Fee: $22/$18 members - includes an autographed copy of The Rooms Are Filled, refreshments and admission to the sculpture garden -- come early for a stroll around the grounds. Online registration is now closed. If you are interested in attending this event, please give us a call at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads continues year three of her series featuring writers of particular interest to women. We are joined this year by series sponsor Bronze Optical and treats sponsor MKELocalicious.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell books welcome Jessica Null Vealitzek author of The Rooms Are Filled to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, May 28, 7-9 pm. (You may also be interested in Women's Speaker Series: Kate Southwood, author of Falling to Earth, July 8, 7-9 pm.)

In the mid-1980s, AIDS hysteria and homophobia were rampant. Fear and ignorance led to increased discrimination, especially in the classroom. Set in 1983, The Rooms Are Filled, by Jessica Null Vealitzek, is the beautifully heart-wrenching story of two castaways brought together by vastly different circumstances.

At nine years old, Michael Nygaard is transplanted from his Minnesota farm, and the sacred wolf-filled wilderness that surround him, to suburban Chicago (Ackerman, Illinois) after his father dies abruptly. Simultaneously, Julia Parnell escapes to Ackerman in hopes of beginning her life anew after a failed attempt to live openly with her lifelong girlfriend, Rose.

In his new town, Michael doesn’t fit with the characters that surround him: the wild girl across the street, Tina, nurtures their friendship and then undermines it; Tina’s alcoholic father rockets between affability and rage; and the relentless bullies at school taunt him. He finds temporary refuge with his proper, young—closeted—teacher, Miss Parnell.

When Julia’s secret is exposed, she faces a choice: accept herself or deny her true nature. Michael must also choose whether to simply endure or fight back. Coming of age will take bravery from these two lost souls and if they cannot find the strength to change, neither will have the life they deserve and desire.

A powerful novel by a skilled debut author, The Rooms Are Filled teaches an important lesson for anyone who is searching for his or her true self: “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

The Rooms Are Filled was recently featured in the Great New Books newsletter.

About the Author

Jessica Null Vealitzek was born and raised near Chicago, where she still lives with her husband and two children. She majored in American Studies at Lake Forest College, then earned her M.F.A. at Roosevelt University while waitressing and reporting for a suburban newspaper.

A Midwesterner through and through, she believes in the power of the quiet stories of everyday people. A former communications director for a gubernatorial candidate and an exhibit writer, Vealitzek writes for Rebellious Magazine, Great New Books and PDXX Collective. The Rooms Are Filled (She Writes Press) is her first novel.
http://jessicavealitzek.com

   

A Workshop with the Milwaukee Bonsai Society

Ages: Entering grades 6-9 in fall 2014.

Fee:$60/ $54 members of Lynden or the Milwaukee Bonsai Society. This price includes one tree to take home.

Registration: Register online now. Space is limited; advance registration required. If you prefer not to pay online, give us a call at 414-446-8794 to register by phone.

At Lynden, we think of bonsai as one of the most intriguing intersections of art and nature. This is why we have 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 children, teens and adults 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.

In this hands-on workshop, you will work one-on-one with an experienced bonsai teacher to learn the basic principals and techniques of bonsai design, creating your own bonsai from tropical material and transplanting it into a ceramic bonsai container to take home.

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.

A Workshop with the Milwaukee Bonsai Society

Fees:
Single: $85/ $75 for Lynden members (this includes workshop admission for one, a tree to take home, and a single membership to the Milwaukee Bonsai Society good through the end of 2014).
Family (one tree): $95/$85 for Lynden members (this includes workshop admission for one, a tree to take home, and an annual family membership to the Milwaukee Bonsai Society good through the end of 2014).
Family (two trees): $150/$140 for Lynden members (this includes workshop admission for two, two trees to take home, and an annual family membership to the Milwaukee Bonsai Society good through the end of 2014).

Registration: Registration for this workshop is now closed. Sign up for our e-list for notifications on upcoming programs.

At Lynden, we think of bonsai as one of the most intriguing intersections of art and nature. This is why we have 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 children, teens and adults to the art of bonsai.

A bonsai is a living sculpture, changing from day to day, season to season, and year to year. 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. This workshop is designed to introduce you to the exciting world of bonsai: you'll get your feet wet (and your hands dirty) creating your very own bonsai and transplanting it into a ceramic bonsai container under the watchful eyes of experienced Bonsai Society members.

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.

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.

Drop in to the art studio to play an all-ages drawing game. Gather natural objects from the garden, attach them to paper, then animate your selection with simple pen and ink drawings. Finish by photographing your work to use as a spring screensaver.

Fee: Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
Registration: Pre-registration is not required, but it helps us to plan if we know you are coming (email us at info@lyndensculpturegarden.org.)

The Lynden Sculpture Garden is recognized for its art and landscaped beauty, and most visitors confine their walks to the lawns and formal gardens. However, the 40 acres that make up Lynden include meadows with native plants and trees, ponds that support a huge array of aquatic life, and thickets filled with nesting activity and shelter. Numerous birds, insects and mammals are sighted each day.

