Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award

The 2024 cycle of the Ruth Arts Mary L Nohl Alumni Award is now open. To view the guidelines and application instructions, click here.

The Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award offers a new layer of support for former Nohl Fellows. It does this in two ways: by providing unrestricted funds to the selected artists and by working alongside current and former awardees to develop a network of career-sustaining opportunities to respond to their needs. In the 2024 cycle, four artists will be selected, up to 50% of whom may live outside the four-county area (Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, Waukesha).

The original Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists program, which launched in 2003, was designed to encourage artists to stay in greater Milwaukee, to evolve as artistic practitioners, and to contribute to our community through the creation of art. From 2022-2024 additional funding from Joy Engine enabled us to temporarily deepen our support for artists.

Over the course of more than twenty years working with Nohl Fellows and Suitcase Fund awardees across many career stages, we have developed a better understanding of the issues faced by post-fellowship artists, particularly mid-career artists who want to remain in the area: a lack of career-sustaining networks and opportunities outside greater Milwaukee.

In the spirit of the Nohl Fellowship—and Mary Nohl, who built the world she wanted to inhabit as an artist by creating her own clubs, convenings, and newsletters outside of established institutions and formalized spaces— our goal is to share knowledge across the local, regional, and national landscape to build a network of support that can meet the evolving needs of former Nohl Fellows and mid-career, Milwaukee-based artists. Our work with the second cohort of Nohl alumni will continue to center artist self-determination and support artist-defined forms of success.