Lynden Blog

In the first half of the sixteenth cycle, the Fund made thirteen awards, providing assistance with shipping and travel to thirteen individual artists, two of whom worked on the same project. In the second half, the Fund made twelve awards, all to individuals. These artists--five of them Nohl Fellows—work in a range of media and their exhibitions took them to Carbondale, Colorado; Miami, Florida; Portland, Indiana; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Kansas City, Missouri; New York, New York; Charlotte, North Carolina; Brownsville, Texas; and Park City, Utah. Destinations abroad included Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, France, Georgia, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

Debra Brehmer will create daily drawings during a one-month residency at Arte Studio Ginestrelle in Assisi, Italy that will become part of the International Collective Exhibition of works produced by the artists and writers attending the residency during the past year. She will also engage local populations in the Portrait Society’s (her Milwaukee gallery) nonprofit sketchbook project, On the Wing.

HIJOS (Children of the Disappeared) invited Brian Carlson to install his memorial to the disappeared in Latin America, Aparecidos, at ex(ESMA), formerly a notorious detention and torture center and now a Museum of Memory in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The installation now includes more than 3000 painted portraits of victims of state terrorism in Latin America.

Kyoung Ae Cho brought two works to Minneapolis for Silver Jubilee, an exhibition celebrating the Textile Center’s 25th Anniversary. The exhibition featured eleven artists who have made significant and unique contributions to the field of fiber art over the past quarter century.

Christopher Davis Benavides was invited to participate in American Clay 2019, an exhibition held in the Sala de Exposiciones Roman Zaldivar during the XI Feria Nacional de Alfareria y Cermanica in Navarette, Rioja, Spain. Davis Benavides will also conduct a three-day workshop and deliver an artist lecture.

Makeal Flammini (Nohl 2018) brought her husband and two small children to the family-friendly Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria, for a two-week residency that culminated in a public exhibition. Flammini created 20 drawings and paintings and two performances, and shared a studio with a long-time artist colleague based in Europe.

Sæter Jørgensen Contemporary, a non-profit gallery and nomadic curatorial practice focused on realizing projects in Norway and France, invited Skully Gustafson to participate in a solo exhibition in the Gaillac region of the Tarn in France. For Le mouton à cinq pattes, the artist showed portable works on paper, and sold several.

Hannah Hamalian took her film and animation work on a solo screening tour in the United Kingdom and Ireland. As part of her tour, she participated in residencies at Greywood Arts in Killeagh, Ireland, and at Createspace in Cardigan, Wales.

Maeve Jackson created work onsite during a residency at Hotel Pupik in Schrattenberg, Austria that became part of the three-day group exhibition at its culmination.

Director Brad Lichtenstein (Nohl 2011) and co-producer Madeline Power took Ashe ’68, a virtual reality short film about tennis champion Arthur Ashe, to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. They participated in the New Frontier section as part of the VR Cinema exhibition.

Kim Miller (Nohl 2009) screened a new work, ReWilding (2019), as part of an artist residency at the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians and practitioners themselves, PAF is a user-created, user-innovative informal institution and all public events are open to the local population.

Melissa Mursch was one of eleven women artists featured in Soft Somethings, a group exhibition at the University of Texas Rio Grande in Brownsville, Texas. Mursch is submitting soft sculptures/wall hangings that explore her experiences as a racially ambiguous queer woman. She will travel to Austin and Houston to meet other artists and to see where her grandfather grew up as she prepares to make a new body of work.

Rosy Petri was represented by six textile works in a group exhibition hosted by the Black Archives of Mid-America and held in conjunction with the National African American Quilting Convention. This was Petri’s first exhibition outside Wisconsin, and she took advantage of her time in Kansas City, Missouri to visit the Negro League Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum to discuss works for their collections.

John Riepenhoff (Nohl 2009, 2014) travels to Tbilisi, Georgia, to stage an iteration of Handler, an exhibition of sculptures of legs that support paintings by other artists at Project ArtBeat. The opening of the exhibition coincides with the city’s contemporary art fair. Riepenhoff, who runs the The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, will also do studio visits with local artists.

Lenore Rinder screened her 2018 documentary, People of the Wild Tiger, at the Indian Institute of World Culture in Bangalore during Conservation Week. The film focuses on the people who live and work as naturalists and ecologists to save India’s endangered tigers in Karnataka; she remained in India for a month to pursue new collaborations with her Indian cast and crew.

Kristina Rolander traveled to Sudbury, Ontario, to create a multi-use and immersive installation for Up Here, an independent urban art and music festival. Each summer, Up Here brings together dozens of muralists, musicians, and installation artists to transform the city’s downtown. Rolander’s installation, within the foyer of the Grand Theatre, was a life-size diorama with hand-painted backdrops, hanging elements, sheer fabrics, and environmental structures that transformed from day into night.

Nicole J. Shaver drove her work to Charlotte, North Carolina, for Homeward Bound, a group exhibition she curated at Goodyear Arts, a nonprofit multi-arts space.