Come explore the hidden natural treasures of this unique sanctuary with naturalist Naomi Cobb. Each month we will visit the back acres, observing what the seasons bring, and locating evidence of the abundant life that is there. Wear good hiking shoes, dress for the weather, and bring your curiosity and wonder.

A Workshop with the Milwaukee Bonsai Society

Fee: $60/ $54 members of Lynden or the Milwaukee Bonsai Society. This is the price for an adult/child pair, and includes one tree to take home. Children should be in grades 1-5.

Registration: Registration for this program is now closed.

At Lynden, we think of bonsai as one of the most intriguing intersections of art and nature. This is why we have 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 children, teens and adults to the art of bonsai.

A bonsai is a living sculpture, changing from day to day, season to season, and year to year. 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. In this hands-on workshop, you and your child will learn the basic principals and techniques of bonsai design, creating your very own bonsai from tropical material and transplanting it into a ceramic bonsai container.

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.

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of House Hold, refreshments 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 year three of her series featuring writers of particular interest to women. We are joined this year by series sponsor Bronze Optical and treats sponsor MKELocalicious.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Bronze Optical, and Boswell books welcome Ann Peters author of House Hold: A Memoir of Place to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, April 23, 7-9 pm.

Like the house built by her father on a hill in eastern Wisconsin, Ann Peters's House Hold offers many views: cornfields and glacial lakes, fast food parking lots and rural highways, Manhattan apartments and Brooklyn brownstones. Peters revisits the modern split-level where she grew up in Wisconsin, remembering her architect father. Against the background of this formative space, she charts her roaming story through two decades of New York City apartments, before traveling to a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and finally purchasing an old farmhouse in upstate New York.

More than a memoir of remembered landscapes, House Hold is also an expansive contemplation of America, a meditation on place and property, and an exploration of how literature shapes our thinking about the places we live. A gifted prose stylist, Peters seamlessly combines her love of buildings with her love of books. She wanders through the rooms of her past but also through what Henry James called “the house of fiction,” interweaving personal narrative with musings on James, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Paule Marshall, William Maxwell, and others. Peters reflects on the romance of pastoral retreat, the hazards of nostalgia, America’s history of expansion and land ownership, and the conflicted desires to put down roots and to hit the road. Throughout House Hold, she asks how places make us who we are.

About the Author

Ann Peters is associate professor of English at Stern College, Yeshiva University, and the recipient of the 2012 McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn and in upstate New York.

   

Registration: Participants have the option of enrolling for 1 credit as either an undergraduate or graduate student through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Contact graduate representative for art education Rina Kundu at kundu@uwm.edu for further information. Registration is now closed. If you are interested in receiving information about the 2015 Summer Institute, please contact Prof. Rina Kundu at kundu@uwm.edu.

The UWM Art Education Institute at the Lynden Sculpture Garden welcomes K-12 teachers, community and museum educators, and docents with an interest in developing an interdisciplinary and integrated curriculum that explores the relationship between art and nature. Generalist teachers and those with expertise in science, language and social studies, as well as the arts, are encouraged to participate.

The idea of matter is central to physics, biology, and art. Even in the purely physical sense, we know that matter is never static, but mutable and relational. In this summer's institute, we will view the Lynden Sculpture Garden through the lens of Living Matter, exploring the idea that both the beholder and the works of art and nature that constitute the sculpture garden are situated, historical, physical bodies and because the boundaries among them are indefinite, they can affect and contaminate--even destroy--each other. By the end of the week, we will be thinking of Lynden less as an idealistic space showing an important collection of art in a natural environment, and more as a living and changing body.

Today’s knowledge and skills are more frequently constructed through mediatized processes and abstract concepts, and less often through first-hand experiences. We are expected to become passive consumers, and to see objects as mere commodities. To the extent that we are removed from the material experiences of making and experimenting with the manipulation of matter, we have become less reflective about the uses, relations, processes and states of being that objects facilitate, and the ways in which objects create complex entanglements between humans and the world we inhabit. It is here that the concept of materiality connects with the concept of embodiment--how our bodies perceive, understand, and represent their relationships with the external world, their intertwining and enfleshment. Philosopher Evan Thompson (2007) describes this as “the relation between one’s body as one subjectivity lives it and one’s body as an organism in the world” (p. 244).

These concepts of embodiment and materiality in relation to places and objects will provide the underlying structure for the summer institute. A toolbox of art-based strategies will be developed that will be augmented by a participatory, outdoor artmaking experience with guest artists. Participants will undertake a larger research and/or curriculum development project that they will present on July 18.

July 7-8
We will spend our time among Lynden's sculptures, spaces and landscapes engaged in guided, art-based exercises centered on Merleau Ponty’s (1962) concept of the world perceived as flesh and body, putting in practice strategies of material and spatial embodiment inspired by artists like Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Abbas Kiarostami and Richard Long.

