Arts and Humanities Travel Award; a Wisconsin Arts Board Award Fellowship; the UWM Foundation and Graduate School Research Award (2004); the Lillian Elliott Award; a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and an Art on the Move Grant from the Detroit Recreation Department.

January 26, 2014 - March 30, 2014

Warren MacKenzie (American, b. 1924) 
Lidded Container, 2012 
Stoneware with Shino glaze 
9 x 7 1/2 in. diameter (22.86 x 19.05 cm) 
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Katherine Duff Rines M2012.497a,b
Photo credit John R. Glembin
Warren MacKenzie (American, b. 1924)
Lidded Container, 2012
Stoneware with Shino glaze
9 x 7 1/2 in. diameter (22.86 x 19.05 cm)
Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Katherine Duff Rines
Photo credit John R. Glembin

Reception: Thursday, March 20, 2014, 5-8 pm

Listen to Lynden's executive director discuss the exhibition on WUWM here.

Read a post about the exhibit on the NCECA blog here.

Read a review of the exhibition by Kat Murrell of ThirdCoast Daily here.

From its inception, Mingei ceramic practice has had an ambivalent relationship with the notion of the master. The early Mingei manifestos drew on the belief of John Ruskin and William Morris in the transformative power of simple, beautiful, functional, objects, but they located these essential forms in an anonymous folk memory. Nonetheless, master potters like Shoji Hamada and Bernard Leach—who served as a conduit between British and Japanese potters—were extremely influential and the individuality of their work was highly prized.

Warren MacKenzie left Minnesota for St. Ives in the late ‘40s to apprentice himself to Leach, and on his return established a ceramics program at the University of Minnesota, and a pottery of his own, that became the nucleus of a Midwestern Mingei tradition. An undisputed master, MacKenzie has hewn closely to many of the original Mingei ideals, living a simple life, sitting at his wheel every day, producing an infinite series of variations on a small repertoire of functional forms.

This exhibition, organized by Lynden’s Executive Director Polly Morris and ceramicist Linda Wervey Vitamvas in conjunction with the 2014 NCECA conference, focuses on the Mingei tradition in the Midwest, and is built outward from MacKenzie’s work. The exhibition will include work by Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada, as well as pieces by Randy Johnston, Jan McKeachie Johnston and Mark Pharis, three ceramicists trained or influenced by MacKenzie who have made creative adaptations to the living tradition as it continues to thrive in the Midwest.

September 1, 2013 - January 12, 2014

     

Quartet, 1967/2013
Unveiling: Sunday, September 1 at 4 pm
Domesticated Monumentalism
September 1, 2013 – January 12, 2014
Opening reception: Sunday, September 1, 3-5 pm (free)
Companion exhibition at The Green Gallery:
Scaling the Wall
August 30-September 29, 2013
Opening reception: Friday, August 30, 5-8 pm

Read full press release here.

Quartet,1967/2013 from Lynden Sculpture Garden on Vimeo.

Sculptor Forrest Myers moved to New York from the West Coast in 1961 and by the late sixties was becoming known for works both large and small: monumental sculptures like Four Corners and the diminutive Moon Museum that carried the work of Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Myers himself to the moon on a tiny ceramic wafer attached to the Apollo 12 lander. A founding member of the seminal Park Place Gallery in Soho and perhaps best known for The Wall, located on the side of a building not far from the gallery, Myers was part of an emerging downtown scene that ignored traditional boundaries between disciplines and between aesthetics and function. Myers comes to Lynden for the unveiling of Quartet 1967/2013. The early monumental work originally known as Calipers resided on Milwaukee’s lakefront for many years as part of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s collection. Lynden has worked with Myers to restore, reimagine, and re-site the work in the sculpture garden. On view in the gallery and on the patio, Domesticated Monumentalism, an exhibition curated by Nicholas Frank of Myers's maquettes, furniture-sculptures, metal paintings, and a new sculptural work.


