2024 Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Awardees

PAUL AMITAI
Nohl 2003 (Emerging)

Paul Amitai is an artist, musician, and curator who has exhibited and performed internationally. He’s been an artist-in-residence at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Banff Centre, and Harvestworks, and was a member of the inaugural Mary L. Nohl Fellowship cohort in 2003. Paul was formerly Senior Curator at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and currently leads Listen, a New York-based sound design agency. His latest album, First Light, was released this fall.

“Becoming part of the Nohl Alumni cohort is particularly gratifying at this time in my life — balancing family, work, and artmaking — when meaningful connections with artist peers can be harder to maintain. The more finite time available for making art has also brought clarity, focusing on doing less, reducing the number of tools, and using constraints to arrive at what's most resonant.”

This refinement of priorities has brought Amitai back to an improvisational creative process with sound. He treats sound like paint or sculpture — an additive and reductive process shaped in real-time, blending studio-based experimentation, live improvisation, and site-specific installations.

Since 2021, Amitai has released three albums that reflect this painterly approach, using his voice as the sole instrument. With guitar effects pedals as his colors and textures, he has explored turning voice into something elastic and uncanny, yet grounded in physical, human presence. These improvisations aim to create immersive sonic paintings and environments that evoke a secular, sacred experience. Amitai continues to explore ways to present longer-form, spatial sound experiences in distinctive architectural spaces for both individual and collective listening.
https://www.paulamitai.com/

BEN BALCOM
Nohl 2015 (Emerging)

Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For ten years, he programmed Microlights Cinema, fostering a space for experimental film exhibition. His work explores radical histories through experimental and documentary forms, engaging with speculative fiction and archival research to consider how past ideals inform and intersect with present-day struggles. Recent projects have investigated utopian communities, alternative education models, and the intersection of politics and place, including The Phalanx, a film about a 19th-century Fourierist commune in Ripon, Wisconsin. His films have screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Museum of the Moving Image, European Media Arts Festival, Media City Film Festival, and Visions in Montreal, among others.

"I am excited about the potential of the Nohl Alumni network to foster a stronger, more connected artistic community. Having benefited from spaces of critical dialogue throughout my career, I see this network as an opportunity to extend those conversations—whether through resource-sharing, feedback sessions, or creating new platforms for artists to present work. I'm looking forward to collaborating with other Fellows to shape an evolving and responsive program, one that supports the diverse needs of its members while amplifying the impact of the Nohl Fellowship."
http://www.benbalcom.com/

ZACH HILL
Nohl 2015 (Emerging)

Zach Hill creates sculptures, drawings, and videos that play with material identity, visual perception, and speculative utility. In these multidimensional transmutations, he presents objects and images that actively misbehave, challenging perceptions and expectations of function, form, and material. This misbehavior encapsulates his practice which, at its core, physically manifests a type of innate, undeniable, and unable-to-be-hidden queerness. Within this overarching logic of construction, his work explores sexuality, surveillance, and the collective witnessing of both catastrophe and pleasure.

Hill has been awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship and the Illuminate the Arts Grant along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, RAIR, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Flux Factory on Governors Island, Peep Projects, Vox Populi, Moravian University, and VisArts, among other spaces. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught courses in fine arts and design at UPenn, Drexel University, Delaware County Community College, and Haverford College, where he is currently the Digital Arts & Sculpture Technician and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Art. He is based in Philadelphia, where he founded Zach's Crab Shack, a queer contemporary art gallery hiding behind the facade of a campy, beach-side crab stand. The shack has existed as two walls in the corner of a drag festival, a miniature model, an 8x10-foot galvanized steel shed in a backyard, and continues to traverse various venues and forms.

“As a participant in this alumni network I imagine myself as both a facilitator and beneficiary. This will be a way for me to stay connected with Milwaukee and the many exceptional artists the Nohl Fellowship has shaped and will continue to shape.”
https://zach-hill.com/

KIM MILLER
Nohl 2009 (Emerging)

Kim Miller’s work embraces dance and the grammar of choreography as both a subject and a discipline. Social choreography – embedded within a visual art context – opens and expands her practice. Social choreography asks how we can (re)organize social relations through space, objects, image, gesture, and text. Social choreography attempts to organize movement into an approach toward liberation.

Miller moves across different forms – performance, video, text, sculpture – asking, each time, What does this form do? Situating obstacles at the center of her practice, she produces movement that captures the kinesthetic, tactile, sonic, and proprioceptive qualities of human interaction, especially in its more athletic and dynamic forms. This practice seeks to reverse the chain of command that usually places the artist at center stage and instead places the audience in the position of the performer.

Miller has performed live and screened her videos at Anthology Film Archive, New York; The Surburban, Oak Park; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; MOMA, New York City; MASS MoCA, North Adams; and Art in General, New York City.

