Nohl: Suitcase Export Fund Winter & Summer Cycles 2020

In the eighteenth cycle, the Fund made nineteen awards, the majority of them in the final months of the year, providing assistance with shipping and travel to seventeen individual artists and two duos (for a total of twenty-one individuals). We were also able to see projects through to completion from the previous cycle that had been postponed during the pandemic. The awards made in the 2020 cycle took artists and their work to Miami, Florida; Bloomington, Minnesota; Kansas City, Missouri; Binghamton and New York, New York; Nashville, Tennessee; and Cisco, Utah. Outside the United States, artists (or their work) traveled to Guayllabamba, Ecuador; Kouvola, Finland; Aix-en-Provence and Paris, France; Skagaströnd, Iceland; Syracuse, Italy; Aveiro, Portugal; Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia; and Barcelona, Spain.

2020 Winter Cycle
Recent graduates Felipe Pagan Cancel and Jacquelin Valadez participated in Nave Proyecto, an artist-run initiative in Guayllabamba, Ecuador, that provided an opportunity to develop a body of work among like-minded artists. Each residency culminated in an exhibition.

Felipe Pagan Cancel

Jacquelin Valadez

Carey Watters has been invited as an artist-in-residence/visiting professor to Made Labs in Syracuse, Sicily. She will focus on a developing body of work she that weaves together feminism, historic map making, and religious and pagan symbolism drawn from her travels in Italy and research on Byzantine architecture, design, and religious reliquaries. The three-week residency will conclude with in an exhibition.

2020 Summer Cycle
Kyoung Ae Cho’s work was selected by Marika Szaraz and Raija Jokinen for the Asia-Europe 5 international touring textile exhibition. The exhibition showcases works by European and Asian textile artists and launched in Poikilo-museums, Kouvola, Finland. It will travel to museums in Belgium, Germany and Denmark in 2022.

Christopher Davis Benavides shipped his sculpture, "Chimeneas Despobladas," to Portugal for the XV International Ceramics Biennial of Aveiro at the Aveiro Museum. Although the artist was not able to travel with the work, following the biennial it will travel to Spain for an exhibition that is proposed for the Museo del Ruso in Alarcón, Spain.

Emma Daisy Gertel participated in Bubblegum, a themed exhibit presented by Muros, a “global art activation agency,” in partnership with the Hilton Cabana Miami for Art Basel 2021. The exhibition celebrated the “playfulness and positivity” of the new Pantone color, qualities that resonate with the artist’s work. Gertel showed a new painting and did a live painting.

Britany Gunderson screened her short film, “Background Material,” at the 39th Festival Tous Courts in Aix-en-Provence, France. Gunderson participated in screenings, a Q&A, and the awards ceremony. It was an important opportunity for a young filmmaker to “meet more filmmakers, festival organizers, and see films that I would not be able to see otherwise.”

Gregory Klassen’s solo exhibition at ZieherSmith in Nashville, Tennessee featured twenty-six drawings from Their Four of Hearts, a series of 176 drawings. The opening coincided with Nashville’s downtown art crawl.

Kate Klingbeil traveled to New York for a solo exhibition of new work in several media at Hesse Flatow. The exhibition included cast iron and brass sculptures were made during a recent Arts/Industry residency at the John Michael Kohler Art Center and was a meditation on resilience and tenacity after hardship.

Brad Lichtenstein (Nohl 2011) previewed American Reckoning, a film he is making with Yoruba Richen, at an event that included a public exhibition at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. American Reckoning is part of Un(Re)Solved, a project from Frontline that includes an interactive exhibition and a podcast as well as this film.

Nancy McGee was invited to exhibit six works in the 6th edition of the Biennial of Fine Art & Documentary Photography, an exhibition of international award-winning photography at the FotoNostrum Gallery in Barcelona, Spain.

Keith Nelson (Nohl 2018) was finally able to travel to Nashville, Tennessee, for a solo exhibition of work--some made during his Nohl Fellowship--at ZieherSmith.

Melissa Paré traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, for a group show with two other artists at Troost Gardens. She exhibited her framed silk pieces.

Nirmal Raja (Nohl 2020) and Lois Bielefeld (Nohl 2012, 2017) will participate in a solo show at Artistry in Bloomington, Minnesota, featuring collaborative works from their previous exhibition, On Belonging. In addition to photographs, video, and sculptural work, the exhibition will include a site-specific installation by Raja.

John Riepenhoff (Nohl 2009, 2014) spent a month in the Republic of Georgia during the grape harvest making work with Georgian artist Mamuka Japharidze for an exhibition at Gallery Art Beat in Tbilisi. Individually and together they painted the night sky over the vineyards.

Nicole Shaver and her collaborator, Heidi Zenisek, have been invited by the NES Artist Residency to create and install a light sculpture as part of Light Up 2022, a January 2022 festival marking the darkest month of the year in Skagaströnd, Iceland. The immersive light and projection installation will be created during a month-long residency which will culminate in an artwalk.

After pandemic delays and reroutings, Nathaniel Stern was able to travel The World After Us: Imaging techno-aesthetic futures, a solo exhibition, to Binghamton University Art Museum in Binghamton, New York. The exhibition of sculptures, installations, prints, and photographs combine plant life with electronic waste, and scientific experimentation with artistic exploration.

Jenny Jo Wennlund will travel to France for a solo exhibition at Les Mésanges, an art space, gallery, and cafe in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris. She will be showing ten paintings, selling her archival prints at a nearby gallery, and meeting with gallerists interested in showing her work and commissioning murals in the future. She relied on her network of Milwaukee artists, including at least one former Nohl Fellow, for introductions.

Natasha Woods (Nohl 2019) travelled to Cisco, Utah. As a visiting artist at Home of the Brave Residency, she created a visual and sound installation onsite using equipment she acquired as part of her Nohl Fellowship. She also worked with the organizers to archive past projects and artist interviews in an accessible online platform.