Peck School of the Arts ++ Mary L. Nohl Fund

Black & Gold Committee

MARY L. NOHL FUND FELLOWSHIP FOR INDVIDUAL ARTISTS
Seven Artists Recognized in Sixth Cycle

Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 132 applicants in the sixth annual competition. Brent Budsberg and Shana McCaw (a collaborative team), Xav Leplae, and Iverson White were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Tate Bunker, Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant (applying as Special Entertainment), Frankie Latina, and Barbara Miner will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition in the autumn of 2009. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.

Finalists in the Established Artist category included Paul Caster, Portia Cobb, Brent Coughenour and Kay Knight.

Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Mark Brautigam, Pat Buckley, Annushka Gisella Peck, John Riepenhoff, Naomi Shersty and Paul Stoelting,.

Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the UWM Peck School of the Arts in collaboration with Visual Arts Milwaukee! (VAM!), the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.

The panel of jurors included Valerie J. Mercer, the first curator of African American art and head of the General Motors Center for African American Art at The Detroit Institute of Arts; Laurel Reuter, director and chief curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art; and Eva González-Sancho, director of the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain - Région Bourgogne (FRAC Bourgogne) in Dijon, France. The panelists were in Milwaukee October 30-November 1 reviewing work samples and artists' statements and visiting the studios of the six finalists in the Established Artist category.

About the Fellows Established Artists
BRENT BUDSBERG & SHANA McCAW
Brent & Shana
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg have collaborated for the past seven years constructing site-specific sculptural installations and performances. Their recent work focuses on realistic architectural miniatures utilizing narrative and mood to transform a site. Both are also founding members of the WhiteBoxPainters, a performance art group specializing in public projects. McCaw was born in Dubuque, IA and received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1999. She currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch University. Budsberg was born in Wausau, WI and earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000. He is a 3-D lab supervisor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, a carpenter, a musician, and has also built numerous set pieces for the theatre/film industry. McCaw and Budsberg's recent exhibitions include Escapisms at Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, NB, Canada, Beloit and Vicinity at the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, WI, for which they won first prize and a solo exhibition to be mounted in May 2009, Leading Edge at NML Gallery, Cardinal Stritch University, in Milwaukee, WI, Broken Down at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN, and New Work/Emerging Artists at Inova at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, WI.

XAV LEPLAE
Leplae
Xav Leplae, born in Belgium in 1966, is a Milwaukee based filmmaker, performer and artist. He is best known for his film I'm Bobby (official selection at Sundance Film Festival), and was creative consultant on Chris Smith's The Pool (Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival). Leplae attended art school at Cooper Union, studied cinema and animation in China, and was a member of Paper Tiger TV in New York. He is recognized locally as the owner of Riverwest Film & Video. Leplae is currently in post-production on Rasmalai Dreams, a 3-D talent video shot in India.

IVERSON WHITE

Iverson White is a native of Detroit, Michigan. While attending Cass Technical High School's Performing Arts program, he joined playwright Ron Milner's Spirit of Shango Theater Co. White attended Wayne State University where he acted in local productions, was a delegate to the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture, in Lagos Nigeria (1977), published several volumes of poetry, and produced Oracy, an LP album of poetry and music with long time collaborator Kamau Kenyatta. Oracy was re-released as a CD in 2005. After graduating from WSU with a degree in mass communications, White joined the Graduate Repertory Company at the University of New Orleans (1980-1981) before transferring to UCLA's film school. At UCLA he received the Donald Davis and Jack Nicholson Awards for screenwriting in 1982 and 1983. In 1985 he produced Dark Exodus, a short film that has been screened on PBS, the Southern Circuit Film Tour, and in national and international film festivals, and has received several major awards including the Dore Schary Award from B'nai B'rith, the Paul Robeson Award from the Newark Museum, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award, and the Prized Pieces Award. White's latest film, Self-Determination, was completed in 2008. It has screened at the Pan-African Film Festival, the San Diego Black Film Festival and at UWM. Iverson White is an associate professor in the department of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.

Emerging Artists
TATE BUNKER
Bunker
Tate Bunker moved from Florida to Wisconsin to enter the film program at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. The city's support for local filmmakers kept him here after he received his M.F.A. in 2001. Bunker has directed more than 30 films in the last 10 years. He balances directing his own films, freelancing (Bunker's lush images and mastery behind the lens make him one of Milwaukee's premier cinematographers), and teaching film production at UWM. His received an Emmy for his production work on Gumbo TV, two additional Emmy nominations, and two Milwaukee International Film Festival "Best Milwaukee Filmmaker" awards. He also won a Paris Film Festival "Best Cinematography" prize for his Stanley Kubrick-inspired short, Starlite. He is currently working on a feature film, Resurrection Ferns, which will be shot in early January.