Anja Notanja Sieger produced the fifth iteration of her Advice Tent project--its first foray outside Milwaukee--at the O, Miami Poetry Festival in Florida. She trained twenty local teens to offer advice to visitors.

Cris Siqueira (Nohl 2013) attended the premiere of her documentary, Ape Girl—a film supported by her Nohl Fellowship—in São Paulo, Brazil. The film screened five times to full houses at two venues. The success of the premiere acted as a spur to distribution in both Brazil and the United States.

Roy Staab was invited to exhibit photographs, video, and new site-specific work in conjunction with his Proyecto en Sitio residency at La Coyotera Taller-Estudio in Umecuaro, Michoacan, Mexico. For the residency, he created site-specific outdoor work, as well as a work with native sunflowers in the gallery. This was Staab’s first exhibition in Mexico.

Hungry Gardens, Tori Tasch’s solo exhibition at the Portland Art Center in Portland, Indiana, included 30 wall panels, four silk panels hung from the ceiling, and books. She offered workshops and a gallery talk that focused on sustainable art making practices.

Gabrielle Tesfaye screened her latest film, The Water Will Carry Us Home, and previewed her next film, Yene Fikir, Ethiopia, at the Alliance Éthio-Française in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She also facilitated community discussions about her new work, taught a stop-motion animation workshop, and gave an artist talk connecting her cultural storytelling to ancient and contemporary Ethiopian art practices.

Shane Walsh shipped several large paintings to New York City for his solo exhibition at the Asya Geisberg Gallery. He followed to install them and attend the opening.

Michael Ware was in Colorado, for the opening of Clay National XIV Nature Reconsidered: Reimagining the Natural World through Ceramics, the annual juried exhibition at the Carbondale Clay Center. His work was included in the exhibition.

Rina Yoon exhibited a large installation work in With Through and Beyond: Celebrating the 20th Year of the Women’s Art Institute, a twelve-artist invitational exhibition at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

It is 2019, the air is filled with diminutive snowflakes, and Lynden is open for another year. I can see Floyd, our semi-resident canine, following Kyle across the grounds, bushy tail swinging.

In the first half of the fifteenth cycle, the Fund made fifteen awards, providing assistance with shipping and travel to thirteen individual artists and two collectives. In the second half, the Fund made fourteen awards, twelve to individuals and two to groups. These artists--eight of them Nohl Fellows—work in a range of media and their exhibitions took them to Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose, California; East Haddam, Connecticut; Tampa, Florida; Chicago and Peoria, Illinois; Ames, Iowa; Baltimore, Maryland; St. Louis, Missouri; Chadron and Lincoln, Nebraska; Caldwell, New Jersey; Glens Falls and New York, New York; Raleigh, North Carolina; Columbus and Youngstown, Ohio; De Pere, Wisconsin. Destinations abroad include Toronto, Canada; Orquevaux, France; Chennai and Kolkata, India; Dublin, Ireland; Durban, South Africa; L’Alcora, Spain; Gothenburg, Sweden; and London, England.

American Fantasy Classics (Nohl 2011) was invited by former Milwaukeean Ashley Janke to create Another Side to My Dream, an installation inspired by Orson Welles’s 1938 broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. A “textured mesh of fact and fiction incorporating radio broadcasts, installation, and sound artists,” the exhibition took place at Enclave Lab in Deptford, London, and included two-way transmission of “sound, narrative, and acts of collective joy.”

James Barany (Nohl 2004) was commissioned to paint a 90-foot mural in downtown De Pere, Wisconsin. The mural, which addresses the industrialization of the Fox Rivers, is a part of the city’s public art collection. Barany returned for the unveiling and several public events.

Rosalie Beck shipped three pastels to the Adirondack National Pastel Exhibition, a juried show sponsored by the Adirondack Pastel Society at the Shirt Factory Gallery in Glens Falls, New York.

Tom Berenz (Nohl 2017) shipped a large painting to the Mueller Gallery at Caldwell University in Caldwell, New Jersey, for Play: An Iconography of Sport. He also attended the opening of the group show.

Kelly Bronikowski traveled to Toronto, Canada to present Mom’s Tiger Lilies, an expanded film Performance, at 8 Fest, a festival that programs film works created and finished on Super 8mm film. Bronikowski was one of two performers at the festival, which also included more than sixty screenings.

Cecelia Condit (Nohl 2004) was invited by Kamila Kuc and Sam Jury to screen Tales of a Future Past (2017) as part of Disasters of Peace, Vol. 5, a curated international film program about the environment, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, England.

Paul Druecke (Nohl 2010) presented his project, Spinning Underfoot, a series of custom-printed carpets that reimagine the domestic welcome mat as a public site and catalyst for community conversation, as part of a residency at the Luminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He offered a public talk, displayed prototypes, and piloted site-specific interventions.

Fiddle & Hammer (Jordan Waraksa and Cora Monis) traveled to San Francisco to exhibit The Bellaphones--a pair of wooden horn speakers made from reclaimed whiskey barrels that are functional sound sculptures--at NEXUS, the juried exhibition held in conjunction with the Furniture Society's 2018 conference.

