MARY L. NOHL FUND FELLOWSHIPS FOR INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AWARDED
For immediate release: 5 November 4, 2012
For further information: Polly Morris, (414) 446-8794
pmorris@lyndensculpturegarden.org
http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl
Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 140 applicants in the tenth annual competition. Danielle Beverly, Faythe Levine and Colin Matthes were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Lois Bielefeld, Tyanna J. Buie, Brad Fiore and Paul Kjelland will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) in the autumn of 2013. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.
Finalists in the Established Artist category included Santiago Cucullu, Anne Kingsbury, Keith Nelson and Jason Yi.
Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Tegan Andrich, Robin Jebavy, Matthew Konkel, Gregory Martens, Amanda Tollefson and Dean Valadez.
Headshots and images of the artists’ work available for download at: http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/Nohl2012Images.zip.
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.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. Her $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation is one of the largest gifts the Foundation has received from a single donor in its 97-year history. The Fund, by supporting local visual arts and arts education programs, keeps Nohl’s passion for the visual arts alive in the community.
The panel of jurors included Lisa Dent, incoming Director, Grants & Services at Creative Capital in New York; Astria Suparak, Director and Curator, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and Irene Tsatsos, Chief Curator/Director of Gallery Programs at Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California. The panelists were in Milwaukee October 25-October 27, reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the seven finalists in the Established Artist category.
About the Fellows
Established Artists
DANIELLE BEVERLY
Documentary filmmaker Danielle Beverly has been an independent artist for 15 years, shooting and directing her own films, including the upcoming Old South. Old South follows a historically black Georgia neighborhood as it battles a Confederate flag-flying college fraternity that moves in and stages an antebellum parade. Her next project will follow the “thriving and striving” cooperative movement in Milwaukee. Beverly has worked as a producer at PBS and ITVS, as a cameraperson on social issue documentaries such as 2011 Nohl Fellow Brad Lichtenstein's As Goes Janesville, and as a field producer for the Peabody Award-winning Rebirth (Sundance 2011). She is currently Professional-in-Residence at Marquette University's Diederich College of Communication in Milwaukee.
FAYTHE LEVINE
Faythe Levine is a multimedia artist, curator, author and collector. Her devotion to varied interests propels her to constantly be doing many things at once. Levine’s current focus is Sign Painters, a documentary and book about the trade of traditional hand lettering in America. She is also documenting off-the-grid land projects around the country, acting simultaneously as participant and observer. Locally, Levine curates Sky High Gallery and produces Art vs. Craft. Her personal work has been published and exhibited internationally in both formal and renegade outlets. Levine toured for two years with her first book and film, Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y. Art, Craft and Design. You can keep track of her slightly obsessive updates via various social media channels and visually on her website where she documents her community-based projects, travels and experiences. Levine was a Nohl Fellow (Emerging) in 2007.
COLIN MATTHES
Colin Matthes makes work about engineering the absurd, which allows him to address economic and environmental crisis from a funny, critical, fatalistic, and industrious point of view. His practice includes painting, drawing, installation, zine and graphic production, and public art projects. Within these works the viewer will find advertising, questionable science, obsessiveness, paranoid ramblings, and genuine concern laced with humor. His next project, a solar-powered miniature demolition derby with concessions, brings the worlds of county fairs and alternative energy into collision. Matthes works collectively with Justseeds, a decentralized network of twenty-six artists living in the United States, Canada, and Mexico that runs a print collective, produces portfolios, contributes graphics to movements, co-publishes books, and builds installations. As an individual artist, Matthes has exhibited across Europe and the United States. Solo exhibitions include Artspace Leguit, Antwerp, Belgium and Igloo Gallery, Portland, Oregon; group exhibitions include Monash University, Melbourne, Australia and the Haggerty Museum, Milwaukee. He has participated in numerous residencies including Hotel Pupik (Austria), Werkkamp (Belgium), Cow House Studios (Ireland), Harold Arts (USA), and AS220 (USA). Matthes’s upcoming projects include Cite Maquette, Brussels, Belgium and exhibitions at Munch Gallery, New York and Monster Truck, Dublin. Matthes was a Nohl Fellow (Emerging) in 2007.