FRANKIE LATINA

Italian American independent film director, producer and screenwriter Frankie Latina was born July 14, 1978 in Milwaukee Wisconsin. The son of counterculture parents Lisa Jordan and Thomas Latina, he was raised by his two sets of grandparents: Frank and Charlotte Latina and Alex and Shirley Jordan. This unique collage of grandparents, immigrant entrepreneur juxtaposed with a labor movement activist, exposed Latina to the contradictory yet inspirational values of the American dream. Using his Uncle Dave's Super 8mm camera, he began making movies when he was a teenager. He studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is a graduate of MATA cable access. Away from show business, Latina is also a crepe chef, visual aid for the blind, and music writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He also mentors and teaches film making to Milwaukee Public high school students. Latina is best known for directing the highly regarded art house epic, Modus Operandi. Latina aspires to explore the dark experiences of contemporary life and transform them into a phantasmagorical escape for his audience

BARBARA MINER
Miner
Barbara Miner is a writer and print journalist with a 30 years' experience, with an emerging focus on photography. Her long-term artistic goal is to combine photography and writing in order to make the final product more powerful than either words or photos might be on their own. For the shorter term, her goal is to hone her photographic skills and use them in the tradition of social documentary: to help people see what is there for all to see, but which too often goes unnoticed and/or unacknowledged.Miner has written for publications including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Magazine, The New York Times, The Progressive and Rethinking Schools. In May, she received an associate degree in photography from the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Among her photography awards, she was named 2008 Photographer of the Year, college division, by the Wisconsin News Photographers Association. Her photos were also selected in 2007 and 2008 for the college competition of the Lakefront Festival of the Arts.

SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT (ANDREW SWANT & BOBBY CIRALDO)

Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo have been collaborating since 2003. They share an interest in exploring and bending the rules of art, entertainment, and humor, and in new media especially with respect to how they relate to the field of memetics (the study of viral, evolving ideas).Swant (born 1976, raised in Madison, Wisconsin) is a writer and filmmaker who studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and art at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He was a Sundance TV Lab finalist and has exhibited work in New York, Los Angeles, and Brazil. Bobby Ciraldo (born 1974, raised in Michigan and Florida) is a filmmaker and web-based artist who attended Grinnell College and later collaborated with Chris Smith, Ray Chi, and Scott Reeder to create ZeroTV.com, a pre-cursor to MySpace and YouTube.

Working as Special Entertainment, their titles include The Robot Mousetrap, shown at White Columns gallery in New York; the award-winning Studying the Lie, with artist David Robbins; work on The Ice Cream Social, financed by the Sundance Channel; and Zombie Killer, a music video for the band Leslie & the Lys with guest vocals by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Their hit music video, What What (In the Butt), was recently featured on the television show South Park in an extensive shot-for-shot re-creation. Current projects include Hamlet A.D.D., a feature length comedy based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, with live-action characters in an animated world, and William Shatner's Gonzo Ballet, a feature length documentary about the making of Common People, a ballet choreographed for Milwaukee Ballet by Margo Sappington and set to the William Shatner/Ben Folds album Has Been.

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is made up of charitable funds, each created by individual donors or families to serve the charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties and beyond. Started in 1915, the Foundation is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the world.

For further information about the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program, please visit arts.uwm.edu/nohl.

JURORS
Laurel Reuter
Valerie J. Mercer
Eva González-Sancho

Select previous cycle:
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2005
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2007 Cycle

Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 155 applicants in the fifth annual competition. Gary John Gresl, Mark Klassen and Daniel Ollman were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Annie Killelea, Faythe Levine, Colin Matthes and Kevin Miyazaki will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition in the autumn of 2008. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.

Finalists in the Established Artist category included William Andersen, Brad Lichtenstein and Roy Staab. Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Cristina de Oliveira Sigueira, Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant (applying as Fortress Productions), Paul Stoelting, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg (a collaborative team), Kimberly Miller, and Brent Coughenour.

Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the UWM Peck School of the Arts in collaboration with Visual Arts Milwaukee! (VAM!), the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.

The panel of jurors included Ingrid Schaffner, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hamza Walker, associate curator and director of education for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Clara Kim, associate curator and acting director at REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), Los Angeles. The panelists were in Milwaukee November 1-3 reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the six finalists in the Established Artist category.

About the Fellows

Established Artists

GARY JOHN GRESL
Gary John Gresl turned to artmaking in his late 30s, building on his years of experience with art history, museum studies and the antiques business to create assemblage sculpture using real objects. “While I began later in life as a serious probing artist,” he notes, “there was little time wasted catching up.” Gresl has long been associated with Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors, serving as its president for four terms, and founded the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Awards. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Lakeland College (2007), Sculpture at the Edge, Lawton Gallery, UW-Green Bay (2007), One Collection, Three Dimensions: A Personal Pursuit of Wisconsin Sculpture, Museum of Wisconsin Art (selections from Gresl’s extensive collection); and the Wisconsin Triennial 2007, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Wisconsin Artists Biennial 2007, Haggerty Museum; Palimpsests and Middens (solo), Hotcakes Gallery (2006); and the Milwaukee International Art Fair (represented by Hotcakes Gallery, 2006). Gresl received his M.S. from the School of Family Resources and Consumer Sciences (now the School of Human Ecology) at UW-Madison in 1973. He is a recipient of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fun Suitcase Award.