Our reconsideration of the work of Forrest Myers extends beyond the borders of the Lynden Sculpture Garden to The Green Gallery at 1500 North Farwell Avenue. Nicholas Frank has curated a companion exhibition, Scaling the Wall, that he describes this way:

The legacy of sculptor Forrest Myers has been assured, for billions of years. The Wall, 1973, the famous building-sized sculpture on Houston Street just east of Broadway in lower Manhattan, has been officially recognized as a historic site. Myers celebrates the occasion by extending this piece geographically, offering a chance to place 42 new ‘T’ sections, identical to the originals, around the globe. Also on view in the Green Gallery will be Myers’s Moon Museum, 1969, a tiny ceramic wafer featuring etched drawings by six legacy artists of the 1960s: Myers, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Chamberlain and David Novros. An original copy of this multiple is said to have landed with Apollo 12 at the Mare Cognitum site, and remains to this day the only ‘museum’ on the moon.

The Wall, photo: Koji Toyama, 2010

Special thanks to Storm King Art Center for the image used in some of our promotional materials:

Forrest Myers (b. 1941)
Four Corners, 1969-1970
Stainless steel, weathering steel, bronze, and concrete
Gift of the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation, Inc.
Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York
http://www.stormking.org/

June 29, 2013 - July 14, 2013

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
Opening reception: Saturday, June 28, 3-5 pm

Participants in the 2013 UWM Art Education Institute: Attentive living: Art, Nature and Place celebrate the completion of the course with a week-long exhibition in the front rooms of Lynden.

For more information on the 2013 UWM Art Education Institute, click here.

June 2, 2013 - August 25, 2013

EHR46_29_x42_
Emilie Clark, Untitled EHR-46, from Sweet Corruptions, 2012

Opening reception: Sunday, June 2, 2013, 3-5 pm
Artist in residence May 27-June 3, 2013.

Since 2003 artist Emilie Clark has inserted herself into the works and lives of Victorian women scientists and naturalists including Mary Ward, Mary Treat, Martha Maxwell, and Ellen Henrietta Richards. Treating her studio like a laboratory, Clark literally restages much of the research these women undertook. This investigative activity and her archival research and writing inform a practice that involves painting, drawing, installation and sculpture.

Sweet Corruptions departs from the work of Ellen H. Richards—a sanitary chemist who studied air, water, and food. Richards was the first female student and then professor at MIT, and brought the word ecology into the English language. Richardsʼs research—like that of the other scientists Clark has studied—points to transformations of organic material that suggest both fluid categories and vast networks of interconnectivity. Following Richardsʼs air, water and food taxonomy, Clark interweaves them through the provocation offered by Walt Whitman in his poem “This Compost”: “Such sweet things are made of such corruptions.” Elaborating on Richards, Clark sees compost not just as a mundane mode of regeneration, but also as an engine of cosmology. Both Richardsʼ practice and Clarkʼs involve careful testing, sustained empirical inquiry, structured interaction with daily life, and ultimately, world building.

Sweet Corruptions transforms Richardsʼs early thinking about ecology into paintings, watercolors, texts, and installations in which the detritus of everyday life becomes a complex and often beautiful cosmology. The watercolors and paintings in the gallery are based, in part, on Clarkʼs process, over the course of a year, of preserving her familyʼs food waste a month for each season. The paintings emerge not as fanciful still lives of garbage heap composting, but rather as intricate compositions that blend full abstraction with carefully rendered studies of the fauna and flora in her daily detritus. Clark meticulously documents the surprising lives of her preserved food scraps, describing in detail such processes as her desiccating and pickling of carcasses, and also elaborates on her shifting understanding of her ongoing practice.

