The Weekly Art Drop-In enables children aged 6 through 12 to enjoy Lynden's studio without committing to a weekly class.

Spring Session

January 13-May 25, 2016
Wednesdays, 2:30-5 pm
Ages 6-12
$10/$8 members
Art Drop-In Card: Any 8 sessions for $56/$40 members

You may register for the weekly drop-in at any time, or pay at the door.
Purchase an 8-session Art Drop-in Card or register for an individual session online now.

Drop into our studio for informal art exploration. Come for 30 minutes or stay for 2 1/2 hours; visit weekly or stop by when you need an after-school activity; bring a friend or sibling or try it on your own. Each week we'll introduce different materials, processes and themes, and get you started on a project. We'll focus on three-dimensional artmaking--though we will also do plenty of painting, drawing and collaging--and make use of Lynden’s special resources: the collection of monumental sculpture and 40 acres of park, lake and woodland. Watch for occasional outdoor artmaking days, too.

We can accommodate groups (scout troops, art clubs, etc.) in the Art Drop-In with a little prior notice. Contact Jeremy Stepien at jstepien@lyndensculpturegarden.org or (414) 446-8481.

   

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.

Yevgeniya Kaganovich and her student assistants will take up residence in the studio all afternoon to make the next “planting” of grow, Kaganovich’s durational installation. grow is a system of interconnected plant-like forms simulating a self-propagating organism in multiple stages of development. Created from a singular material, recycled plastic bags, the system grows over time, its growth rate determined by the number of bags accumulated in our official recycling bin. Drop in to watch or participate as Kaganovich fuses the layers of plastic to create a surface similar to leather or skin, molds the skin into plant-like volumes, stuffs the volumes with more bags, and connects the forms with plastic bag “thread.” Tasks include cutting sheets and strips; fusing sheets and tubes; sewing bulb forms and connecting them to bases; crocheting tubes and necks; stuffing stalks; and assembling the plants.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

For those of you who missed the performance, or would like to revisit it, here is a shorter version edited by Aitor Mendilibar documenting last summer's project: https://vimeo.com/154639412

The choreographer Reggie Wilson often finds the ideas for his dances while on a journey. Like an anthropologist, he conducts field research, traveling to places that interest him. Ideas lead to other ideas and accumulate in clusters before he translates them into sensual, structurally complex performances.

– Brian Seibert, The New York Times

The Lynden Sculpture Garden and Alverno Presents embark on Movement and Migration, a series of events culminating in the performance of a new site-specific iteration of choreographer Reggie Wilson's acclaimed work Moses(es). The theme, movement and migration, resonates with Wilson's abiding interest in the cultures of Africans in the Americas and the effect that migration has on beliefs. At Lynden, these themes can be tied to the movement of creatures across the landscape and to natural cycles, as well as to the movement of sculptures from around the world to their current home in our collection (where, it could be argued, their meaning as a collectivity supersedes their individual significance). They also enable us to consider the cultural contributions of the African diaspora to America's culture, Milwaukee's migration history, the Exodus story, and the movement of bodies across Lynden's grounds.

The original Moses(es) was inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (the Moses story told as a Southern folk tale in African-American vernacular) and by Wilson's travels to holy lands such as Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Mali. Moses(es) has been remixed several times since its New York premier at the Brooklyn Academy of Music Next Wave Festival in 2013. For the investigation at Lynden, Wilson and his Fist & Heel Performance Group will continue to ask the questions how do we lead? and why do we follow? Wilson will engage with Lynden's landscape and an intergenerational group of community performers--the Milwaukee County Department on Aging's Jazzy Jewels dance troupe (based at Washington Park Senior Center), the campers in our summer camp, the praise dancers from Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church (Wilson's church to this day), dance students and recent graduates of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Dance Department, and several local performers-- making this Moses(es) a celebration of space and place.

As with Conversations with Sculptures, our project with the Trisha Brown Dance Company last summer, we are creating in-depth programming that will connect diverse audiences with contemporary dance performance, with Wilson's work in particular, and with Lynden as a community resource. This summer's "conversations"--dialogues with the public, from the casual to the highly participatory--will engage audiences of all ages with the project and with Lynden's unique environment.

Activities include the performance workshops with community members, a master class with the graduate students in UWM's Dance Department, and a workshop for the K-12 teachers who participate in our Summer Institute. Children aged 6-11 are invited to enroll in our Movement and Migration summer camp; and the general public can participate in a discussion about the work of Zora Neale Hurston under the auspices of the Women's Speaker Series; our Free Family Day Call-and-Response Picnic; and the culminating performance. The exhibition in the gallery during the project, Dan Torop: Frozen Period, also speaks to the issues of migration and movement.

