Offsite Exhibitions
2025 Nohl Fellows Exhibition
We Belong/You Belong: Joy and Unity Against the Odds
June 4 - August 1, 2026
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 29-July 4, 2026)
Opening reception: Saturday, June 13, 4-6 pm
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 2025 on Monday, June 1, 2026. The exhibition is co-presented with the Lynden Sculpture Garden, which administers the Nohl Fellowship program, and brings together work by Michelle Grabner and Michael Newhall in the Established category; and three artists in the Emerging category: Sarah Ballard, Margaret Griffin, and Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen).
Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund and Joy Engine, and administered by the Lynden, the 2025 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.
A catalogue highlighting the work of the 2025 Nohl Fellows, with essays by Yaşar Adnan Adanali, Diedre Dempsey, Michelle Grabner, and Morgan Quaintance, will be available for purchase at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and online: Lynden Gift Gallery
The 2025 Nohl Fellows were chosen in late 2024 from a field of 157 applicants by a panel of three jurors: 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. 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, and professional development opportunities. The 2025 jurors chose a cohort of fellows born across the last six decades of the twentieth century. In this exhibition, using painting, sculpture, and moving images, they tell us something about what it means to be an artist at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first.
This year, hyper-locality and a kind of dynamic, future-facing rootedness, a strategy for surviving in a globalized world, come up frequently in the work and the essays written about it. Margaret Griffin, three years past graduation, deploys her labor-intensive sculptural processes to pay homage to a neglected industrial pillar that was the companion of her art studies—and to imagine its potential futures. Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina + Alyx Christensen) explores entanglements between the human and non-human worlds—down to the cellular level—here in Milwaukee through the medium of food: growing it, raising bees to pollinate it, placing it at the center of a radical hospitality that builds community. In his essay, Yaşar Adnan Adanalı describes what happens when Open Kitchen goes on the road, and he proposes a future created by different hyper-localities rubbing up against each other. Michelle Grabner has long placed the domestic—her home, her daily life—at the center of her practice. Here, she activates several abiding interests: in the local, incorporating masonry fragments from the Pabst Mansion; in sustaining, generative relationships among artists, by juxtaposing her work with that of Dieter Roth; and in the power of multiples and the mundane in her instantly recognizable porcelain crackers.
For Sarah Ballard and Michael Newhall, rootedness has an historical dimension. Morgan Quaintance goes back to 1641 and to Descartes when he writes about Ballard, whose films examine the body's capacity for knowing. Quaintance places Ballard firmly on the side of those rejecting a characterization of the mind as drifting free from its corporeal anchor. That drift leaves the body ripe for exploitation in the neoliberal present: "a thing to be optimized and mastered by regulated thought"—and not, as Ballard asserts, "an instrument of resistance." Newhall, contemplating decades of practice, roots himself in a constantly unfurling history of art. He enumerates his influences—Willem de Kooning's "Excavation," with its revelation that "everything is in relation"; his Chicago Imagist friends, propelling narrative painting into the future; painters from Titian, Vermeer, and Velázquez to Philip Guston—and concludes: "you're on the same train…informed by the perishing past."
About the Artists
Michelle Grabner: Dieter Roth / Michelle Grabner
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator, and serves as 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 the Arts at Bard College, the Yale University School of Art, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Grabner is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, election as a National Academician in the National Academy of Design in 2018, and a 2024 fellowship from the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Her work is held in major public collections across the United States and internationally. In addition to her individual practice, Grabner collaborates with artist Brad Killam to run the artist-operated project spaces The Suburban (est. 1999) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and The Poor Farm (est. 2008) in Little Wolf, Wisconsin.
Michael Newhall: Ordinary Existence
Michael Newhall is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, sculpture, and sumi ink drawing. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1982) and his BS in Comprehensive Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1970), with additional studies at the Art Students League of New York. Newhall has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and Naropa University. His work has been exhibited nationally, including at the Art Institute of Chicago; the University of Wisconsin-Parkside (Kenosha); Edgewood University Gallery (Madison); the Grohmann Museum and Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens (Milwaukee); and numerous galleries across the country. Newhall is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship (1985). From 2004 to 2021, he served as guiding teacher at Jikoji Zen Center in California and continues as emeritus guiding teacher.
Sarah Ballard: Here – There
Sarah Ballard is an artist and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work has been exhibited worldwide at venues such as the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Images Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Kasseler Dokfest, Arab Image Foundation, and Beijing International Short Film Festival, among others. She was a recipient of the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Margaret Griffin: And Believe Me When I Tell You That There Is No One in the World Wondering Where You Are
Margaret Griffin is a Milwaukee-based sculptor from the Chicago area. She earned her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2023, and upon graduation was accepted into the Plum Blossom Initiative's 2023–24 Bridgework program. In 2024, she was awarded the Gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix grant. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Midwest, including at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, the Trout Museum of Art, and numerous Milwaukee and Chicagoland galleries.
Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina & Alyx Christensen): Fountain Kitchenette
Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen are artists and founding members of Open Kitchen (2016-present, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and filmfront (2014-16, Chicago, Illinois). They are artists-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, where they have exhibited work and currently organize public, interdisciplinary programs around experimental ecological pedagogy based on their research and co-stewardship of the "Lynden Apiary" and the "Cultural Garden." OK has been a guest at the Poor Farm Experiment (Little Wolf, Wisconsin), ACRE Residency (Steuben, Wisconsin), SodA Mundial (Mexico City), Bishkek School of Contemporary Art (BiSCA, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) and at Postane, Istanbul, Turkey, where they have presented programs and exhibited work.
We Belong/You Belong: Joy and Unity Against the Odds
June 16-30, 2026
Milwaukee City Hall, 200 E. Wells St.
FREE
More information: Click here
We Belong/You Belong: Joy and Unity Against the Odds, 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. Participants are drawn from Hmong American Peace Academy, the International Newcomer Center at Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language, Clement J. Zablocki School, and Lynden's HOME refugee programs, including Be the Change and a summer 2025 photography workshop led by artist Asher Imtiaz.
