Offsite Exhibitions

2024 Nohl Fellows Exhibition

June 12 - August 2, 2025

Location: Haggerty Museum of Art
For directions and parking information: Click here.
Hours: 10 am-4:30 pm (closed Sundays; the museum will be closed June 30-July 5, 2025)

Opening reception: Saturday, June 14, 4-6 pm

Saturday, July 12, 2025, 10 am-12 pm: A hands-on drop-in workshop with Nina Ghanbarzadeh. Learn to write your name in Farsi, Ghanbarzadeh’s mother tongue, using stencils and other art supplies. Start with a two-dimensional version, writing right to left, then experiment, as Ghanbarzadeh does in her exhibition, with three dimensions.

Saturday, July 26, 2025, 1-2 pm: A conversation about painting inspired by Nicholas Perry’s exhibition. He will be joined by painters Leslie Vansen and Shane Walsh.

Thursday, November 6, 2025, at 7 pm: Screening of Justin Goodrum’s films at the UWM Union Cinema.

Saturday, July 19, 2025 – 1 pm: Join artist Roy Staab and John Riepenhoff, Executive Director of Sculpture Milwaukee, for a walk through of Staab's exhibition and the outdoor piece commissioned for Sculpture Milwaukee's 2025 show, Whirling Tennure. In a related collaboration with Sculpture Milwaukee, Kim Miller's Social Choreography will share SOLAR REVOLUTION, celebrating the un-birthday of a subject without an object. There is no leader to follow, so how should we act? Choreography from social and modern dance, along with party practices. Kim Miller's Social Choreography includes Angela Frederick, sydney bannaxh and others. This performance will be outdoors, in proximity to Roy Staab's Whirling Tennure.

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University opens an exhibition of work by the artists who received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2024 on Thursday, June 12, 2025. The exhibition is co-presented with the Lynden Sculpture Garden, which administers the Nohl Fellowship program, and brings together work by Nina (Afkhamian) Ghanbarzadeh and Roy F. Staab in the Established category; and three artists in the Emerging category: Justin Goodrum, Jovanny Hernandez Caballero, and Nicholas Perry.

Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and Joy Engine, and administered by the Lynden, the 2024 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 Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties. Additional assistance for this exhibition comes from Sculpture Milwaukee. They are supporting Roy Staab’s outdoor installation, Whirling Tennure, as part of their 2025 exhibition, Actual Fractals Act III, which brings together distinguished artists from diverse backgrounds whose works touch on concerns, pastimes, and pleasures that shape contemporary life, here and in the world beyond.

A catalogue highlighting the work of the 2024 Nohl Fellows, with essays by Laila Abdul-Hadi Jadallah, Francesca Cigola, Courtney R. Baker & Therí Pickens, Raoul Deal, and Annabel Keenan will be available for purchase at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and online: Lynden Gift Gallery

The 2024 Nohl Fellows were chosen in late 2023 from a field of 147 applicants by a panel of three jurors: Allison Glenn, independent curator and writer, New York, New York; Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri; and Anisa Olufemi, independent curator and Fellowship Manager, Hamiltonian Artists, Washington, DC. Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and Joy Engine, and administered by the Lynden, 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 Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties.

The Nohl jurors are charged with selecting artists who will benefit from the resources offered by the fellowship program—funds, close attention to their progress through regular studio visits, professional development opportunities—without any reference to the culminating exhibition. In choosing a cohort that spans six decades—from Jovanny Hernandez Caballero, just 22 at the time, to Roy Staab, aged 82—the 2024 jurors honored both lifetime experimentation and future promise. They recognized that Justin Goodrum was a young filmmaker at a critical juncture, embarking on his first feature and shifting from documentary to fiction, but they could not have known that Nina Ghanbarzadeh would make her first foray into large-scale sculpture. In Hernandez, Ghanbarzadeh, and Goodrum they identified three artists deeply engaged in investigating their cultures of origin—Mixtec, Persian, African American—as a means of locating themselves in the present, but they would not have known that Hernandez would make his collaboration with his grandparents the center of his exhibition. They might have discerned a thematic connection to the natural world in Roy Staab’s outdoor installations and Hernandez’s photographs of his family’s village in Oaxaca, but they would not have known that Nicholas Perry would turn from portraiture to landscape under the influence of hours spent along the Milwaukee River Greenway.

