ARTIST LIZ BACHHUBER SELECTED FOR CONTINUUM PROJECT COMMISSION
Jurors met on April 5, 2006 to award a $25,000 commission for the Continuuum Project, a competition sponsored by the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) in the UWM Peck School of the Arts. The jurors selected artist Liz Bachhuber to create a work of public art to be installed in the lobby of the Mainstage Theatre on the UWM campus.

The jury of four narrowed the pool to three finalists--Bachhuber, Carol Emmons and Richard Taylor--prior to meeting for final selection. The finalists also participated in a public presentation and in a range of classroom activities in the Department of Visual Art.
Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl and Mary Tingley Funds, the competition was open to alumni from all UWM Department of Visual Art programs. In addition to the public art commission, the Continuum Project includes a residency in the Peck School, with opportunities to serve the school’s students, the campus community, and the general public through activities including lectures, skill-based intensives, and hands-on workshops.

Liz Bachhuber, one of the school’s farthest-flung alumni, is professor of installation and sculpture at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany where she directs a “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” program. During an artist residency at the Peck School of the Arts in 2005, she created a large sculpture in the theatre lobby and participated in Transmission, an exhibition of work by Bachhuber and her mentor, Professor Emeritus Laurence Rathsack. The exhibition traveled from the Institute of Visual Arts to the Neues Museum in Weimar, Germany where it was expanded to include the work of several of Bachhuber’s former students.

The project Bachhuber proposed for Continuum takes her ongoing exploration of the tension between nature and culture as a point of departure. As in other works in this series, Bachhuber will create a form from natural materials (birch saplings) woven around a mobile industrial scaffolding. For Continuum, she will work with students to research local materials that can then be integrated into the form. These found objects might include everything from medical supplies to manufacturing detritus. “We will unearth the unique ingredients that contribute to Milwaukee’s civic and cultural life, the material artifacts that tell the story of the city’s past,” says Bachhuber. Students will create a directory, easily accessible to other artists, of these “made-in-Milwaukee” materials.

Bachhuber is also contemplating incorporating sensors in the sculpture to activate light and audio elements, and creating a shroud that could encase the sculpture at different times.
“ Paradoxically,” Bachhuber notes, “the elements of chance and changeability in my process will produce a permanent but flexible sculpture made of high-quality materials.” The mobility of the sculpture, and the possibility of creating more than one form, will make it possible to transform and activate the space in response to the lobby’s various functions. “Instead of being a thoroughfare,” observes Bachhuber, “the lobby could become a hub of activity, a true vestibule and entrance to the theatre, one that invites both social gathering and silent contemplation.”

The Continuum Project is part of a campaign to build a visual art alumni/student community in the Peck School of the Arts, and interaction with students is an essential component of the project. While in residence in the autumn of 2006, Bachhuber will share her open-ended and archaeological process and her approach to public art with students. “My Bauhaus students develop individual alternatives to the classical memorial when they research a community’s history and come to understand the deeper context for a public sculpture. After students interact with a particular population, they are prepared to relate their ideas for site-specific interventions to their own community culture and family history.” Bachhuber has directed student-created public art projects involving her graduate students throughout Germany and in other European cities.

The panel of jurors for the Continuum Project competition included multi-disciplinary artist Ray Chi; Kim Cridler, who teaches metalsmithing and jewelry arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Joy H. Dohr, Ph.D., professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in environment, textiles, and design; and Graeme Reid, assistant director of the West Bend Art Museum.

The Mainstage Theater lobby is in a public building in the heart of the UWM campus. It serves students, the campus community, and the general public alike; it is a gateway to music, dance, and theatre performances, as well as classrooms and public events. The public is invited to participate in the ongoing discussion about the use of the theatre lobby on the Continuum Project discussion board [make link to discussion board]

About Liz Bachhuber
Liz Bachhuber was born in 1953 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1972 she began her studies at the University of Arizona-Tucson. She studied German, anthropology, biology, literature and art history before deciding to concentrate on studio art. She transferred to UWM, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in ceramics and painting in 1976 and a Masters degree in painting in 1979. A Fulbright/DAAD grant enabled Bachhuber to continue her studies at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf from 1979 to 1983. In 1983 she became a Meisterschülerin (master student) in the class of Swiss artist Christian Megert, who held the chair for the Integration of Art and Architecture. During this period she co-founded the studio cooperative Ratherstrasse 25 with four of her fellow students, and remained an active member from 1981 to 1987. Ratherstrasse 25 lived and worked in a large, converted industrial space in which they also exhibited the work of international artists´groups.

Bachhuber spent a year in Rome in 1983 as the beneficiary of a travel grant from the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. Her studio that year was in a pasta factory in San Lorenzo that had become famous as the venue of the second generation of Transavanguardia artists. In 1984 she received a grant from the Kunstfonds in Bonn and in 1988 the City of Düsseldorf conferred its Emerging Artist Award on her. From 1987 to 1989, with the help of the P.S. 1 Studio Residency Program, she returned to the USA to live and work in New York. During this time she realized a large-scale installation for Jay Chiat at the advertising agency Chiat/Day/Mojo on 5th Avenue. Through him, she gained valuable insight into the workings of the New York art world.

Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Bachhuber returned to Düsseldorf. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts supported her work from 1990 to 1991, and the following year she was a guest professor at the Art Academy in Münster. Since 1993, Bachhuber has been professor for installation and sculpture at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, where she is one of the founding faculty members. Today she lives and works with her husband, the Swiss artist, Christoph Rihs, and their daughter, Leonie, in Weimar, Germany and Bourguignon, France.