Bruce J. Knackert
Director of Galleries

Over the course of the past two decades, Knackert has been associated with two accredited university art museums, a university natural history museum and a leading private art gallery. Knackert received his B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in painting and drawing, and his M.A. in painting from Ball State University. During his twelve years as director of operations for the Michael H. Lord Gallery in Milwaukee he designed, installed and curated exhibitions. Some of the exhibits that Knackert was involved with during that time were: Magdalena Abakanowicz, Nicolas Africano, Sam Gilliam, Carol Hepper, Robert Kushner, Robert Mapplethorpe, Dennis Oppenheim, David Salle, William Wegman and Tom Wesselmann. He served, until recently, as director of the Northwestern Mutual Art Gallery at Cardinal Stritch University. Exhibitions curated by Knackert at Cardinal Stritch University include Ed Paschke: Paintings, Prints and Drawings, Bird and Myth in African Culture from the Collection of Mark Wentzel, and Paste Nail Weld: the Art of Collage, Assemblage and the Found Object.

Nicholas Frank
Curator

Nicholas Frank began his curatorial career in 1993 with the Atlas Symposium Series, one-night solo exhibitions of Milwaukee artists with moderated artist talks. Frank opened the Hermetic Gallery in1994 to show challenging installation and conceptual art to a Milwaukee audience. The Hermetic showed several young artists who went on to further acclaim, and many with local ties, including Michelle Grabner, Kirsten Stoltmann, Camilla Pearce, Willie Gregory, Jean Roberts Guequierre, Paul Druecke, Peter Barrickman and Scott Reeder, and Arturo Herrera, Carla Arocha, David Shrigley, Maria Lindberg, Brett Bloom, Kay Rosen, Brad Killam, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Pedro Velez, and Gaylen Gerber. Throughout its tenure, the Hermetic received attention from such notable journals as Art Press and Purple in France, Frieze magazine in London, and nationally from Art in America, Artforum, Art Papers and New Art Examiner.

In 2002 Frank turned the gallery into a roving curatorial enterprise, the Portable Hermetic, which was featured in a large-scale exhibition at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. His most recent curatorial project was Please Love Me at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (co-curated with Santiago Cucullu), and he was one of the organizers of the Milwaukee International art fair in October, 2006. Frank has also curated exhibitions for the Pond Project in Chicago and for Inova at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts.

Frank has presented symposia, lectures, critiques, panel discussions, a public radio program on visual art, and published catalogue essays, reviews, articles and essays for various print and web publications including newspapers, art journals, and magazines Art Papers, New Art Examiner, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bridge, Purple, and X-tra. Frank is also a practicing visual artist, showing regularly with Western Exhibitions gallery in Chicago and at various venues around the state and country.