Karen Gunderman exhibited five ceramic works in an invitational group exhibition, American Clay, curated by Xavier Monsalvatje Vich at the Museu de Ceràmica de L’Alcora, Spain. During the week of the opening, Gunderman delivered a lecture and a master class at the Escuela Superiorde Ceràmica ESCAL.

Cynthia Hayes traveled to Kolkata, India for a solo exhibition, Eternal Visions, at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture Museum and Art Gallery. Hayes exhibited more than thirty paintings and drawings focused on historical styles of sculptural representation in Indian mythological subjects.

Rachel Hausmann received her award for a solo exhibition at Project 1612, a garage gallery space in Peoria, Illinois. She arrived early to make some of the work and install the show.

Thad Kellstadt will go to Tampa, Florida to make work onsite from found/repurposed materials and to install his solo exhibition at Coco Hunday. He will be showing 20-30 smaller pieces in addition to the works made in Tampa.

Erik Ljung’s feature-length documentary, The Blood Is at the Doorstep, made in part while he was a Nohl Fellow in 2014, is receiving limited theatrical release. The Suitcase Fund enabled him to travel to several cities with the film, and to bring members of the Hamilton family—featured in the film—for talkbacks. According to Ljung, “A national theatrical release for a small independent social justice documentary is an incredible opportunity to revitalize exposure for the film in hopes of acquiring a more permanent and broad distribution partner.”

Colin Matthes (Nohl 2007, 2012) was invited to participate in the Royal Hibernian Society’s 188th annual exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin. The exhibit, accompanied by an extensive catalogue, is a major event in the Irish arts calendar; Matthes sent a large painting.

Kym McDaniel, Grace Mitchell, and Ariel Kate Teal traveled to the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles to screen a program of work by six female Milwaukee filmmakers curated by Teal. It was the first time McDaniel’s work had screened outside the Midwest.

Kevin J. Miyazaki (Nohl 2007) has been spending time in Lincoln, Nebraska. He opened Echo, a solo exhibition of photographs, at the Workspace Gallery in Lincoln and, as a Hixson-Lied visiting artist and scholar at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Art, Art History & Design, gave a public lecture and visited undergraduate and graduate students.

Shannon Molter followed her two sculptures to the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles in California for The Art of Labor, a curated group exhibition of work by members of the Surface Design Association. This was Molter’s first opportunity to show her work alongside other contemporary fiber artists in a museum outside Wisconsin.

Allen Morris drove himself and twenty-five framed photographic prints from ISO, a recently completed body of work, to Youngstown, Ohio, for a solo exhibition at the Thomases Family Endowment Art Gallery at Youngstown Area Jewish Federation.

Nirmal Raja, Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Christiane Grauert, and Julie Vondervellen are traveling to Chennai, India for Hanji Translated, an exhibition at the Lalit Kala Academy sponsored by the Indo Korean Centre of Chennai. The group exhibition, curated by Raja and Chelsea Holton, also includes work by local artists Rina Yoon and Marna Brauner, as well as pieces by an artist from Detroit and three artists each from India and Korea. The travelers will carry all the American work with them to India.

Sara Risley was selected for a four-person “winners” show at 311 Gallery in Raleigh, North Carolina. One of her photographic works was Best in Show at the gallery’s Abstracts Matter show.

Pacia Sallomi will participate in a two-person exhibition at the Octagon Arts Center, a nonprofit community arts center in Ames, Iowa. This is Sallomi’s first exhibition in this region; she will include ten paintings from her Roundabouts series.

Nathaniel Stern produced and installed a series of his “Server Farms,” using computers and other technological equipment as well as native plant species, at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Durban, South Africa.

Takahiro Suzuki went to San Francisco for two events: to present Schrödinger's Cat Part I, a video, as part of the San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS festival, and to have another video, 9214, installed as a supplement to SFMOMA's exhibition The Train: RFK’s Last Journey.

Janelle VanderKelen presented an hour-long solo screening of six recent video works, including two world premieres, at the Grange Film Series in East Haddam, Connecticut. The Grange is an emerging microcinema, founded by a Josh Weissbach (Nohl 2013), that exhibits contemporary experimental and non-fiction film and video work. The screening was accompanied by an artist lecture and a Q&A session.

Jason Vaughn flew to Gothenburg, Sweden for a solo show—his first in that country--at the Nevven Gallery. The gallery hosted a book signing event for Driftless, Vaughn’s recently published book of photos with text by Brad Zellar.

Melissa Wagner-Lawler will be showing a new body of work, including prints and an installation, in her upcoming solo exhibition at Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska.

Della Wells traveled back and forth to Chicago several times for the events surrounding her solo exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA). These included a workshop at Intuit, a talk at a school, and a gallery talk and a gallery conversation at the museum.

Jaymee K. Harvey Willms was invited to create a work for the permanent collection of the Chateau Orquevaux as part of a two-week residency in France. The works of the artists-in-residence then become part of a travelling exhibition.

About a week ago, as yellow began to spread through the foliage, I began to wonder whether the yellow was ascending or descending. These thoughts filled many drives between Lynden and elsewhere.