Postscript Event
Searching for Hurston: Writing Black Modernity
Saturday, February 20, 2016, 2-4 pm
Intrigued by the performance? Join us in February for a Postscript event focused on the work of Zora Neale Hurston, author of Moses, Man of the Mountain--one of the original inspirations for Moses(es).

Details, resources, questions, and readings will be circulated on Twitter #searchingforzora.

Movement and Migration Summer Camp (ages 6-11)
July 13-17, 2015
At Lynden, birds migrate, and bodies--human and animal--move across the landscape. We will explore migration through site-specific outdoor artmaking, nature activities, and movement. We'll spend time each day working with choreographer and artist-in-residence Reggie Wilson as we prepare to participate in his company's performance on July 18.

Free Family Day: Call-and-Response Picnic
Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - 4:30-7:30 pm
On July 15 Lynden opens its doors to the community for a Free Family Day during the Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group residency. Families are invited to picnic on the grounds (bring your own or try a food truck). A variety of hands-on art and nature activities will be available, and there will be plenty of time to stroll. To allow the Fist and Heel dancers a break from rehearsals, we have invited some of our community's stellar younger performers, Ton Ko-Thi and the Skai Academy Band, to share their work with you. The evening will conclude with a participatory ring shout around the pond. First practiced in the United States by African slaves, the ring shout has found its way, over time, into a range of musical forms as well as into the call-and-response familiar in African American churches.

Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group: Moses(es)
Saturday, July 18, 2015 at 2 pm
Milwaukee-born choreographer Reggie Wilson comes home to create a new site-specific iteration of his acclaimed work Moses(es). Originally inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (the Moses story told as a Southern folk tale in African-American vernacular), and by his travels to holy lands such as Israel, Egypt, Turkey and Mali, Moses(es) examines the effects that migration has on beliefs and on how we choose to lead and why we follow. Audience members are invited to wear white; the performers will wear red.

Dan Torop: Frozen Period
In the gallery June 14-September 20, 2015
Frozen Period is an intensive photographic examination of Lynden's landscape framed by a single journal entry written by Meriwether Lewis in 1805 on his westward journey. Intrigued by the "frozen period" between Peg Bradley’s death in 1978 and the opening of the sculpture garden to the public in 2010, Torop made extended seasonal visits to Lynden beginning in the summer of 2013 to investigate the landscape’s history and the passage of seasons, animals, and sculptures across it. The project is both a subjective description based upon a year’s photographic work and an examination of the very act of exploration and observation.

Further Reading

We will work with Wilson and many of the individuals mentioned above to collect and develop web resources that provide a context for Wilson's work and explore project themes. We are using the Lynden and Alverno Presents websites, Instagram and Pinterest to accumulate resources, and Twitter and Facebook to direct people to these and other archival resources related to the project and the performance.

Links
Fist and Heel Performance Group
Arts Fuse reviews a performance of Moses(es) at the Institute of Contemporary Art

About Reggie Wilson

Reggie Wilson’s work has been presented nationally and internationally at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), UCLA Live (Los Angeles), Summerstage (NYC), Linkfest and Festival e'Nkundleni (Zimbabwe), Dance Factory (South Africa), Danças na Cidade (Portugal), Festival Kaay Fecc (Senegal), and The Politics of Ecstasy (Berlin, Germany). Wilson is a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award recipient and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. Wilson was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow and is a 2009 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. Most recently, Wilson received a 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for Moses(es), and was named a Doris Duke Performing Artist. Reggie Wilson is a Milwaukee native, a graduate of Rufus King High School, and a regular visitor to the city where much of his family continues to reside.

The residency and performance of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group are supported in part by the Herzfeld Foundation, Arts Midwest, the Milwaukee County Department on Aging, and Social X MKE.

Fee: $25/$20 members - includes an autographed copy of The Cartographer of No Man's Land, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden. Bronze Optical invites you to arrive early to browse a diverse, vibrant selection of frames--mirror provided, of course!--while they clean and tighten the screws in your current eyewear. Register online now.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads continues her series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome P.S. Duffy, author of The Cartographer of No Man's Land, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Tuesday, September 29, 7-9 pm.

From a hardscrabble village in Nova Scotia to the collapsing trenches of France, a debut novel about a family divided by World War I.

In the tradition of Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife and Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn, P. S. Duffy’s astonishing debut showcases a rare and instinctive talent emerging in midlife. Her novel leaps across the Atlantic, between a father at war and a son coming of age at home without him.

When his beloved brother-in-law goes missing at the front in 1916, Angus defies his pacifist upbringing to join the war and find him. Assured a position as a cartographer in London, he is instead sent directly into the visceral shock of battle. Meanwhile, at home, his son Simon Peter must navigate escalating hostility in a fishing village torn by grief. With the intimacy of The Song of Achilles and the epic scope of The Invisible Bridge, The Cartographer of No Man’s Land offers a soulful portrayal of World War I and the lives that were forever changed by it, both on the battlefield and at home.