Artist Statement
We can type a name into a search engine such as Google or Lycos and find hundreds of references and potential sources of information about almost any subject. While it is still possible to be reclusive and remain unaware of what is going on in the art of the world, avoiding contact and influence from major art centers and art movements takes a nearly conscious effort. Influences come at us from many cultures and histories.

Despite knowing so much about the Universe, it still is important to recognize that where we live, what we experience--the life within our reach--this is our place to grow. Here we witness our fellow creatures. Here we learn to interact. In this place we become adults, we learn to love, we experience sex and nature and sunlight and death. In our region we grow and transform. Our childhoods become our memories...and the past is locked into our brains. We choose from what we see in the broadest sense, as well as selecting ideas and places and moods from our local experience.

As far as we are complete as persons and artists, we express what is important in our lives. Sometimes that is drawn from the local, and sometimes from the remote and exotic. If we are considered Regionalists, then let us be so by our own free will. Let others categorize us as they want, but let us be as unique as we choose to be. We are not robots, nor slaves, nor dupes. We grow here. We make our choices here. Part of the beauty of the current scheme is the fact that we are free to reach for other things, to see what ideas abound outside our Region.

But...this is our place. If we awake each morning and find our roots are well planted, perhaps we can show in our art-making the indebtedness to our physical and cultural environments. If some of us select subject, theme, imagery or method which might be construed as Regional, then simply let it be. Relax about it. We are part of the fabric of culture...of visual art in which all geographic and intellectual regions weave together.

MARK KLASSEN
Mark Klassen was born in 1971 in Minnesota. He received his B.F.A. in Printmaking and Sculpture from Minnesota State University Mankato and an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Klassen is an associate professor of art at Beloit College where he teaches sculpture, installation and book arts. Klassen exhibits his artwork in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. His most notable exhibits include the High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California, and the Armory Show, Socrates Sculpture Park, and The Outlaw Series in New York. His work has been reproduced or reviewed in Raw Vision, Artforum, Sculpture magazine, the New Yorker, and Object Space and Meaning, Principles of Three Dimensional Design by S.J. Luecking. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, Minnesota State University Mankato, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kohler Art Library, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection

Klassen’s artwork ranges from sculpture and installation to printmaking and book arts. He uses his artwork to address issues related to the rectangle and, more broadly, to grid structures. While his work raises many questions. It is his hope that it will specifically raise issues relating to the place and role of the individual within the collective. One of Klassen’s most recent projects made it possible for two individuals unknown to each other to form a temporary relationship. The telephone is a pervasive cultural artifact that creates the opportunity to instantly connect individuals within a vast communications grid. One phone was placed in the High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California (just outside of LA) and another in the Socrates Sculpture Park in New York City. Using a call restrictor, the two payphones could be used to call each other as well as other payphones located randomly around the country. The exhibition made it possible for someone at a payphone in the Socrates Sculpture Park to connect with another person drying clothes in a Nebraska laundromat. When a connection is made with a random stranger who happens to answer the phone, both individuals are subtly reminded of the physical interconnectedness made possible by the grid. “Individualism is heightened through the experience with the art piece while at the same time the notion of individuality can become threatened when viewed in the context of a highly interconnected collective,” observes Klassen. “Additionally, the interaction of the participants is an exciting and impulsive connection between the ‘real world’ and art spaces.”

DANIEL OLLMAN
Dan Ollman was born and raised in Milwaukee. Growing up in different parts of the city, he was introduced to different people, cultures and ideas. His first experience with filmmaking came when he was 13 and he began making low budget horror movies with his friends and neighbors. He taught himself to edit with only a camera and VCR, and eventually majored in film at UWM. Ollman has collaborated with many different artists, creating work that has been exhibited at festivals, museums and cultural centers throughout the world. He takes an organic approach to filmmaking, working with others and sharing ideas to produce the strongest piece possible. He is committed to sharing his abilities with those who want to make a social change. His recent films include Suffering and Smiling (2007), a film about Fela Anikulapo Kuti and his son, Femi, Nigerian singers and political activists, and The Yes Men (2004). He is currently working on a film with hip hop artist and activist M1 of the Dead Prez; and Everything You Love is Going Away, which follows Milwaukee native Paul Finger as he travels the city revisiting the remaining places that contributed to Milwaukee’s cultural uniqueness.

Artist Statement
I've always seen film as an important instrument to reach the masses. Whether it be a narrative piece or documentary, whether it be serious or funny, everybody wants to see a movie. For me, films dealing with social justice issues are important for the education and development of people around the world as well as for future generations. With my work, I hope to reach as many people as possible, and to help educate as well as to construct a relationship that allows us to be in constant contact about what's really happening in the world.

