A Workshop with Linda Wervey Vitamvas

Fee: Registration for this workshop is now closed. Sign up for our e-list for information on future workshops. $85/$75 members per session (all materials included). If you prefer to pay by phone, give us a call at 414-446-8794.

Working in clay is deeply satisfying, and making pottery allows one to explore aesthetics and function simultaneously. In Trays, Tiles, and Trivets we will continue to work with porcelain slabs. The focus will be on different surface decoration techniques such as stencils, image transfer, various carving methods, and adding underglazes for color. With changes in scale and minor additions our flat designs will magically turn into functional trays, tiles and trivets. Bring textures and objects to press into the clay as well as images and designs that you would like to see take form on your pieces. They will then be fired and finished with a clear glaze to protect the surface and make them functional. Those attending more than one workshop will find plenty to do each time.

Bring a bag lunch and beverages and dress for studio work as well as the outdoors. We’ll be making use of Lynden’s 40 beautiful acres during our breaks, weather permitting.

You will need to return at a later date to pick up your pieces.

About Linda Wervey Vitamvas

Linda Wervey Vitamvas earned her B.S. in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and practiced psychiatric, obstetrical and surgical nursing before returning to UWM for her M.F.A. Vitamvas has won awards in the 2009 Wisconsin Biennial, Forward: A Survey of Wisconsin Art Now, and the 2005 and 2010 Kohler Eight Counties exhibitions. Her work has been featured in the 2010 Wisconsin Triennial at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend and at the Wisconsin Academy’s James Watrous Gallery in Madison. She has also exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Villa Terrace Decorative Art Museum as well as in ceramic arts exhibitions nationally. Linda Wervey Vitamvas is currently an artist-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden; you may read more about her residency here.

Presented in collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center.

Photograph taken during a performance for "Ban" in Pratt Institute's Rose Garden, April 2013.

Fee: $250/$225 for members of Lynden or Woodland Pattern (one discount only). Register online now.

Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Woodland Pattern Book Center offer a weeklong-residency at Lynden with poet and writer-in-residence Bhanu Kapil. In addition to the workshop, Kapil will offer a reading at Woodland Pattern on June 1 at 2 pm. The workshop will culminate in a reading by participants, followed by a reception, at Lynden on Thursday, June 5 at 7 pm.

We will create posture-gesture sets in the energetic domain of the sculptures we encounter. How can we link our writing-to-be to the garden we are in? How might the sculptures support our work in powerful, non-verbal ways? The dream of the workshop is to extend the somatic and contemplative gestures already present in our writing, and to transform them into postures, movement practices, sensorimotor sequences and bodily progressions of different kinds. How can we create another kind of space to work out the questions we have for writing, and then return them to writing, by the end of our time together? How are our gestures in relation to the other members of the group? How might we return witness notes to each other, and gather together on this different kind of grass?

About Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil teaches at Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, as well as Goddard College in Vermont. Recent workshops have engaged architecture, animal studies, performance art, and memory as ways to approach contemporary writing. Bhanu maintains a blog, Was Jack Kerouac A Punjabi?, documenting daily and creative practices of all kinds. She also has a long-term private practice as a palmist and bodyworker, with an interest in somatic trauma therapies and Ayurvedic energetics. For several years, she has been incubating her works through performances in India, England and throughout the U.S. Bhanu Kapil is interested in books that break then become.

Dates at Lynden: June 2-June 5

Monday, June 2, 2-7:30 pm (docent-led tour 6-7:30 pm)
Tuesday, June 3, 2-5 pm
Wednesday, June 4, 2-5 pm
Thursday, June 5, 2-5 pm (reading and reception to follow)

Related events:

Sunday, June 1
2 pm
$5-$8
Opening Reading: Bhanu Kapil
This event takes place at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St., Milwaukee, WI 53212

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

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden. Younger children should be accompanied by an adult.

Drop in to the art studio to create a handmade accordion book using a variety of paper materials. Build up the layers with cut paper collage and try different folding techniques to make your own book or journal--then use it to illustrate a story, map and document your time at Lynden, or take it home to fill later.

Wednesdays, May 21, June 18, July 16 & August 27

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.)

Take advantage of Lynden's extended summer hours and drop in for a picnic (pack your own) followed by a walk through Lynden's less-explored areas. 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 Sally Duback

Fee: $85/$75 members (all materials included)

Registration: Registration for this workshop is now closed.

Explore the capabilities of pastel in the idyllic setting of the Lynden Sculpture Garden. During this one-day workshop we will create colorful drawings on a variety of papers and custom prepared surfaces. The landscape of Lynden will be ours to roam and record in pastel, as well as opulent and colorful still life and figurative subjects in the studio.

Bring a bag lunch and beverages and dress for the outdoors. We’ll be making use of Lynden’s 40 beautiful acres as much as possible.

About Sally Duback

Sally Duback has been making art since she was a child and teaching art since 1969. Her work hangs in the Milwaukee Art Museum and in many private and corporate collections. Sally has studied at Vassar, the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Fine Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. To bring art to disadvantaged children, she cofounded Artists Working in Education in 1998, which received a 2002 Wisconsin Governor's Award for the Arts. You can see more of her work at www.sallyduback.com.

A Workshop with Sally Duback

Fee: $85/$75 members (all materials included)

Registration: Registration is now closed. We're offering another session of this workshop Saturday, July 12. For more information and registration for that session, click here.

A Workshop with Leslie Perrino

Registration for this workshop is now closed. Sign up for our e-list for information on future workshops.

Fee: $85/ $75 members (all materials included)

Registration: 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.

Free to members or with admission to the sculpture garden.

Kite makers, flyers, artists and art lovers of all ages are invited to celebrate the arrival of spring with an afternoon of events and activities. Drop into the studio to make and decorate simple, earth-friendly kites using recycled plastic bag kite material provided by Yevgeniya Kaganovich and the grow crew, or pick up a DIY plein air painting box and head outside for some artmaking. A great opportunity to get to know our Summer Camp staff.

Alka Bhargava will offer an Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) demonstration at 2 pm. Bhargava, an associate master of the Ichiyo School of Ikebana, creates flower arrangements that give the viewer an experience with nature that is unexpected, stimulating, and profound. The Ichiyo School encourages personal interpretation: imagination is considered as essential to creative design as materials and containers. Many of you may know Bhargava from the Milwaukee Art Museum's Art in Bloom, where she won the Iron Design Competition (2014), the top award (2013), and Best Creative Design (2008 and 2009).

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.