Clark’s project at Lynden has been shaped by her visits to Milwaukee over the past year. Her installation in Lynden’s dining room--the one room of the house that remains as it was when the Bradleys were in residence—is a kind of memento mori, re-animating the space with the relics of meals past. Clark’s original plan to build a functional field research station on the grounds grew, after visiting Milwaukee and many of its urban farms last year, to include an aquaponic system (incorporating fathead minnows from Lynden’s Big Lake) and a trial garden. Ellen Richards corresponded with young women interested in science, and Clark is replicating this part of Richards’s practice by collaborating with Alice’s Garden, SeedFolks Youth Ministry, and Urban Underground’s Fresh Plaits program to create the garden. This spring, Clark and her Milwaukee collaborators are planting and tending seeds in their respective cities and exchanging information via email. They will come together to plant the garden during Clark’s residency at Lynden in the last week of May, and the garden will form the basis of an ongoing community collaboration.

A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.

This exhibition and the projects surrounding it are generously supported by a grant from the Brico Fund.

About the Artist

Emilie Clark’s work involves drawing, painting, installation and writing. Following her exhibition at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, her drawings and food detritus will be traveling to the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno for a solo show and her field station will go to the San Jose Museum of Art for Around the Table: Food, Creativity, Community. She will also be featured in the inaugural exhibition at the Children’s Museum of Art in New York. Clark was selected as one of four artists in residence at The Drawing Center for 2013. In 2010 Clark was the first Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Her residency culminated in a solo exhibition in the Steinhardt Conservatory. Her work has been in many group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including the Weatherspoon Museum’s 2012 Biennial Art on Paper, the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, Ireland; and, in New York, Wave Hill, Smack Mellon and the Arsenal . Her work has been featured in publications including Bomb, Printed Project and Cabinet Magazine, and has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Huffington Post, Art in America, Art Week, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York. Emilie Clark is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock Krasner award and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio fellowship. Clark has collaborated extensively with scientists and poets and has been published in numerous books, journals and periodicals. Born and raised in San Francisco, Clark received her BFA from Cornell University in 1991, and moved to New York City from the Bay Area in 1998. She received her MFA from Bard College in 2002. Emilie Clark is represented by Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, where she exhibited an earlier state of Sweet Corruptions in the fall of 2012.

April 7, 2013 - May 26, 2013

The Shuffle of Things
The Shuffle of Things, 2012

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.

February 3, 2013 - March 24, 2013

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.

Im-mediate-detail

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.

Read Art City's review of the exhibition here.

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.

February 1, 2013 - January 1, 2014

Brad Fiore
Friends Forever

Lynden Sculpture Garden Porch

Friends Forever is an artwork by Brad Fiore that consists of the permanent installation of smoke detectors in various Milwaukee locations. The devices are installed in the usual manner, discreetly positioned so as not to interfere with the building's day-to-day functioning and aesthetic. A typical visitor to the installation site may not be aware of the device’s significance, or the scope of the network that it signifies, but they are nonetheless protected by its vigilance. This protection, and this inclusion within a network, are gifts, given in the hope that they may be useful to the institution.

November 24, 2012 - January 27, 2013

Leo Michelson exhibition

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.

October 28, 2012 - October 28, 2013

   

October 28, 2012 - October 2, 2016

Yevgeniya Kaganovich conceived of grow as a series of durational installations in public buildings throughout the Milwaukee area. At each location, a system of interconnected plant-like forms, simulating a self-propagating organism in multiple stages of development, would grow over time. These systems are created from a singular material, recycled plastic bags, and their growth rate is determined by the number of bags accumulated in an official recycling bin at each site. The layers of plastic are fused to create a surface similar to leather or skin, molded into plant-like volumes, connected with plastic bag “thread” and stuffed with more bags. Like weeds, these organisms will grow into unused and overlooked spaces: niches, stairwells, and other peripheral and forgotten architectural elements.

“My goals for grow,” says Kaganovich, “are to transform an artificial manipulated material into a seemingly unchecked, feral, opportunistic growth; to visualize and punctuate reuse by juxtaposing it with slow, methodical, labor-intensive making that plays with control, 'craftiness,' and precision; and to speculate about how artificial lifecycles are sustained.”

