Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists
Five recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 168 applicants in the twenty-third annual competition. Evelyn Patricia Terry and Della Wells were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $20,000 fellowship. Nomka Enkhee, Laura Farahzad Mayer, and Yinan Wang will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $10,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All of the 2026 fellows are based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in professional development activities and studio visits, and in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the summer of 2027. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.
The finalists in the Established Artist category are Mike Gibisser, David Najib Kasir, Brit Krohmer, and Heidi Parkes.
The finalists in the Emerging artist category are Kayle Karbowski, Brandom Terres-Sanchez, and Sean Williamson.
Headshots, images of the artists’ work, and image credits available at:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/a0c6bfab47iwxvw2mo9gn/AMeiOrA2rOvdY-ZhHVJnuA4?rlkey=5u9a9dn59qcf6ykurh1ox8tae&st=dr9lla9j&dl=0
The panel of jurors included Anthony Graham, Senior Curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; Mia Lopez, Curator of Latinx Art at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas; and Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs, The Bronx Museum, New York. We were delighted to bring the jurors to Milwaukee for a public talk at the Haggerty Museum of Art and for studio visits with all twelve finalists.
More information on the jurors available at: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/nohl-jurors
The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Nohl Fellowship program is a central pillar of Lynden’s support for artists. The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. She left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Her fund supports local visual arts and education programs, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community.
About the Fellows
Established Artists
EVELYN PATRICIA TERRY
Fueled by an instructor’s advice—“You graduate as printmakers, but feel free to explore other art disciplines”—Evelyn Patricia Terry built a career after earning a BFA and MS from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a full-time professional artist, she enjoys writing, curating, mentoring, collecting art, archiving, and producing non-objective and figurative pastel drawings. She has created commissioned oil portraits, found-object assemblages, marked-up sewn recycled drawings, and book art using her recycled monotypes. Her recent site-specific commissioned installation at ThriveOn King, America’s Favor, America: Guests Who Came to Dinner and Stayed (2024), features a 16-foot table with recycled wood–turned legs, globally sourced ethnic dolls, a George Ray McCormick Sr. sculpture, and plates adorned with raw-food replicas. Together, these elements encourage healthy choices, thoughtful reflection, and a deeper understanding of America’s beginnings—how and why we are here.
“The good that I am seeking is also seeking me,” Terry, a Black American artist, affirms. “My work contributes to ‘Making America Great—Eventually.’” She is interested in artists who exemplify creative freedom: in her pantheon, you’ll find Faith Ringgold alongside newsmakers Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. Philosophically, metaphysics guides her manifestation of “the unseen,” while phenomenology informs “the seen”—nontraditional material choices that include “girly things” such as beads, buttons, jewelry parts, and glitter. Art consultants, museums, and galleries have assisted her in directing her artwork to more than 500 corporate, private, museum, and special library collections worldwide. She has exhibited locally, regionally, and internationally in Spain, Germany, Japan, and Russia, and has created public art projects for her neighborhood and for Mitchell International Airport. Terry was named a City of Milwaukee Artist of the Year in 2014.
http://www.evelynpatriciaterry.com/
DELLA WELLS
Della Wells (b. 1951, Milwaukee, Wisconsin), is a nationally recognized collage artist. As a child, she invented stories and characters based on her mother’s recollections of growing up in North Carolina during the 1920s through the 1940s. This practice led to her later narrative style. Much of Wells's work takes place in Mambo Land, a conceptual environment “where Black women rule."
Her collages, drawings, and recent collaborative textiles employ a symbolic vocabulary of imagery such as a chicken (symbol of fear and truth), ancestors peering through windows, butterflies (emancipation), and the reframing and reclaiming of racist tropes such as watermelon, alligators, and Miss Ann.
