About Michele Feder-Nadoff
Michele Feder-Nadoff's installation and time-based works incorporate an unrestricted range of simple to complex materials and processes, from embroidery to lost-wax casting, examining the raw and the cooked, the transforming of matter into meaning. Her work has been exhibited internationally and nationally for over 25 years: at the Phyllis Kind and TOUGH Galleries in Chicago, the Venice Biennial in Italy, ARCO in Spain, and elsewhere.  She has been creating sculptural installations indoors and out, temporary and permanent, collaborative and solo, since the mid-eighties, often utilizing water as a tangible physical element and to produce sound. In 2003, Feder-Nadoff created a 2,500 square foot on-site sculptural installation, an homage to the Mexican coppersmithing community of Santa Clara del Cobre, at the Rockford (Illinois) Art Museum for the exhibition, “Art of Containment.”  She has been deeply involved with this community since 1997— through apprenticeships and transdisciplinary collaborations—and she has been studying and documenting the village’s traditional metalsmithing craft through a recently published bilingual book, video documentary, and ongoing community exchange programs. Feder-Nadoff is the artistic director and creative founder of the Cuentos Foundation, a community-based organization dedicated to creating and facilitating cross-cultural understanding and exchange through the arts.

About Paul McMullan
Paul McMullan was born in Rochester, New York.  He received his M.F.A. from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in Alfred, New York and his B.F.A. from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.  Recent exhibitions include “The New Utilitarian,” an NCECA Exhibition at the Hoffman Gallery in Portland, Oregon; “A Tale to Tell” at the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; and “Snakes in the Grass” at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  McMullan has taught at Alfred University and Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently associate professor at Siena Heights University in Adrian, Michigan. He received a McKnight Fellowship from The Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2005.

McMullan’s sculptural forms and art tiles deal with clay as a collage material. He incorporates the use of photo-silkscreen, painting, decals, molds and various handbuilding techniques to achieve an image-packed surface.

About Nick Cave
A graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Nick Cave joined the School of the Art Institute in 1990 and now serves as chair of the Department of Fashion and Design. Cave designed and marketed his own line of men’s  and women’s clothing and ran ROBAVE, a successful retail clothing company, in Chicago for 10 years, selling to 300 retailers nationally and internationally before turning exclusively to his artistic and teaching practice. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA Jacksonville, Telfair Museum Savannah Georgia, the Mattress Factory, the Art Connexion in Amsterdam and the Zachata National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland. Cave has been invited to residency programs around the world. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. He has received several prestigious grants and awards, including a Louis Comfort Foundation grant, a USA Artist Grant, a Creative Capital Grant, the Joyce Award, the Richard Driehaus Foundation Award, grants from the Illinois Art Council grants and, most recently, the N’DIGO Award. Cave has been featured in such publications as Art News, Art in America, Sculpture and The New York Times.

In his clothing and figurative sculptures, collages, installations and performances, Cave explores the use of textiles and clothing as conceptual modes of expression. His SOUNDSUITS are full-body sculptures that recall ethnographic dress. They are composed of ephemeral materials such as twigs, dryer lint, bottle caps and recycled garments, and are designed to rattle and resonate with the body movements of the wearer. Combining Western culture and ceremonial ritual, they are catalysts for contemplating the condition of the black male in contemporary society. Whether displayed as sculptural forms in museums and galleries or worn as ceremonial garments in performances and video, Cave’s intricate constructions pose fundamental questions about the human conditions in the social and political world.  

About Faythe Levine

Faythe Levine is an artist and organizer based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She is currently finishing her first documentary film, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft and Design, which is due to premier in 2009. She is the co-author of a book of the same title published by Princeton Architectural Press that will be released in November 2008. Faythe is the founder and coordinator of Art vs. Craft, co-owner of brick and mortar space Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery, and does freelance curating and design work. She also plays the musical saw in the experimental musical group Wooden Robot. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Utne Reader, Venus Magazine, Paper Magazine, and American Craft Magazine.

Growing up in Seattle during the 1990s,  Levine was exposed firsthand to many punk bands and the riot grrrl scene. This underground community quickly introduced her to DIY ethics, and she learned early on that you could release, self-publish and distribute your music and zines through a vast nationwide network of like-minded people. In 2003, she found herself looking at an emerging movement that embraced both art and community, a community that can now be defined loosely as "the new wave of craft." This movement is exploring the uncertainty of where fine art meets craft, redefining and reclaiming creativity.  The new wave of craft is influenced by the history and techniques of traditional handiwork, modern aesthetics, politics, feminism and art.