This is what the annual Nohl exhibition offers: the exhilaration of seeing what emerges when five artists are well-supported for a year and a half.

As noted, Nina Ghanbarzadeh embarked on a major experiment. The artist had long used text in her two-dimensional work to “translate the experience of living between two cultures.” For the Nohl exhibition, moved by “the absurdity and brutality of our contemporary world,” she deconstructed the Farsi words for “love” and “peace” and reconstituted them as monumental sculptures that dominate the gallery space. Using the letters and diacritical marks of her mother tongue as abstract forms, she prised them apart, then repeated and rearranged them. The words hover on the cusp of legibility, though the contrast between her commanding tower of “love” and collapsed structure of “peace” speaks clearly.

“When I received the Nohl Fellowship—on my 21st attempt,” writes Roy Staab, “I did not go to Cape Cod or the Hamptons or even California to work on the beach—a common practice of mine—but instead spent the summer in a cottage near a fallow field and thought.” Staab took advantage of the temporary financial respite provided by the fellowship to launch new investigations and pick up old threads, weaving them into a retrospective exhibition in which chance and geometry are constant themes. The chance acquisition of some solar lights led to experiments in twilight photography with a drone (the drone’s movements adding another element of chance; also by chance, he was invited to Paris to retrieve a roll of paintings that he had made in the late 1970s. In those early works, the artist was using spray watercolor on the back of old posters to create grids of color. The exhibition includes two wall drawings, one referencing an exhibition Staab did in 1997 and the other a sketch for an outdoor installation in France that he ended up realizing on Cape Cod. In 1997 he drew an oval in blue pastel powder on the rectangular floor of the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts: “People were so busy looking at the photographs on the walls that they walked all over the drawing.” That drawing resurfaces on the Haggerty’s walls, and that oval-within-a-rectangle has become an installation in the courtyard behind the museum. As Francesca Cigola observes in her catalogue essay, these outdoor installations belong to an “ancient artistic tradition of measuring the land, using the artist’s body in movement to leave a trace behind—an ephemeral mark as transient as the artist's own life.”

Courtney R. Baker and Therí Pickens, in their essay on Justin Goodrum, write that he “uses film as an evocative vessel to carry and convey multiple experiences of Black life in America.” The films are vessels full of holding: of “conflicts, of competing ideas, of grief, of hope.” During the fellowship year, Goodrum continued work on his first feature, Christopher. The film revisits his interest in mental health disparities within Milwaukee’s Black community, this time from a fictional perspective. Film production is a slow process, and the length of time it takes to complete a film correlates closely with the filmmaker’s ability to raise funds—a struggle for an emerging filmmaker. As Goodrum navigates the fiscal and creative sides of filmmaking, he adheres to his mission “to celebrate the complexity of the human experience and to use my craft as a force for understanding, empowerment, and change.” For the Nohl exhibition, he has assembled some of his earlier documentaries and chosen iconic objects from each to lend the film material form. Bookend, his proof-of-concept short for Christopher, will also be on view.

Upon winning the Nohl Fellowship, Jovanny Hernandez Caballero saw an opportunity to realize a long-held dream: to bring his maternal grandparents to Milwaukee from Mexico to reunite with their daughter, Jovanny’s mother. Hernandez’s grandparents, Juana Zúñiga Hernandez and Clemente Caballero García, are his collaborators as well as his relatives. Their woven blankets, wooden carvings, and family artifacts—all well-used—share the exhibition space with his photographs. “I come from a land of weavers (nia kanu do) and farmers (dexe tatna),” writes Hernandez. “To be Mixteco is to carry the language of form, texture, and spirit that speaks through our creations.” Hernandez is engaged in honoring and transforming his Indigenous heritage. Raoul Deal, in his catalogue essay, describes Hernandez’s photography as “more ‘land-based’ than landscape… it reveals instead a spiritual experience of interconnection between the earth there and the Mixtec people who inhabit and respect it for all it provides.” The artist’s exhibition strategy rejects traditional ethnographic approaches to display and re-immerses his own photographs in lived Mixtec culture. As Deal observes, “It models a clear critical strategy for cultural affirmation and resistance at a historical moment of chaos and confusion. It sparks a sense of hope and possibility.”