Emerging Artists

ANNIE KILLELEA
Annie Killelea is a filmmaker based in Milwaukee. She received her M.F.A. in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1998. In addition to producing film, Killelea plays bassoon with the Trusty Knife, the Neopolitans, the low band, and Junkytown. Her most recent film, Subtitle Trilogy, screened at the White Columns Gallery in New York and the Wisconsin Film Festival this year. She will continue work on a 16mm film during the fellowship term. Killelea was a Nohl finalist in 2005 and 2004.

FAYTHE LEVINE
Seattle native Faythe Levine has been in Milwaukee for the past seven years where she has established herself within the arts community in many different ways. Levine has participated in many local shows including the Cedar Block event; has shown her artwork internationally with the help of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary Nohl Suitcase Grant; and continues to create her artwork. She is the founder of Art vs. Craft, an alternative market for handmade goods. Levine is co-owner of a brick and mortar gallery called Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery where she curates a dozen gallery shows a year and handles over 200 independent designers in the retail area. She is also the director of Handmade Nation, a documentary about the rise of DIY Art, Craft & Design currently in post-production as well as the co-author of a book under the same title, which is scheduled to be released by Princeton Architectural Press in November 2008. For more information: http://www.handmadenationmovie.com

COLIN MATTHES
Colin Matthes makes drawings, prints, installations, sculpture, and zines. Recent projects include
Everyday Transactions, a multi-media investigation of the connections between business, warfare and leisure; and Animals and Workers, a project exploring relationships between animals and workers in food production. His artwork has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Denmark, Spain and Austria. Collective projects make up a considerable amount of Matthes’s art practice. These projects include the Street Art Workers (www.streetartworkers.org), the Cut and Paint zine project (www.cutandpaint.org), and the Just Seeds / Visual Resistance Artist Cooperative (www.justseeds.org). Matthes currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and UW-Whitewater. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and his B.F.A. from UW-Whitewater. For more information: http://www.ideasinpictures.org.

KEVIN J. MIYAZAKI
Kevin Miyazaki is a photographer based in Milwaukee. At the heart of his artwork are the themes of memory, family history, and architecture within society. He focuses on what lasts physically and emotionally in our view, and the ever-evolving value of place in time and in our memory. In his series Camp Home, Miyazaki documents the reuse of buildings from the Tule Lake internment camp in California, where his father’s family lived during World War II. The barracks buildings built to house Japanese American families were dispersed throughout the neighboring landscape following the war. Adapted into homes and outbuildings, many are still in use today. In photographing the intimate environments of these buildings, Miyazaki explores family history--both his own and that of the building owners--and the changing value of institutional architecture in our history as a country. And because photography was forbidden by the internees, these pictures are evidence of human use and habitation, something not captured during the initial life of the buildings. Miyazaki's freelance work appears in national magazines. He holds a B.A. in graphic design from Drake University. For more information: http://www.kevinmiyazaki.com

2006 CYCLE - top
Seven Artists Recognized in Fourth Cycle
Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 155 applicants in the fourth annual competition. Santiago Cucullu, Scott Reeder and Chris Smith were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Daniel Klopp, Christopher Niver, Marc Tasman and the media arts collective donebestdone will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition in the autumn of 2007. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.

Finalists in the Established Artist category included Tyson Reeder and Denis Sargent. Finalists in the Emerging artist category included John Will Balsley, Katherine Biehl, Jennifer Gutowski/Yevgeniya Kaganovich (a collaborative team), Scott Foley, Meredith Root and Sonja Thomsen.

The panel of jurors included Alma Ruiz, Associate Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Nadine Wasserman, an independent curator based in Albany; and Dominic Molon, the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. The panelists were in Milwaukee November 2-5 reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the five finalists in the Established Artist category.

About the Fellows

Established Artists

Santiago Cucullu
Santiago Cucullu makes large wall pieces using contact paper to delineate images; watercolors; and non-figurative works constructed from plastic materials found in party stores. He received a BFA from the Hartford School of Art in Hartford, Connecticut (1992) and an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1999). Cucullu was awarded a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2001 and participated in the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art in 2001-2002. He has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 2000. His most recent residency was at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California; he has a solo gallery show coming up at Carlier Gebauer Galerie in Berlin, a solo project at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, and has been invited to make an installation for the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Statement
I want you to feel history when
you see to this. Think about how
sampling, making new from old, came before before
the idea of versioning. Think about the
soundsystem battles of Duke Reid, Sir Coxsone and Prince Buster...

Somehow my work keeps becoming much more idiosyncratic. The way un-like strands of thoughts become neighbors. Reflecting my own voyeuristic relationship with the holy rollers that live across the street. Across from them is a man who dresses like a frumpy fifteen year old and it makes me look twice. He in turn lives in the same building as “the Captain,” who sometimes stands in traffic. Slowly synchronizing movements akin to tai-chi. Kind of like a slow moving chicken in the road, but somehow, impossibly graceful.