July 9-11
We will collaborate with artists Linda Wervey Vitamvas and Kevin Giese on a site-specific transient installation on the Lynden grounds. Vitamvas and Giese have a relationship with Lynden that dates back to 2010 and the inaugural Inside/Outside exhibition, when both artists made interventions in the organism that is the sculpture garden. A ceramicist, Vitamvas, has produced a series of site-specific pieces that speak to transience, relationality, and the disintegration of materials back into the natural system of Lynden. Giese works with wood, and at Lynden he harvested, carved, and recontextualized living and dead buckthorn trees in an installation entitled Immigrant. Buckthorn is an invasive species introduced into this country from Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. “As a naturalist I lament the losses inflicted on our native habitat by these trees," says Giese. "As an artist I am intrigued by the dynamic between their visual beauty, strong resilient characteristics and their pariah status: unwanted, disliked, overlooked…Ultimately, it is we humans who are the invaders, dominating any landscape we occupy.”

July 18
We will reconvene to present our projects.

Fee: Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.
Registration: Pre-registration is required, please email us at info@lyndensculpturegarden.org.

Jean Creighton, a native of Greece and director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at UWM, will share her favorite Greek myths associated with spring constellations and what excites her about the celestial objects we can observe at this time of year. She will point out some of the most prominent constellations visible on constellation maps, such as the Big Dipper, Taurus, Orion, and Gemini. If it is clear, we will head outdoors to look for stars and constellations.

Adequate clothing required; we’ll go out rain or shine.

About Jean Creighton

Jean Creighton is the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has always lived in big cities where the city lights tend to obscure the stars of the night. This may be why she appreciates a planetarium theater. Born in Toronto, Ontario, Creighton grew up in Athens, Greece where her mother claims she showed a great interest in how stars form from the age of five. For Creighton, physics was the gateway to astronomy, so she studied (in the Physics Department) at the University of Athens, graduating in 1991. While writing her honors thesis was on the planet Neptune, she discovered that she wanted more astronomy in her life; she went on to get a master's degree from Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Waterloo. After that, she was fortunate enough to be involved in an infrared satellite called WIRE as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Since September 1999, she has been teaching astronomy at various levels at UWM, becoming director of the planetarium in 2007. "It's great fun to share my excitement with my audience as well as with my own two boys," says Creighton.

Registration for this event is now closed. Make sure to sign up for e-list for notifications about future events.

Fee: $25/$20 members – includes an autographed copy of Redefining Girly and refreshments.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads continues year three of her series featuring writers of particular interest to women. We are joined this year by series sponsor Bronze Optical and treats sponsor MKELocalicious.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series, Boswell Books, and Bronze Optical welcome Melissa Atkins Wardy, author of Redefining Girly: How Parents Can Fight the Stereotyping and Sexualizing of Girlhood, from Birth to Tween to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Wednesday, February 5, 7-9 pm.

Many parents are increasingly startled and unnerved at how today’s media, marketers and manufacturers are sexualizing and stereotyping ever-younger girls—all-pink aisles in toy stores, ultrasexy Halloween costumes in tween sizes—but feel powerless to do much about it. Mother of two and author Melissa Wardy was frustrated—and then she channeled her frustration into activism. She created a website to sell T-shirts with girl-positive messages; started blogging and swapping parenting strategies with families around the world; began writing letters to corporate offenders; and worked with parents through workshops and social media. Wardy’s outreach ensures parents have the tools they need to change, limit and challenge the media that their daughters are confronted with every day. Amidst all the sexualized messages and gendered marketing of clothes and toys, Wardy encourages moms and dads to take a stance and start redefining girlhood even before a daughter is brought into the world.

Redefining Girly: How Parents Can Fight the Stereotyping and Sexualizing of Girlhood, from Birth to Tween is the how-to guide for parents, family members and teachers who are concerned about how to raise confident and empowered girls in today’s hypersexual culture. Offering the tips, tools and facts needed to guide girls successfully through girlhood, Wardy inspires parents to teach media literacy to girls; encourage girls to advocate for themselves; discuss body image in a healthy way; and introduce kids to creating their own media.

“This eye-opening tome is an absolute must-read.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Melissa Atkins Wardy is the founder of Pigtail Pals & Ballcap Buddies, a company that sells empowering and inspirational children’s apparel and products, and runs a blog of the same name focused on gender stereotypes and sexualization in childhood. Wardy discusses these issues facing families with thousands of parents using social media and workshops. She is also the cofounder of The Brave Girls Alliance, a gender equality think tank and advocacy group dedicated to communicating with and influencing media, corporations, and retailers.

She has appeared on CNN and FOX News and in the Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Huffington Post, and the Ms. Magazine blog, which have featured her work and her campaigns against national brands and retailers that resulted in the removal of sexist ads and products. She lives in Janesville, Wisconsin, with her husband and two children.

Watch Melissa Atkins Wardy on The Morning Blend.