MARY L. NOHL FUND FELLOWSHIPS FOR INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AWARDED
For further information:
Polly Morris, (414) 446-8794
pollymorris@ameritech.net
lyndensculpturegarden.org
Media images available for each artist below their bio.
Seven Artists Recognized in Eighth Cycle
Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 136 applicants in the eighth annual competition. Brent Coughenour, Paul Druecke and Waldek Dynerman were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Sarah Buccheri, Neil Gravander, Ashley Morgan and Chris Thompson will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition in the autumn of 2011. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.
Finalists in the Established Artist category included Santiago Cucullu, Sheila Held, Kay Knight and Mary Osmundsen.
Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Nicholas Grider, Kristin Haas, Allison Heape, Jon Horvath, Colleen Ludwig and Sarah Luther.
Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the Bradley Family Foundation, 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). The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.
The panel of jurors included Sheryl Conkelton, an art historian, curator and writer based in Philadelphia; Nathan Lee, a critic and curator based in New York; and Lucía Sanromán, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The panelists were in Milwaukee October 28-October 300, reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the seven finalists in the Established Artist category.
About the Fellows
Established Artists
BRENT COUGHENOUR
Brent Coughenour is a film- and video-maker from Motor City (USA) currently based in Cream City (USA). One preoccupation in his creative work has been the exploration of narrative cinematic language outside the boundaries of a traditional dependence on drama and plot. His most recent work, including The Physical Impossibility of Life in the Mind of Someone Dead, incorporates computer programming for audio and video manipulation into projects designed for live performance. He has presented his work at a variety of festivals and venues throughout the United States and internationally, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Media City Film and Video Festival, Antimatter Underground Film Festival, Onion City Film and Video Festival, Experimental Film and Video Festival in Seoul, and Ann Arbor Film Festival. In 2009 he toured Europe with his feature-length Super 8 film, I Pity the Fool (2007), screening at bars, festivals, galleries and theaters throughout Germany, Switzerland and France. He is also an occasional member of the Milwaukee Laptop Orchestra (MiLO).
PAUL DRUECKE
Paul Druecke's work plays on the relationship between authorship and authority. As part of his 2010 residency at Spaces World Art Program in Cleveland, Druecke produced two bronze plaques to be permanently installed on the Spaces facade. The plaques memorialize the act of memorializing. His contest/installation, Detroit: Phoenix, was presented by The Suburban as part of Steppenwolf Theater's Explore Series. He was recently named Creative Liaison for the Friends of Blue Dress Park, a collaborative project with Los Angeles artist Sara Daleiden. Druecke's projects have been presented at venues including the Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Germany; Many Mini Residency, Berlin House, Berlin, Germany; The Suburban, Chicago; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston. His work has been written about in Metropolis.com, Artforum, Art in America, Artnet.com, and featured in InterReview and Camera Austria.
WALDEK DYNERMAN
Waldek Dynerman was born and educated in Poland. He relocated to the United States in 1983 to teach at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, where he is currently a professor in the Printmaking and Drawing Departments. He works in mixed media painting, sculpture and printmaking. He uses found objects in his 3D constructions, and thrift stores are his favorite place to get art supplies for his mixed media paintings. Although there are many layers to the content of his work, the Holocaust frames and underlies all that he does. Born six years after the end of Word War II, Dynerman grew up in the shadow of war and genocide. His father was a Holocaust survivor, and his non-Jewish mother experienced the horrors of total war and slave labor. Yet this family history never manifests itself directly in his work. Instead, it often assumes a “disguise,” shaped in a semblance of a toy (as in the Train Project) or is full of grotesque humor, as in the most recent paintings.
Emerging Artists
SARAH BUCCHERI
Sarah Buccheri’s approach to filmmaking involves exploration of space and the mutual psychological influence space and its occupants impress upon one another. Many of her works can be categorized as documentaries about certain locations, but once completed, communicate qualities beyond visual characteristics and portrayal of landscape. In her latest film, House Ghost, she examines the artifacts of a person’s presence in a place and how we coexist with artifacts from those who have occupied a space before us. Buccheri received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Film from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has performed at The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, and Galapagos Art Space. Her films and videos have screened at Detroit Docs, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Chicago Underground Film Festival, and Milwaukee Underground Film Festival.
NEIL GRAVANDER
Electronic artist Neil Gravander graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with degrees in political science and philosophy. His work has been in the area of sound art design; his recent album (under the name Lucky Bone), Non-Hypnotic Catatonic, was released by the local experimental music label FTAM. Currently he is experimenting with electronic circuits, both audio and video, as a process of blurring the line between the two mediums. Audio and video obey the same laws of physics, and Gravander uses equipment and techniques intended for one to shape and manipulate the other. His live performance pieces, which have focused on producing physical representations of sounds, have been seen at the Minute Gallery; in January the gallery will present his collages and an installation. During the fellowship year, Gravander will be applying the audio tape manipulations he has developed to video tape.
ASHLEY MORGAN
Ashley Morgan is a sculptor and a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she received an MFA from the Department of Visual Art. Morgan experiments with the non-traditional use of materials; she is interested in how those materials can be transformed to reveal new properties. Her aim is to bring the vastness of the outside world into the home and into the sterile space of a gallery. Each location is deliberately chosen in an attempt to draw the viewer into a romantic world where love and loss are always revealed. Morgan has studied contemporary sculpture on the streets of Florence, Italy, to gain insight into the boundaries between public and private viewing of contemporary art. Her exhibitions include public art projects in Florence, Italy; a solo exhibition in Seoul, Korea; and local and national juried, curated and traveling exhibitions. Recently, her work received a prize in the Eight Counties Juried Exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. During the fellowship year, Morgan plans to make interior/exterior architectural installations and to experiment with temperamental environmental manipulation of materials.
CHRIS THOMPSON
Chris James Thompson is a filmmaker from Cambridge, England. His first short documentary, Kyoko Naturally, focused on his widowed friend Kyoko who lives with a slight hoarding problem in an enormous house. It won the Midwest Directors Award at the 2007 Milwaukee International Film Festival. The MIFF prize package was used to begin shooting his current project, Jeff, a documentary film about the people around Jeffrey Dahmer during the summer of his arrest in 1991. Jeff features Dr. Jeffrey Jentzen, Detective Patrick Kennedy, and actor Andrew Swant, and uses archival footage, interviews, and fictionalized scenarios to tell the stories of some of those affected in ways unexpected by Dahmer's gruesome acts. Thompson hopes to complete Jeff, his first feature film--over three years in the making--in early 2011.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s mission is to strengthen communities through effective partnerships. It is made up of over 1,000 charitable funds, each created by individual donors or families to serve the charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties and beyond. Started in 1915, the Foundation is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the U.S. and abroad.
For further information about the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program, please visit http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl.