Scott Reeder
Scott Reeder is an artist, filmmaker, and independent curator. His recent projects include a soon to be completed feature film entitled Moon Dust. The movie is set 100 years in the future and follows the story of a failing resort on the moon. The project has been over 4 years in the making and was shot almost entirely in Milwaukee using untrained actors and local artists. Reeder’s other recent activities include co-directorship of the “General Store,” an alternative art gallery based in Milwaukee that has curated several prominent exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago. A one-person show of his paintings opens at Daniel Reich Gallery in New York on December 16th. Reeder’s work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, Art & Text and Art Review. He is currently assistant professor in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reeder received his BFA from the University of Iowa (1994) and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1998).

Statement
My work deals with viewer expectations. What are paintings expected to do? What are they supposed to be about? What are they supposed to look like? By adopting a variety of formal and conceptual strategies, I’m reexamining and expanding painting’s definition. Some of my recent work explores of the idea of painting as prop. By creating canvases shaped like familiar objects (doors, plants, flowers, pillows), I hope to encourage a conversation between painting and sculpture, and painting and the everyday world that surrounds it….My recent feature length video project continues this investigation of viewer expectation and formal play. Moon Dust is a narrative film three years in the making. Its stripped down aesthetic and minimalist sets continue to investigate modernist conventions, but here the investigation goes beyond painting and sculpture to include furniture, architecture, technology and the idea of progress.

Chris Smith
Chris Smith is a filmmaker best known for American Movie (1999), which he directed, and The Yes Men (2004), which he co-directed. Other films include American Job (1996), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Home Movie (2001), a documentary about people who live in odd homes that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was distributed by Cowboy Pictures and the Independent Film Channel. Current projects include The Pool, a 35mm feature length narrative film shot over five months in India and The Grand Human Experiment, a feature length documentary on the pollution caused by subtle chemical exposure. Smith serves as director and cinematographer for both of these projects. He is also the producer of Suffering and Smiling, a documentary on African musician Femi Kuti that will premiere at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam later this month. Smith received his BFA from the University of Iowa in 1993 and his MFA in film from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1997.

Statement
I have a very eclectic yet simple approach to filmmaking. I generally focus on anything that seems interesting to me. I do not have an overall style or subject matter…but rather enjoy bouncing back and forth between different disciplines, styles and subject matter. Generally I like to focus on projects that are socially conscious—but I attempt to bring complicated issues or ideas to a mass audience through humor or non-traditional forms of filmmaking. In additional to political and social issue films I like to explore different subcultures and interesting characters and touch on similar themes in less obvious ways through narrative stories.

Emerging Artists

donebestdone
donebestdone is an ongoing experiment in interdisciplinary, technological productivity-fueled collaborative activity. It is a complex network of artists and machines (computers, input devices, software, signal processors, mixing devices), a technological mutant set loose and tamed to the extent possible by man. The collective’s creations are a product of the constantly-shifting configuration of these people and tools. Personal choices about an aesthetic or specific goals are secondary. Real-time and composed video is donebestdone’s most prominent artifact, but it also generates music, photography, graphic design, drawings, ring tones, field recordings, and more. Its primary aims are to create works rapidly that are as integrated as possible; to generate synaesthetic effects, especially between the aural and the visual; and to create new forms of instantaneous expression. Development of a platform for live cinema is currently underway. donebestdone recently screened a film created in 24 hours at the Milwaukee International Film Festival, held a two-hour performance originating entirely from samples of Milwaukee Street at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and has a 4-channel video, digital photography, and sound installation on display at MIAD. For more information, visit www.donebestdone.com.

Dan Klopp
Dan Klopp is a filmmaker and photographer based in Milwaukee. He received his BFA in film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he served as the Union Theatre’s film curator in the late 1990s. Klopp is also a recent recipient of the Wisconsin Arts Board filmmaker fellowship. In addition to producing film, Klopp exhibits photographs throughout North America. His most recent book and exhibit, Motorcycles of Kerala, is a series of pinhole photographs taken during a trip to India. He is currently finishing his feature documentary, Swim Jim Swim. It is a film about the first man to swim directly across all five of North America’s Great Lakes, the last and most difficult being Lake Superior. The film was shot over the past three years in video, but will incorporate motion picture pinhole photography. It will be completed sometime in 2007. Klopp was a Nohl finalist in 2005. For more information: www.keyholefilms.com.

Chris Niver
Chris Niver, originally from West Hartford, Connecticut, studied art at Central Connecticut State University and briefly at Hunter College in New York. Before completing his BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Niver participated in the La Napoule Summer program with Jack Beal. Niver received an MA in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 1994, he was awarded a Milwaukee County Individual Artist's Fellowship and is currently a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellow. He has exhibited locally and nationally with recent exhibitions at Lawrence University and Jody Monroe Gallery. His current work consists of embroidered landscape drawings that display anxieties about isolation, the body, and death. Niver was a Nohl finalist in 2005. For more information: www.huggettandniver.com.