A play about her life by Y York, Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Fly, was workshopped at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and premiered at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee. Wells has illustrated two children’s books. Her work is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; the Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin; the Intuit Art Museum, Chicago; the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; the Bunker Artspace, Palm Beach, Florida; the Lumber Room Collection, Portland, Oregon; and many private collections. Wells received the City of Milwaukee Artist of the Year Award in 2016. She is represented by the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee and serves on the board of the Bronzeville Center for the Arts.
https://www.portraitsocietygallery.com/dellawells
Emerging Artists
NOMKA ENKHEE
Nomka Enkhee is obsessed with repetitions, rituals, and tics, dealing with themes of the domestic, migration, translation, and systems of caretaking and migration. By merging drawing and poetry, she creates a lexicon of bodies through sculpture and performance. Enkhee is in constant conversation with the objects she creates through methods of preservation. Over the past year, she has invested in researching Tuuli, a form of oral Mongolian epic poetry. A traditional Tuuli combines eulogies, spells, idiomatic phrases, fairy tales, myths, and folk songs. She weaves in traditional elements of oral storytelling in her work, reinterpreting narration through experimental writing and performance. “I’m invested in exploring translation and its inherent gaps,” observes Enkhee, “creating an invisible void, friction, and immense freedom.”
Enkhee studied sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Mainz in Germany, received her
BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), and is an alumna of the Yale
Norfolk School of Art. She has received the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix
emerging artist grant, a fellowship from the Plum Blossom Initiative's Bridge Work program, and has attended residencies at ACRE, Image Text Workshop Residency, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Special Collections. She has an upcoming residency at the Wassaic Project. In 2022, she founded the Ping Pong Book Club, a community group for AAPI people in Milwaukee that meets bi-weekly to discuss readings and organize public events. Enkhee is the co-director of e.s.r. (experimental sculpture room), an exhibition space and a publishing practice based in Milwaukee.
https://nomkaenkhee.com/
LAURA FARAHZAD MAYER
Laura Farahzad Mayer is a Milwaukee-based artist and educator. Her experience growing up as the daughter of an Iranian immigrant in a small town informs her work, which navigates through the grief of losing her father while seeking to connect two generations—her father and her children—who were never living at the same time. Her work explores themes of memory, grief, culture, and generational storytelling. Farahzad Mayer works across many mediums in her practice—process and form are often conceptual considerations in making the work—but frequently returns to printmaking, artist books, and small sculptures. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work, and her children are often active participants.
Laura Farahzad Mayer earned her BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point before beginning a career as a graphic artist in Chicago. She completed her MA and MFA at the University of Iowa where she also earned a certificate from the Center for the Book. Farahzad Mayer is a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD).
https://laurafarahzad.com/
YINAN WANG 王一男
Yinan Wang 王一男 is a filmmaker born and raised in Beijing and now based in Milwaukee. Working across personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms, his practice explores how memory, language, humor, ritual, and food shape our sense of home—following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing. His recent work, 甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet, reconstructs both personal and collective memories of a local Chinese restaurant through cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, quietly probing how images form—and deform—cultural identity.
Wang received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and his MFA from Temple University. His work has been shared across festivals, community programs, classrooms, and international venues. A 2022 Flaherty Fellow and 2020 University Film and Video Fellow, he has received the Cream City Cinema Jury Award and the Sikay Tang Critical Lens Award, and his practice has been supported by the Brico Forward Fund, the Harry L. Friedberg Award, and the Robert A. Nelson Scholarship.
https://www.yinan-wang.com/
Five Artists Share $70,000 in 2025 Cycle
Five recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 157 applicants in the twenty-second annual competition. Michelle Grabner and Michael Newhall were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $20,000 fellowship. Sarah Ballard, Margaret Griffin, and Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen) will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $10,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All the 2025 fellows are based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows participate in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the summer of 2026 and receive professional development services and studio visits. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.
The finalists in the Established Artist category are Ben Balcom, Phoenix Brown, Tate Bunker, and Ariana Vaeth.
The finalists in the Emerging artist category are Michael Lagerman, Seth Ter Haar, and Brandom Terres-Sanchez.
Headshots, images of the artists’ work, and image credits available at:
Nohl Fellow's Headshots, artists' work, and image credits.