“It should do for WWI what Matterhorn did for Vietnam."
-Publishers Weekly, BEA preview

“I cannot believe this is a debut novel. Incredibly well written, with beautifully executed characters, and so obviously grounded in research without ever being didactic – I loved this book. It’s one of the best I’ve read in a long time.”
–Becky Day, TCC/City of Virginia Beach Joint Use Library

“Brilliant. The description of front line action in the trenches is impressively real, and the ending blessedly free from sentimentality. Altogether a remarkable debut.”
–Simon Mawer, author of Trapeze and The Glass Room

About the Author

P.S. Duffy lives in Rochester, Minnesota. She grew up in New England and Baltimore and spent 35 summers sailing in Nova Scotia, where her family roots go back to 1754. She has a degree in history from Concordia University in Montreal and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and had a 25-year career in neurologically based communication disorders. She now balances writing in the neurosciences for Mayo Clinic with creative writing and is the author of a graduate textbook, flash fiction, essays, and creative non-fiction. The Cartographer of No Man’s Land (Liveright/W.W. Norton), is her first novel.

   

A Workshop with the Milwaukee Bonsai Society

Fee: $70/ $63 members of Lynden or the Milwaukee Bonsai Society. This price includes one small tray planting in a ceramic container to take home.
Registration: Registration is now closed. For information on upcoming workshops, sign up for our e-list.

At Lynden, we think of bonsai as one of the most intriguing intersections of art and nature. This is why we have previously joined with the Milwaukee Bonsai Society to host some of their exhibitions and informal showings of bonsai. We are delighted to be able to offer a series of hands-on workshops that will introduce parents and children and teens to the art of bonsai.

A bonsai is a living sculpture, changing from day to day, season to season, and year to year. Because it is never finished, it celebrates all of nature: its cycles, its harshness, its resilience, its balance. Creating and caring for a bonsai combines the principles of design with the science of horticulture; it develops an appreciation for the world of trees and the world of three-dimensional artmaking.

Although we associate bonsai with small trees, related arts have grown up around companion plantings. In this hands-on workshop, you will work one-on-one with an experienced teacher to learn the basic principles and techniques of the art of kusamono (or k'samono). Following the principles of design, we will plant grasses, miniaturized non-woody plants such as ferns, forbs, and hosta as well as mosses and lichens in custom handmade ceramic containers to create small tray plantings that will mature and delight through the years. Anyone with an interest in gardening, plants, ecology and nature and an appreciation for natural beauty will enjoy this workshop.

The Art of K’samono

Originally, beautiful mountain grasses were dug and put into small containers and placed next to larger trees growing in pots (bonsai) to complement them. They completed the picture, telling the story of the season, location, ecology and history of the tree. Then, elements such as flowering plants and mosses and lichens were added to the pots to create a vignette, a small window of nature captured in time that changed and held the viewer’s interest through the seasons and through the years.

Simplicity, tranquility and naturalness are the hallmarks of the best non-woody tray plantings called K’samono and they can stand alone to tell their own story as the seasons pass and bring pleasure to the viewer.

The Milwaukee Bonsai Society, Inc. is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping individuals in their efforts to increase their knowledge and skills in the art of bonsai.

Presented in collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center.

Fee: $200/$185 for members of Lynden or Woodland Pattern (one discount only). Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Woodland Pattern Book Center offer an intensive workshop at Lynden with writer-in-residence Andrew Schelling. In addition to the scheduled hours, each participant will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with Andrew Schelling for individualized feedback and discussion of his or her work. The workshop will begin with a reading by Schelling at Woodland Pattern on May 31 at 2 pm, and will culminate in a reading by participants, followed by a reception, at Lynden on Friday, June 5 at 8 pm.

Medicine Play: A Workshop on Poetry, Voice, Performance
The most archaic examples of poetry show where the craft begins: in the voice. To the Indo-European world this primal force was known as VĀK. Seen by some as a deity, she “voices” the universe into existence. We’ll explore phonetics, rhythm, magic speech, the meaning of “meaningless” language, animal talk, repetition, song, and other vocal techniques. From there we’ll look to Japanese Noh plays. The Noh is a Japanese medicine theater with roots in the Paleolithic; it reached high refinement under the influence of Zen. American poets including Ezra Pound and Leslie Scalapino have drawn on the form to respond to crisis. Working with Noh we’ll allow a range of voices into the writing. Alone or in groups to compose medicine plays. To envision realms of folklore, ghost, and chorus. To set them loose in a postmodern world.

About Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling has published twenty books. Love, wilderness, old languages, the power of animals and plants run through his poetry. He has worked on wolf reintroduction to the Southern Rockies, opposed egregious cell phone towers, taught poetry, and translated from the languages of India, largely Sanskrit and old dialects. His first book Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, received the Academy of American Poets translation prize. In April 2014 he and three other poets did A PAIR OF TREES OPENS A NEW LIFE, a tree-planting poetry-walk along the John Muir Way in Scotland, a hike of 130 miles from Dunbarton to Helensborough. Recent books include From the Arapaho Songbook and A Possible Bag (poetry), The Real People of Wind & Rain: Talks, Essays and an Interview, a volume of translations, Bright as an Autumn Moon, and the anthology Love and the Turning Seasons. He lives along the Indian Peaks, outside Boulder, Colorado, where he teaches at Naropa University. He is also a founding arts faculty at Deer Park Institute, in India’s bird-thronged Himalayan foothills.

Dates at Lynden: June 2-June 5

Tuesday, June 2 - 6-9 pm
Wednesday, June 3 - 6-9 pm
Thursday, June 4 - 6-9 pm
Friday, June 5 - 6-8 pm (with a reading and reception at 8 pm)

Related Events

Sunday, May 31 - 2 pm
Reading: Andrew Schelling
$6-$8; free to participants in Medicine Play: A Workshop on Poetry, Voice, Performance
This event takes place at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St. Milwaukee, WI 53212

Friday, June 5 - 8 pm
Workshop Reading & Celebration
Free
Participants in the workshop will offer a reading of work produced during the week followed by a reception.
This event takes place at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.

Both events are open to the public.

Fee: $25/$22 members - includes an autographed copy of Those Who Save Us, refreshments by MKELocalicious and admission to the sculpture garden -- come early for a stroll around the grounds! Register online now.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads continues her series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell Books welcome Jenna Blum, author of Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers and the novella "The Lucky One," featured in the collection Grand Central to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, August 12, 7-9 pm.

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and # 1 international bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us (Harcourt, 2004) and The Stormchasers (Dutton, 2010); novella “The Lucky One” in the postwar anthology Grand Central (Penguin, 2014); and audio course “The Author At Work: The Art of Writing Fiction” (Recorded Books, 2014). Jenna is also one of Oprah’s Top 30 Women Writers.

Jenna’s debut novel Those Who Save Us is a New York Times and international bestseller and was Holland’s # 1 bestseller in 2011. Those Who Save Us is also a Boston Globe bestseller and 2005 winner of the Ribalow Prize, adjudged by Elie Wiesel. Those Who Save Us is a perennial book club favorite; to discuss the novel, Jenna visited over 800 book clubs in the Boston area alone.

Jenna’s second novel, The Stormchasers, which Jenna researched by chasing tornadoes for eight years, is an international bestseller, Boston Globe bestseller, Target Emerging Author Pick, Borders bestseller, and has been featured in French Elle.

Jenna earned a B.A. at Kenyon College and an M.A. in Creative Writing at Boston University, where she taught Creative and Communications Writing for 5 years and was editor of AGNI Literary Magazine. Jenna has taught fiction and novel workshops for Boston’s Grub Street Writers for almost 20 years and is a regular column contributor to Grub Daily. Based in Boston, Jenna travels nationally and internationally to speak about her novels; she visits book clubs in person, by phone, or via Skype. Follow Jenna on Facebook (Jenna Blum) and Twitter (@Jenna_Blum).

   

Pegi Christiansen’s residency at Lynden is built around the idea of distance. Early on she reached out to three other artists critical to her development as a performance artist--Theresa Columbus in Baltimore, Jennifer Holmes in Los Angeles, and John Loscuito in Fort Myers, Florida--and the four started creating art together last September. This project, Distance, will culminate in an exhibition and performance at Lynden on October 10-11.

Pegi Christiansen’s residency at Lynden is built around the idea of distance. Early on she reached out to three other artists critical to her development as a performance artist--Theresa Columbus in Baltimore, Jennifer Holmes in Los Angeles, and John Loscuito in Fort Myers, Florida--and the four started creating art together last September. This project, Distance, will culminate in an exhibition and performance at Lynden on October 10-11.

A Workshop with Wes Tank

Fee: $55/$50 members
Registration: Registration is now closed. For information on future workshops, sign up for our e-list.

If you are the proud owner of a new GoPro, or if you've had one for a while but want to learn how to get the most out of the versatile camera, this is the workshop for you. The GoPro is a natural fit for people who love the outdoors, and in this small, very hands-on workshop filmmaker Wes Tank will familiarize you with your camera, with a focus on shooting in a natural environment. We'll learn about settings, accessories, and resources; try out different shooting techniques on the Lynden grounds; pick up a few tricks for filming without being able to see what you're looking at; and experiment with slow motion and time lapse.