Emerging Artists
LOIS BIELEFELD
Lois Bielefeld grew up in Milwaukee and graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2002 with a BFA in Advertising Photography. Soon after she made the mass migration with all of the other photo graduates to New York City where she lived for seven years. After assisting photographers she began shooting commercial and fashion work. In 2008, when she was sharing a bedroom for a year with her eight-year-old daughter in their small Brooklyn apartment, she started The Bedroom, her first large series of conceptual portraits. The series comprises 103 bedroom portraits made around the United States and proposes the idea that the bedroom is a reflection and extension of the self. Currently, Bielefeld is photographing Concealed Carry portraits in Wisconsin. This series is a portrait of both the person and their handgun and focuses on concealment and revelation. The Bedroom was the subject of a solo show at the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee; the artist has also participated in group shows in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. Bielefeld returned to Milwaukee in 2010 with her daughter, partner, guinea pig, and cat.
TYANNNA J. BUIE
Born on the South Side of Chicago, Tyanna Buie and her three siblings entered the foster care system when they were small. Buie’s life was further complicated by the need to move between Illinois and Wisconsin. Her “impermanent childhood”—and an adolescent engagement with art—motivated Buie to reconstruct and reaffirm her identity through visual documentation. Buie makes up for the lack of physical evidence of her childhood by drawing on her own memory and sharing experiences with family members. Once she has gathered information, she documents found childhood objects using photography, and appropriates family photos and memorabilia. The objects in her work stand in for the tangible resources that were lost, taken, or discarded during her childhood. The pattern of Buie’s childhood is reflected in the processes she uses: she combines painting, collage and screen-printing to conceal, discard, and repeat these elusive images. She distresses, excavates, and re-works the surface until she reveals an unspecified narrative beneath that surface. Each piece has its own significance; collectively they share in a larger story. Buie received a BA from Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010). Since then, she has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont and the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Solo exhibitions include Visiting Hours at The Dittmar Gallery at Northwestern University and Large Scale Mono-Prints at Western Illinois University Art Gallery. Group shows include the Boston Printmaker’s 2011 North American Print Biennial exhibition juried by Jim Dine, the Print and Drawing exhibition at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and A Painter, Photographer & Printmaker at Dean Jensen. Her work has also been featured on the cover of Averil Y. Clarke’s book, The Inequalities of Love: College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family. Buie teaches printmaking and foundations at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
BRAD FIORE
The subject matter of Brad Fiore’s artistic practice is the unoccupied space that separates the poles of interpersonal and personal. The bulk of his work happens at either end of this spectrum—curatorial projects and “social practice” at one end, neurotic meditations on self at the other: “Neither is able to fulfill the potential of the cultural producer, and thus none of my individual works are complete gestures unto themselves, but serve as avenues to a more unified whole.” By inhabiting the extremes, Fiore draws attention away from the works themselves and refocuses it on the broader context in which they operate. Major excursions into the interpersonal include the Milwaukee Travel Research Center, in which Fiore is cast as creative intermediary, selecting, arranging, and platforming the art objects (and non-objects) of others while navigating Milwaukee’s complex cultural and geographic landscape. Then there are the works he categorizes as Theories of Self that perform the more traditional artistic task of exploring individual, subjective experience; in Fiore’s case, the artist is the primary subject. These experiments in self-expression are produced with an “un-unique, info-graphic” aesthetic, presenting the subject with a “frustrating clarity and matter-of-fact sensibility.” Fiore is a recent graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and a co-founder of the Nomadic Arts Center, a mobile exhibition space that investigates the possibilities of temporary, low-budget, urban existence.
PAUL KJELLAND
Paul Kjelland creates venues for ideas and concepts outside the mainstream; builds community through participatory events; and makes time-sensitive copyleft graphics designed to make a difference in social and political movements. He is a co-founder of the Riverwest24, a twenty-four hour bicycle-based community event that celebrates the neighborhood. Now in its sixth year, it brings riders and volunteers together to create various projects within the context of meeting and cooperating with neighbors. Another community project, the Riverwest Public House Cooperative Tavern, is the second co-op bar in the country and an economic engine for funding a co-op-incubating non-profit. Kjelland developed Night School, a lecture series at the Public House that brings artists, activists, historians and social commentators into the community to have conversations and make presentations about different topics. When not organizing within his community, Kjelland creates visual work that addresses social justice issues. These graphics are made for use by local, national, and international movements including the Wisconsin Uprising, the Palermo Workers’ Union, the Chicago Teachers’ Union, Tamms Year Ten, and the Iraq Veterans Against the War. Recent projects include collaborations with Nicolas Lampert, such as their public art project at the Villard Square Library in Milwaukee, and public art for the True/False film festival in Columbia, Missouri. Kjelland received a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2005.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is a family of more than 1,100 individual charitable funds, each created by donors to serve the local charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. Started in 1915, the Foundation is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the world.
For further information about the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program, please visit http://lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl.