Marc Tasman
Marc Tasman is an inter-media artist who has been working in Milwaukee since 2001. He brought with him characters and performances such as "The Chocolate Messiah" and the "Ten Year Polaroid Project", in which he has photographed himself everyday since July 23, 1999 and will continue to do so through 2009. In 2004 Tasman developed the "Video Vigilante" character and the cunning and humorous Who is Stealing My Signs? project. (He used an infrared video camera to expose hoodlums in the act of stealing his political yard signs during the 2004 election cycle then posted the video clips to the web). Tasman holds a BFA in Studio Art and Photography from the University of Louisville and received his MFA in Photography from the Ohio State University. He has taught at Columbia College Chicago, City College of Chicago, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee Jewish Day School, and the Peck School of the Arts; been an artist in residence for Artists Working in Education and a photographer for the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. He currently coordinates the Digital Arts and Culture Certificate Program for the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and lectures in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on subjects relevant to the convergence of media, technology and culture. Tasman was a Nohl finalist in 2005. For more information: http://marctasman.com.

Visual Arts Milwaukee (VAM!) links local visual arts organizations to increase the quality of local artistic presentation and production as well as to bring greater local, national and international attention to Milwaukee’s institutions and artists. The Mary L. Nohl Fund Individual Artist Fellowships and Suitcase Export Fund are the major projects of VAM!.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is made up of charitable funds, each created by individual donors or families to serve the charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties and beyond. Started in 1915, the Foundation is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the world.

2005 CYCLE - top
Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 142 applicants in the third annual competition. Nicolas Lampert, Fred Stonehouse and Jason Yi were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. Juan Juarez, Michael Julian, Mat Rappaport and Stephen Wetzel will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition in the autumn of 2006. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.

Finalists in the Established Artist category included Steven Foster, Douglas Holst, David Robbins and Denis Sargent. Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Jamál Currie, G. DuMonthier, Anne Killelea, Daniel Klopp, Christopher Niver and Mark Tasman.

The panel of jurors included René de Guzman, visual arts curator for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary, contemporary arts institution; Jane Simon, curator of exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; and Nato Thompson, curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, The panelists were in Milwaukee November 3-6 reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the seven finalists in the Established Artist category.

About the Fellows

Established Artists

Nicolas Lampert
Nicolas Lampert is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses photomontage, graphic art, writing, experimental music, teaching, collective practices, and independent curating. Lampert’s collage art includes two series, machine-animal collages and Meatscapes. In both collage series, the search for images in libraries and used-bookstores is as vital as the studio work: by closely examining the millions of images that populate our visual culture, new ideas are generated in the studio context. The machine-animal collages, a black and white collage series that began in 1995, features low-resolution photocopied images of machine and animal parts that form various hybrid creatures. The juxtaposition of these separate entities allows the viewer to reconsider animals and machines alone and when they merge. They speak, dystopically, of an uneasy future in which genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology have run amok. The Meatscapes series, begun in 2000, utilizes absurdist humor to reframe our relationship to animals and consumption. These collages combine groups of people in urban and rural settings who appear nonchalant about the massive piles of meat that loom in the background. Aesthetically, the images present alternatively delicious or revolting slices of meat, their vivid colors and those of the surrounding landscape part of the pleasure in making the images. Lampert is considering realizing three-dimensional meatscapes in the public sphere during the fellowship year. Nicolas Lampert is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts. He received a BFA in printmaking from the University of Michigan and an MFA in sculpture from the California College of the Arts. A web page of his collage work is located at: www.machineanimalcollages.com

Fred Stonehouse
Painter Fred Stonehouse is a Milwaukee native and a local artist with a national reputation who exhibits regularly in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. His current series, Songs and Dreams, explores a personal mythology constructed of memories, dreams and the anecdotal bits and pieces of everyday life. Some of Stonehouse’s familiar characters appear in the series—emotionally scarred saints, veggie heads and animal/human morphs; they are joined by a charred octopus man emerging from a mysterious green ocean “as if at the moment of his painted birth.” The paintings obscure the carefully painted image with distressed overlays of color and shapes, paralleling the fragmentary recollection of an old memory. The Songs and Dreams, while clearly describing some alternate world full of miraculous and disturbing images, have the familiarity of our own past. While the Dreams deploy the imagery and logic of dreams, the Songs offer up the truncated narratives of vocal music, with color and rendering, rather than lyrics and melody, setting the emotional tone. Stonehouse received his BFA from UWM.

Jason Yi
Jason S. Yi creates conceptually driven work that crosses various artistic disciplines: sculpture, photography, drawing, video, and multimedia installations. As a curious observer of everyday phenomena, he is interested in how human beings experience the world. The elements of time and history play a crucial role in the creation of his work. As the saying “learn from the past” implies, history validates and sometimes justifies responses to current human conditions. Yi’s work examines a society where culture and history are constantly reviewed, merged and modified. While the work originates in encounters and observations within his immediate and/or personal environment, the inherent conceptual exercise subtly presents to the audience the broader implications of being human. Yi has exhibited in national and international venues in New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Japan, Korea, Italy and Austria. His work is a part of the permanent collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Kamiyama Museum of Art (Japan), Korean Cultural Center (L.A.), and the Edward F. Albee Foundation (N.Y.C.). Yi, currently a professor at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, received his MFA in sculpture from University of Georgia and Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech.