The panel of jurors included Efe Igor Coleman, independent curator, Memphis, Tennessee; Raphael Fonseca, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; and Adia Sykes, independent curator and Program Manager, United States Artists, Chicago. We were delighted to bring the jurors to Milwaukee for a public talk at the Haggerty Museum of Art and for studio visits with all twelve finalists.
More information on the jurors available at: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/nohl-jurors
The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Nohl Fellowship program is a central pillar of Lynden’s support for artists. The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. She left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Her fund supports local visual arts and education programs, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community.
About the Fellows
Established Artists
MICHELLE GRABNER
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cranbrook Academy of Art; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 National Academician in the National Academy of Design, and a 2024 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Fellow.
For forty years, Grabner’s work has rearticulated familiar patterns and commonplace formal arrangements. Painting, cast metal, and ceramics are important material languages in her practice. Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM - Musée d’Art Moderne Luxembourg; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio; Milwaukee Art Museum; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts; Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, New York; Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Art Omi, Ghent, New York; among other public collections. Grabner, along with artist Brad Killam, runs the artist-run project spaces The Suburban, Milwaukee (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, Wisconsin (est. 2008).
https://www.michellegrabner.com/
MICHAEL NEWHALL
Michael Newhall is originally from Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. The son of an artist, he had early exposure to both academic and contemporary art through the University of Wisconsin. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Art Students League of New York, was an organic farmer in northern Wisconsin, and taught at SAIC, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the University of Western Michigan, and at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Newhall received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Painting, the Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship for Painting, and other awards. He has shown at Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee, at Dobrick, Oskar Friedel and Zaks in Chicago, and Robischon in Denver. A later change in life-direction, from an interest in Eastern philosophy, developed into a vocation as a Zen Buddhist monk and later as a Zen teacher. After a visiting lectureship at Osaka Institute of Art, Newhall studied Zen in Japan, undertook monastic training, and became the Abbot of Jikoji Zen Center in California. He is presently the emeritus teacher at that institution.
Newhall’s painting evolved from academic to abstract expressionism, to neo-expressionist figuration, to cityscape retro-representation, to a conceptualism based on Asian influences, to Chicago Imagist variations of faces or heads in paintings and drawings, to large sumi ink installations, and into sculptural variations. A current series of textual and atonal pattern-field paintings of overlaid imagery was recently shown at the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee. His newest work involves a return to expressionist narrative themes and continues the focus on the head/face/bust motif in paintings, drawings, and sculpture.
https://www.michaelnewhall.com/
Emerging Artists
SARAH BALLARD
Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator. Through non-fiction and experimental modes, her practice fuses personal narratives with historical research to address broader structural inequalities based on gender and class. Her most recent film, Full Out, is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between accounts of mass hysteria, the body's capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can simultaneously fracture and heal. Her films understand mental illness as existing beyond the individual and explore how the body's uncontrollable impulses can act as both a site of vulnerability and an instrument of resistance.
Ballard received a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened nationally and internationally at venues and festivals such as Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Crossroads, Antimatter [Media Art], Florida Film Festival, and Onion City Experimental Film Festival, among others. She was granted the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
https://www.sarah-ballard.com/
MARGARET GRIFFIN
Margaret Griffin is a sculptor whose work investigates humans’ relationship with industry and particularly the physical labor demanded of workers. Inspired by her father’s work as a pipefitter and her own foundry and factory work, Griffin utilizes weight-bearing, hazard-resistant materials and equipment that she manipulates to reference the human form. She puts the conversations between laborers’ bodies and their work sites on display, drawing attention to the safety measures required to subsist in these environments as well as our instinct to protect ourselves. After receiving her BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2023, Griffin was accepted into Plum Blossom Initiative's Bridge Work, a ten-month professional development program. She has also received the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix emerging artist grant. In 2023, she collaborated with other artists on a public project for Sculpture Milwaukee’s Dear Nature exhibition in downtown Milwaukee. Griffin has exhibited her work throughout the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and Michigan.