The project will launch at Lynden on October 28. The public will be able to discover the plant-like forms in Lynden’s interstitial spaces; they will be able to watch them grow and spread over the period of a year or so; and they will be able to contribute to their growth by dropping off their used plastic bags. Various events are planned throughout the project period: an introductory talk by artist Nathaniel Stern (October 28); a day during which Kaganovich and her assistants will occupy our art studio to demonstrate the processes and techniques used in making grow (November 17); and a hands-on workshop where you will learn to manipulate plastic bags as a raw material and make something to take home (January 20).

After grow launches at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Kaganovich will plan subsequent “plantings” at public locations throughout Milwaukee. Public involvement will range from contributing plastic bags for specific locations to participating in workshops. At the culmination of the project, all the forms will be transplanted to Lynden, where they will be exhibited as a combined system before they are, again, recycled. The final exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Jennifer Johung.

About the Artist
Yevgeniya Kaganovich, born in Belarus, is a Milwaukee-based artist, whose hybrid practice encompasses jewelry and metalsmithing, sculpture and installation. She received an MFA from the State University of New York at New Paltz and a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kaganovich has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally since 1992. Her work has received a number of awards and has been published widely. Kaganovich is an associate professor in and chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she heads a thriving undergraduate and graduate jewelry and metalsmithing program.

September 27, 2012 - October 29, 2012

Artist Reception: Sunday, October 28, 2012 – 3-5 pm

Follow Marcasiano's residency on our blog.
LeNuancier
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).

August 8, 2012 - November 11, 2012

around_4_detail copy
Around 4 (Detail), Shona Macdonald

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.

July 2, 2012 - September 26, 2012

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.

http://roystaab.blogspot.com/
http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-68.html

May 20, 2012 - July 29, 2012

Opening reception: Sunday, May 20, 2012, 3-5 pm
The artists will offer an informal tour of the exhibition at 4 pm.

GosSaMer

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/

March 7, 2012 - May 13, 2012

bullman2
Orville Bulman, Bateau Rapide (purchased 1957).

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.

January 31, 2012 - March 2, 2012

P1000993
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.

November 29, 2011 - January 27, 2012

Small Sculptures from the Bradley Family Foundation Collection

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).

September 25, 2011 - November 27, 2011

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.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, American Fantasy Classics, Good Day Sir Studios and Furthermore Beer.

   

About the Artists

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.

August 22, 2011 - September 18, 2011

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.

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June 12, 2011 - August 10, 2011

Inverse

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.

April 17, 2011 - June 5, 2011

Inside/Outside: Lynn Tomaszewski & Kevin Schlei
Drams, Whits, Scintillas
April 17-June 5, 2011

Opening reception: Sunday, April 17 from 4-6 pm (after Kites over Lynden)
Birdwatching with the Artists: Sunday, June 5 at 8 am

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/

Download gallery notes for Drams, Whits, Scintillas here.
Download gallery notes for the first floor of Lynden here.

February 23, 2011 - April 10, 2011

Photos: Troy Freund Photography

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.

http://www.mccawbudsberg.blogspot.com/

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January 9, 2011 - February 22, 2011

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.

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October 24, 2010 - January 5, 2011

Opening reception: Sunday, October 24, 2–4 pm
Artist-Led Tour of the Sculpture Garden: Sunday, November 7, 2:30-4 pm

View Frank Juarez's interview with the artists for EFFJAY PROJEKTS.

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.

August 15, 2010 - October 20, 2010

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.

Gallery

Additional works from the Bradley Family Foundation Collection are hung throughout the first floor of the house.

June 27, 2010 - August 11, 2010

Opening reception: Sunday, June 27, 2-4 pm

from INSIDE/OUTSIDE: Linda Wervey Vitamvas and Kevin Giese

Linda Wervey Vitamvas

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


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