Emerging Artists
Juan Juarez
Juan Juarez is attracted to photographic images as a readily understood marker for the real. These images permeate our visual culture and their implied sense of reality creates an “effective platform for identity comparison by means of classification.” Juarez’s taxonomy emanates from the acceptance of masculine white guys as neutral in our culture and his own sense of identity as a person of color. Yet white guys, despite their neutrality, are subjected to constant scrutiny; Juarez is interested in “how contemporary society has transformed the once colorless white guy into a person of color.” Juarez utilizes painting, drawing, print and photomontage to create his classifications, mining the associations evoked by both anonymous and iconic images. He is planning to move beyond found images to a photographic survey of Milwaukee that would reveal the ways in which we structure identity. Juarez received his BFA in painting and drawing from the University of North Texas and his MFA from UWM. He teaches at UWM and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Michael Julian
As a painter, Michael Julian is engaged in updating geometric abstraction: to make it less aloof and indifferent and more reflective of our current experience. His Continuum Series places viewers within a mutable realm that engages space, time, and the history of abstract painting. To date, Julian has employed serial imagery, installation, Op-art kineticism, Minimalist scale and the artist’s book to define and redefine the viewer’s relationship to the work. During the fellowship year, Julian would like to expand the Continuum Series through the use of animation and the additive color systems of TV and computer monitors. Julian received his BFA from Iowa State University-Ames and his MFA in painting and drawing from UWM. He is a lecturer at UWC-Rock County.

Mat Rappaport
Mat Rappaport is an artist, designer and educator. He has exhibited his work in the United States and Europe in galleries, museums and public venues. He is interested in the use of media art interventions in public space as a means to address the experience of built environments. Rappaport explores themes of occupation and absence through the use of immersive, interactive and media based structures that implicate the viewer’s own re/collective processes. Rappaport’s current projects include collaborative and solo projects. V1B3: video in the built environment is a collaborative project that explores media-based interventions within urban public space that affect the experience of the city. He is also working on the video series dis/locations, and presences, an interactive video installation. The dis/locations explore the way cities are represented in popular films to create a sense of place; they are comprised of found footage. presences is an interactive audio and video installation that draws attention to group behavior that is simultaneously social and isolated. presences is comprised of multiple video screens on which narrative fragments are presented. Like the board game “Memory,” viewers can experience the piece by moving from video to video and viewing each fragment. However, if two people are both under the pods that contain the complementary videos, the video will change to show the complete interaction. Rappaport is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts. He received his BFA from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston/Tufts University and his MFA from the University of Notre Dame.

Stephen Wetzel
Steve Wetzel studied painting at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of Chicago before moving to Milwaukee in 1998 to pursue an MPFA in film and video at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Since graduating in 2000 Wetzel has taught video production courses as an adjunct lecturer at UWM and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently he heads the Education in Technology Project at Milwaukee's public access cable station, MATA Community Media. The Education Project provides resources for youth to create alternative, idiosyncratic, community-directed media. Wetzel's art practice has ranged from painting and installation to radio, performance and video. Much of his early work focused on identity formation and identity politics -- often times using satire and other comic forms. His most recent videos, Men's Hockey and Birthday Girl, are part of a series of feature-length observational documentaries that examine small-scale community, social stratification and the public exhibition of private, intimate experience.

2004 CYCLE - top
Seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 160 applicants in the second annual competition. Terese Agnew, Cecelia Condit and Jennifer Montgomery were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $15,000 fellowship. William J. Andersen, James Barany, Steven Burnham and Frankie Martin will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in September, 2005. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.

Finalists in the Established Artist category included James Brozek, Santiago Cucullu, and Sarah Price. Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Jamal Currie, Steven Hough, Anne Killelea, Dorota Biczel Nelson, Mat Rappaport and Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, who entered as a partnership.

The panel of jurors included Patricia Hickson of the Des Moines Art Center, Habib Kheradyar of Post in Los Angeles, and Sue Spaid, an independent curator based in Cincinnati. The panelists were in Milwaukee November 4-7 reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of finalists in the Established Artist category.

About the Fellows

Established Artists

Terese Agnew
Terese Agnew began her career as a public sculptor in 1985, completing several large projects and commissions. In 1991 she began making art quilts that explore ways to reconnect the way we think about things with their physical reality. Her quilts present “two different perspectives simultaneously…the ordinary way we might look at something straight on and the systematized representation of that same thing.” Her current project, an 8’ x 9’ quilt entitled “Portrait of a Textile Worker,” is constructed entirely from clothing labels. The image is based on a photograph by Charles Kernaghan of a young textile worker in Bangladesh, and by using brand name clothing labels (collected from individuals and organizations throughout the United States), Agnew is “connecting the seams in our clothes with a human face.” Agnew, who studied painting and sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is interested in merging sculpture and quiltmaking in her next project, a three-dimensional quilt that reads from all sides.