https://www.margaretgriffin.com/
OPEN KITCHEN (Rudy Medina + Alyx Christensen)
Open Kitchen (OK) is a Milwaukee-based art collective founded in 2017 by Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen in partnership with Alan Medina. 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. In 2020, OK were invited to be artists-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. They have since become stewards of the Cultural Garden and have developed the Lynden Apiary. During this period in residence, the collective has been experimenting with methods of growing diverse foods and flora that integrate Indigenous environmental knowledge; exploring the parallels of soil and gut microbiomes; and developing a visual and sensuous language that prioritizes the sustainable, the hyperlocal, and ecological reciprocity.
https://okmke.org/
Past Fellows
2024
Established
Nina Ghanbarzadeh (Afkhamian)
Roy Staab
Emerging
Justin Goodrum
Jovanny Hernandez Caballero
Nicholas Perry
2023
Established
Mikal Floyd-Pruitt
Janelle VanderKelen
Emerging
Siara Berry
Fatima Laster
Alayna N. Pernell
2022
Established
Valaria Tatera
Jason S. Yi
Emerging
John W. Balsley
Inna Dmitrieva
Molly Hassler
2020
Established
Ck Ledesma
Nirmal Raja
Emerging
Janelle Gramling
Rosy Petri
Leah Schretenthaler
2019
Established
Cecelia Condit
Ras ‘Ammar Nsoroma
Emerging
Vaughan Larsen
LaNia Sproles
Natasha Woods
2018
Established
Chris Cornelius
Keith Nelson
Emerging
Nazlı Dinçel
Makeal Flammini
Rosemary Ollison
2017
Established
Tom Berenz
Lois Bielefeld
Emerging
Sara Caron
Sky Hopinka
Ariana Vaeth
2016
Established
Jesse McClean
Joseph Mougel
Emerging
Rose Curley
Robin Jebavy
Brook Thiele
2015
Established
Jon Horvath
Frankie Latina
Emerging
Ben Balcom
Zach Hill
Maggie Sasso
2014
Established
Anne Kingsbury
Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg
John Riepenhoff
Emerging
Emily Belknap
Jenna Knapp
Erik Ljung
Kyle Seis
2013
Established
Ray Chi
Sheila Held
Special Entertainment (Andrew Swant & Bobby Ciraldo)
Emerging
Cris Siqueira
Tim Stoelting
Eddie Villanueva
Josh Weissbach
2012
Established
Danielle Beverly
Faythe Levine
Colin Matthes
Emerging
Lois Bielefeld
Tyanna J. Buie
Brad Fiore
Brad Kjelland
2011
Established
Nicholas Lampert
Brad Lichtenstein
Sonja Thomsen
Emerging
American Fantasy Classics
Richard Galling
Hans Gindlesberger
Sarah Luther
2010
Established
Brent Coughenour
Paul Druecke
Waldek Dynerman
Emerging
Sarah Buccheri
Neil Gravander
Ashley Morgan
Chris Thompson
2009
Established
Peter Barrickman
Harvey Opgenorth
Emerging
Kim Miller
John Riepenhoff
2008
Established
Brent Budsberg & Shana McCaw
Xav Leplae
Iverson White
Emerging
Tate Bunker
Bobby Ciraldo & Andrew Swant (Special Entertainment)
Frankie Latina
Barbara Miner
2007
Established
Gary John Gresl
Mark Klassen
Dan Ollman
Emerging
Annie Killelea
Faythe Levine
Colin Matthes
Kevin J. Miyazaki
2006
Established
Santiago Cucullu
Scott Reeder
Chris Smith
Emerging
donebestdone
Dan Klopp
Christopher Niver
Marc Tasman
2005
Established
Nicolas Lampert
Fred Stonehouse
Jason S. Yi
Emerging
Juan Juarez
Michael K. Julian
Mat Rappaport
Steve Wetzel
2004
Established
Terese Agnew
Cecelia Condit
Jennifer Montgomery
Emerging
William Andersen
James Barany
Steven Burnham
Frankie Martin
2003
Established
Dick Blau
Michael Howard
Mark Mulhern
Emerging
Paul Amitai
Peter Barrickman
Mark Escribano
Liz Smith
For information on past recipients, click here.