Gifted with time to devote to his practice, Nicholas Perry “began to question why I was making figures about anxiety and isolation.” A friend’s suggestion reoriented him to the natural world, and he spent much of his time outdoors along the Milwaukee River Greenway. His new paintings, now filled with the flora and fauna of his immediate environment, remain abstract, nor did he entirely abandon his portrait practice. The exhibition includes several portraits that reference his expanded hyper-local understanding of land, water, and light, and a parallel series of oil pastels that capture fleeting moments along the Greenway.

About the Artists
Nina Ghanbarzadeh (Afkhamian): The Love that We Need and the Peace that Is Lost
Nina Ghanbarzadeh transplanted from Tehran, Iran, in 2001. She holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing and Graphic Design from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and completed a two-year artist residency at Redline Milwaukee in 2015. Ghanbarzadeh has been involved in many exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and presentations. She received the 1st Place award at the Wisconsin Artists Biennial in 2020, and she was chosen by Professional Dimensions as the 2025 Imprint Award Artist.

Roy Staab: Twenty-One
Roy Staab (b. 1941, Milwaukee) received a BFA from the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He spent most of the ‘70s in Europe, primarily in France. By 1980 he was living in New York, where he began to make outdoor installations with scavenged materials in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He made his first installation-in-nature using natural materials in North Carolina in 1983, then began to work regularly by the water using materials that were readily available on site. Staab returned to Milwaukee in 1993 and has continued to create installations around the world. Awards include: Japan/American Artist Exchange Creative Artist Fellowship, Pollack/Krasner Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Award, Gottlieb Foundation Award, and an Efroymson Contemporary Art Fellowship. He received a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award (2010) and was named an Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee Arts Board (2012). His work is 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, among others.

Justin Goodrum: Frame by Frame
Justin Goodrum has collaborated with NBC to direct and produce a short documentary on mental health disparities within Milwaukee’s Black community, and his production company, Good Entertainment, presented at the 2021 Culture, Health, and Wellbeing International Conference. He was selected to participate in Firelight Media’s Groundwork Lab with his film The Stigma of the Durag, which went on to premiere at the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival, earning an Honorable Mention, before airing on Milwaukee PBS’s Black Nouveau in 2023. For the past three years, Goodrum has been producing One Minute Remaining, an independent feature-length documentary about the social and economic burdens of incarceration on women. He is in pre-production for Christopher, which returns to the subject of mental health disparities, this time in the form of a feature-length horror film. Other recognition includes the Milwaukee Film Focus Finder Filmmaking Accelerator Program (2023), City of Milwaukee Arts Board Artist of the Year Award (2024), and the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix accelerator program (2024).

Jovanny Hernandez Caballero: Weavers (nia kanu do) and Farmers
(teé xe+ú ñu’u): Threads of Family and Soil
Jovanny Hernandez Caballero is a community artist and photographer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He completed his BFA in Photography & Imaging at the UW-Milwaukee in 2023 and is a staff photographer at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He is a first-generation American and descendant of Mixtecs, an Indigenous group based in present-day Oaxaca, Mexico. His work centers around themes of cultural heritage and identity. Through his photography, Jovanny documents the beauty of Milwaukee’s South Side and his family’s native land of Oaxaca. He seeks to showcase the richness and diversity of his community, celebrating its people, culture, and traditions.

Nicholas Perry: Along the Path
Nicholas Perry is a painter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He graduated from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2018 with a BFA in Painting and Drawing. His work was selected for the Wisconsin Artists Biennial at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in 2018 and he had a solo exhibition at The Alice Wilds in Milwaukee in 2019. Group exhibitions include Usable Space and Real Tinsel (Milwaukee), the Trout Museum of Art’s TMA Contemporary (Appleton, Wisconsin), and Shin Gallery’s SHIN HAUS project (New York). Perry’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Midwest Edition (Nos. 137 and 149).

Walking Together, Weaving the World

June 11- 20, 2025
Milwaukee City Hall, 200 E. Wells St.
FREE

Walking Together, Weaving the World, an exhibition of work by local refugee children and youth, is on display in the Milwaukee City Hall Rotunda in conjunction with our World Refugee Day Celebration at City Hall. Participating schools include Hmong American Peace Academy, the International Newcomer Center at Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language, and Clement J. Zablocki School.