Cecelia Condit
Cecelia Condit, professor of film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, creates video work that explores “the dark side of female subjectivity, and addresses the fear and aggression between women and men, women and society, and most recently, humans and animals.” Condit’s work draws on dream, fairy tale and autobiography, occupying a liminal space between the conscious and unconscious. “Though my work is grounded in primitive fears and instincts, the settings for my narratives have consistently been the contemporary terrain of Middle America, where ordinary lives and unexpected violence seem to co-exist.” Condit is currently working on a short video, “Grandmother’s Woods,” about boundaries, friendship, and how our society is affected by war. Condit’s work has screened widely at festivals and museums and she is the recipient of several awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Condit received a BFA in Sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in Photography from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

Jennifer Montgomery
Jennifer Montgomery, assistant professor of film and video at the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, moves between the worlds of experimental and independent film. She started making films in 1987, drawing on her interest in writing and painting portraits: “The interpersonal nature of filmmaking was what initially caused me to slip off the page and canvas and onto celluloid.” Montgomery’s early, autobiographical work focused on issues of identity formation and “the messy intersection of our sense of self (or lack thereof) with the violence, impatience, and absurdity of the broader world.” Increasingly influenced, as both a feminist and filmmaker, by psychoanalytic theory, Montgomery’s work became less autobiographical but continued to focus on the uses and abuses of power in relationships. Her 2003 film, “Threads of Belonging,” is in part an homage to the “vibrant, idiosyncratic community” that Montgomery discovered when she relocated from New York to Milwaukee. Montgomery is currently engaged in three projects: a collaboration with her father, composer Christopher Montgomery, on an opera/oratorio based on Ovid’s telling of the Callisto myth in Metamorophoses; the screenplay for “The Ballad of Unfinished Business,” an examination of New York’s stormy downtown art scene in the early 1990s as well as the law’s ethical stance on domestic violence in lesbian and gay relationships; and a “Notes on the Death of Kodachrome,” a personal film about the super-8 format and its significance for a generation of experimental filmmakers. Montgomery received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996-97 and has received grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts, among others. Montgomery majored in painting at Wesleyan University, where she received her BA and went on to receive an MFA in Filmmaking from Bard College in Annandale, NY.

Emerging Artists

William J. Andersen
William Andersen, a lecturer in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, spent 2000-2001 in Taiwan and China on a Fulbright Fellowship. Andersen has, in the past few years, begun to move away from traditional approaches to painting and drawing to explore site-specific and ephemeral wall-installations that combine his interests in painting, Nature and Asian art. His most recent work conflates images of China “both real and imagined as well as Eastern and Western.” Andersen intends to continue his collaboration with Asian artists and to participate in projects that bring contemporary art to new audiences at alternative exhibition spaces throughout China: “My work expresses a longing for connection between East and West and, like much of traditional Asian art, a longing for unity between the self and the world.” Andersen received a BFA in Painting and Drawing with a cross-school major in Art History and Criticism from UWM and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago.

James Barany
James Barany, an assistant professor of Foundations at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD), has shifted from large-scale painting to animation over the past four years. “Animation has stimulated my investigation of memory, metaphor and interpersonal motifs, adding a sense of life and empowerment to them.” In August Barany began “My Most Important Self-Portrait,” a mixture of time-lapse and animated elements that trace, day by day, Barany’s personal transformation as he attempts to lose 200 pounds. Barany received a BFA in Drawing from MIAD and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Steven Burnham
Steven Burnham is an associate lecturer in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In his current work, Burnham places a tree or trees in a “landscape of inclement circumstance” creating anxious, highly condensed canvases in which “situation, shapes, and color are boiled down to a compact, potent whole.” The paintings reference real trees and the natural world, but also suggest the human predicament. During the fellowship period, Burnham intends to embark on a series of larger paintings with a more tactile surface exploring similar conceptual and aesthetic issues. Burnham holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA in Painting from the University of Kansas, as well as BA and MA degrees in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Frankie Martin
Installation artist Frankie Martin’s work is “an intersection of culture, fantasy, craft, music, and color.” The conceptual framework shifts from project to project: Martin has organized a cross-country tour during which she signed autographs at malls; made larger-than-life igloos with dance parties inside; and produced and recorded a 7-inch record and CD featuring a band made of balloons. She has a company that produces one-of-a-kind sneakers and is webmaster of her own fansite, www.frankiefeverforever.com. Martin has shown her work in Philadelphia and New York and has a show in Japan in December. Martin received a BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2003 Cycle - top
The first seven recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists were selected by a panel of recognized visual arts professionals working outside the four-county area in November, 2003, from a field of 176 applicants. Mark Mulhern, Michael Howard, and Dick Blau were chosen in the Established Artist category, and each received a $15,000 fellowship. Paul Amitai, Peter Barrickman, Mark Escribano, and Liz Smith received Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition at the Institute of Visual Arts in September, 2004. An exhibition catalogue will also be published and disseminated nationally.