November 5, 2008 - top
Gary John Gresl Synthesis of Four Dimensions: Objects, Collecting, Creating
Brown Deer, WI

About Gary John Gresl
Gary John Gresl was born in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in 1943, currently lives in Brown Deer, and is the oldest person to receive a Nohl Fellowship. He has lived his entire life in Wisconsin, though he has traveled both inside and outside of the United States. He has been an inveterate collector of many things during his lifetime, ranging from coins, rocks and minerals, Orientalia, comic books, art glass, books, ad infinitum...to the art of other Wisconsin artists, in particular sculpture.

He attended a small teacher's college in the early ‘60s, completing his bachelor's degree with a music minor at UW Steven's Point, where he also took art and art history classes. After teaching in the Brillion Public School system for five years, serving as principal in a small middle school, he went on to complete a  master’s degree from the Related Art Department of the School of Family Resources(now the School of Human Ecology), University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gresl then worked for about 35 years in the antiques and collectibles trade serving as an owner and manager of the Milwaukee Antique Center. Around 1984 he turned attention to his own art production, becoming involved in Wisconsin Painters & Sculptors, serving often on its board and as its president for four terms. It was during this period that Gresl became more interested in the history of Wisconsin art, an interest that coincided with the discovery that real objects, as opposed to 2D materials, were a dominant factor in his own production of sculpture.

It was in the early 2000s that Gresl conceived of an organization he called the Wisconsin Visual Art Hall of Fame. This eventually became known as the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Awards, associated with the Museum of Wisconsin Art and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Gresl has served as co-chair of the WVALAA and is a member of its nominating committee. He continues to deal in antiques and collectibles and is actively continuing his explorations with assemblage sculpture.

November 12, 2008 - top
Mads Lynnerup You Are the Artist, You Figure It Out
New York, NY

About Mads Lynnerup
Currently living in New York City, Mads Lynnerup is an artist working in various forms of media from "Shish Kebab" meat and cardboard to installations using video and performance. Taking his inspiration from everyday life, his work comments and draws attention to situations that might otherwise get overlooked in the day to day. Lynnerup's work is site-specific and addresses a diverse selection of circumstances, which often make the outcome of his work manifest itself differently from project to project.
www.madslynnerup.com

November 19, 2008 - top
Dianna Frid  After the Invention of Clouds
Chicago, IL

About Dianna Frid
Dianna Frid was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Vancouver, Canada as a teenager. She received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and is currently assistant professor in Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Frid has been the recipient of various grants and awards including the Canada Council for the Arts (most recently a travel Award in 2008) and an Artadia Award (2004). She has exhibited her work in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Belgium. Recent projects include P.S.1-MOMA (2005), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2006); Croxhapox in Gent, Belgium (2006), and devening projects + editions in Chicago (2008). Her work was recently on view at the Drawing Center’s Selections - Spring 2008 exhibition in New York. Frid is preparing for a large site-specific project to take place at the Neue Kunstforum in Cologne, Germany (2010)

December 3, 2008 - top
Betsy Damon Art, Ecology and Social Change
New York, NY

In 1995, she conceptualized the Living Water Garden in Chengdu, Sichuan, China while directing Chengdu's first environmental public event. From 1996­–1998 she directed a Chinese and US team in designing the six-acre bio-remediation park, which is now a worldwide model for urban ecological solutions. She continues to work on large-scale innovative projects in China and the US, such as an award-winning plan for Beijing Olympic Park. From 2002–2005, she directed projects for the Beijing planning bureau, three of which won awards. Damon has inspired such community efforts as Portland Urban Water Works, The Edwards Aquifer National Park in San Antonio, Texas—the first and only aquifer park in the US—and CURA, Chengdu Urban Rivers Association, which developed a model village project in Ping Yi county, Sichuan to clean upstream watersheds. Among her current commissions is the Trinity Lakes project in Dallas, Texas, which is a plan to create a 23-mile long, ecologically sound corridor on the Trinity River. Damon is the recipient of numerous grants, among them the Bush Individual Artist Grant, and was most recently nominated for the Swedish Water Prize.