“As artists, we need community, theory, and structural support. Community, to sustain and move into a meaningful relationship with audiences, conversations, and ambiguous outcomes. Theory, to create and strengthen relations between events and objects, building bridges from the individual experience to systemic understandings. Structural support includes expanding arts platforms for challenging work, opportunities, and small project grants. I’m grateful to Ruth Arts and Lynden’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship program for opportunities to make bigger and broader cultural moves.”
https://kimmillerkimmiller.com/

2023 Awardees

TYANNA J. BUIE
Nohl 2012 (Emerging)

A native of Chicago and Milwaukee, Tyanna J. Buie has exhibited her work in numerous juried, group, and solo exhibitions throughout the country. She has participated in residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, and the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. In addition to her Nohl Fellowship, Buie has received the Love of Humanity Award from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation (2015), the prestigious Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015), the Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2019), the 2019/2020 Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and a Fellowship.art award (2020). Her work has been acquired by major institutions and private collections nationally. Buie has been an associate professor/section lead of printmaking at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit since 2015 and this fall she takes up a new position as Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to her artist and teaching practice, Buie has maintained a connection to the community by hosting printmaking workshops and demonstrations, and by participating in the Healthy Neighborhood Initiatives through the production of public art in underserved neighborhoods and communities in Milwaukee, and Madison.

“The Nohl Fellowship gave me the resources and confidence to expand my work conceptually, while experimenting with multi-media techniques and processes. This set the foundation for my current and future creative practice. My art practice thrives on the intersectionality of maintaining my studio practice, teaching, mentoring, and my commitment to community engagement. I see myself contributing to the co-creation of the Nohl Fellows alumni network program by providing a space for each Nohl recipient to be seen and heard through learning about their specific needs and goals first, then using my own connections, skills, resources, and expertise to aid in the contribution of a lifetime of knowledge for the artists.”
https://tyannajbuie.com/home.html

COLIN MATTHES
Nohl 2007 (Emerging), 2012 (Established)

Colin Matthes makes drawings--Essential Knowledge instructional drawings. They teach skills for success in challenging situations. These drawings have a place in popular culture and the art world. As a father with two young kids, a husband, and a full-time job, Matthes has continued to build his career. He keeps expenses low, his focus specific, and he trusts himself out of necessity. To support his practice, he does a lot with a little. His drawing process is an extension of living. It is a tool for slowing down, thinking, figuring things out, and sharing with others. Matthes draws to learn new information, understand his weaknesses, and grow as a person. “I have abandoned indecision and self-consciousness,” observes Matthes. “I am more free than ever.”

“I will work with other Ruth Art fellows to create an evolving group of opportunities and connections that can grow with the accumulated Ruth Arts cohort. When thinking about what the larger alumni program can be, it is essential to work as a group and not enter with a specific agenda.”
https://colinmatthes.com/

CRIS SIQUEIRA
Nohl 2013 (Emerging)

Cris Siqueira is a Brazilian transplant living in Milwaukee since 2004. She has been making art for twenty-five years and recently moved from film to illustration, rekindling a lifelong ambition to make "comics as art," a concept she has championed for decades as a journalist, translator and, more recently, co-owner of the bookstore and art space Lion’s Tooth in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee. Siqueira is currently working on her first graphic novel, an absurdist satire of present-day America that explores issues of belonging, cultural appropriation, and colonialism. May You Get What You Want is inspired by her experiences as an immigrant and her personal involvement with the circus. She is also the vocalist in the Milwaukee band Spidora, named after a sideshow attraction.

“I'm very excited about the possibilities of this new program. Covid relief during the pandemic has shown that even small gestures and amounts go a long way toward improving one’s ability to make art, even if not everybody was in the headspace to create work then. This is an amazing opportunity to cultivate a supportive and intergenerational community, greatly amplifying the impact of the Nohl Fellowship on our individual careers.”
https://crissiqueira.myportfolio.com/

SONJA THOMSEN
Nohl 2011 (Established)

Sonja Thomsen is an American installation artist activating light in image, object, and architecture to choreograph space for wonder. Video, sculpture, and photography are key components of a world within which she constructs networks of women across time to negotiate care, grief, and co-authorship today. Thomsen’s artist book, You will find it where it is: a reader, was published by Poor Farm Press in 2020. She has exhibited with Bauhaus Archiv Berlin; The Suburban Milwaukee; Soccer Club Club, Chicago; Higher Pictures, NY; DePaul Art Museum; Center for Photography at Woodstock; the Reykjavik Museum of Photography; New Mexico Museum of Art; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; Gallery f5,6 in Munich; and Fonderia 20.9 in Verona, Italy, among others. Her most recent installation, Orbiting Lucia (2022-2023), was a part of the exhibition Refracting Histories at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. She is currently Associate Professor Adjunct in Photography Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Milwaukee.

Thomsen has a long history with collaborative practices, building/platforming artist communities regionally and internationally. “I look forward to being a part of a cohort that understands generosity and advocacy, planting seeds for career sustaining opportunities for myself and other fellows.”
https://sonjathomsen.com/