Winning Artists Works on Display

You might start the month of June off with a celebration of the winners of the 2023 Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists. This free event is hosted at Haggerty Museum of Art on June 1 from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. It’s a chance to see art by some of the top emerging and established artists in town, and perhaps to chat with them about their vision for the art world. It’s not the only show worth checking out in a month with lots of variety and many paintings on display. Here’s your June art list:

Museum of Wisconsin Art

Mark Mulhern: The Pleasure of Seeing

Through July 21

205 Veterans Ave.
West Bend, WI

Wednesday-Sunday: 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Painter Mark Mulhern has accumulated a recent body of work depicting straight-backed guests in nice clothes and pointy little shoes, milling around on emerald and mauve flooring, drinking out of flutes. It’s the perfect show to see at the cusp of summer, when we are all anticipating sleeveless tops, outdoor drinks and lingering daylight. A selection of Mulhern’s works from the last 40 years are on display in June at MOWA, encapsulating his career as an observer who renders the world into flattened, dreamy works on canvas, paper, and in monotype prints. Viewing a single painting is not the same as viewing more than 30 of the artist’s works all together where the viewer can see patterns emerge. He paints milling crowds, tables of colorful desserts, string lights wrapped around courtyard trees. There are poolside views and friends playing cards, and the occasional portrait arrested in a neutral background. The paintings diffuse in a gauzy atmosphere, like taking a tipsy moment for yourself at a party, a moment to observe the crowd through a hazy champagne glimmer. It’s a rare chance to see such a wide collection from a single artist who has demonstrated this degree of consistency in his themes.

Hawthorn Contemporary

Tears Shaped Like Watermelon Seeds: A group exhibition to support humanitarian relief for Gazans

Through August 24

706 S. 5th St.

Thursday 12 to 5 p.m., Friday 12 to 8 p.m., Saturday 12 to 8 p.m., Sunday 12 to 5 p.m.

Artist David Najib Kasir collaborated with Hawthorne Contemporary to present a group exhibition with twelve artists that address the ongoing conflict between Gaza and Israel. Expect haunting watercolors by Zuhal Feraidon, digital prints by William J. Andersen that evoke tilework traditions, and Nina Ghanbarzadeh’s expressive, aching voids. Milwaukee is so far away from the borders where this conflict is occurring, but there are people in our community who are struggling to process what is happening. This exhibition seeks to illuminate and address the Palestinian crisis and generate relief efforts for Gazans, who have seen more than 30,000 casualties, many of them children, since the war began in October. The artists in this group show question how the world responds to family separation, escalating death tolls, corporate support for war, and how governments justify cruelty. More than just meeting this cultural and humanitarian crisis, the artists selected for this show have consistently produced work about political oppression, the Arab experience, the war-for-profit machine, and survival in the cultural and political margins.

James May Gallery

Exhibition dates: June 4 – 29

Reception: June 7, 5 p.m-8 p.m.

Artist talk: 7 p.m.
2201 N. Farwell Ave.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday: 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Friday: 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

James May Gallery is celebrating its first anniversary in Milwaukee and tenth in Wisconsin with Katherine Steichen Rosing’s solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings driven by her interest in atmospheric phenomena and environmental ecosystems. This show will contain a number of Rosing’s paintings, which are characterized by filmy layers on the blue-green spectrum, evoking distances through water, vapor, and trees. She will also install a never-before-seen sculptural element specifically for the James May gallery. This is a fine opportunity to visit a work of art with site specificity that weaves a connection between Earth’s atmospheric rivers and growth within northern forest ecosystems. If you live in Wisconsin, Rosing’s work will make you see our landscape in a little more detail, with a little more mindfulness paid to the way it is rapidly changing.

Haggerty Museum of Art

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships For Individual Artists 2023

Through Aug. 4, 2024

1234 W. Tory Hill St. at Marquette University

Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships For Individual Artists started in 2003 as a means to retain artistic talent in Milwaukee and foster their careers within the creative community. This ongoing effort to increase the city’s art-friendly profile has made notable careers out of many alums. Through August 4, you can see the 2023 awardees on display, including two established (Mikal Floyd-Pruitt and Janelle VanderKelen) and three emerging (Siara Berry, Fatima Laster, and Alayna N. Pernell) visual artists. The 2023 winners exhibit a range of skills in their practices, including Pernell’s manner of connecting the past and the present by laying her intertwined hands across archival photographs of people subjected to exploitation—subjects whose stories have been erased. And Laster’s textured paintings incorporate American flag imagery into work whose commentary spans from police violence to district redlining. The group exhibition at Haggerty is not the first or last place to see these bright careers on display, but it may be the best opportunity to tap into what the immediate future of the Milwaukee visual arts scene holds.

The Green Gallery (East)

Moreover: 50 Paintings. Group exhibition linked to 50 Paintings at the MAM
May 17 – June 15, 2024

1500 N. Farwell Ave.

Wednesday-Saturday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.

A sister exhibition to the exhibition 50 Paintings hosted at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Moreover: 50 Paintings is in the last of its three phases. In conjunction with this event, you can also view the 50 Paintings international edition at the Milwaukee Art Museum until June 23, but the Moreover edition draws “from a concentrated Midwestern geography.” It is a mystery to me what this means, but maybe you can expect photorealistic interiors by Emil Robinson, enigmatic pictographs from Timothy van Laar, and a pointed gaze that peers out from behind Leonardo Kaplan’s doodles in an image that straddles the line between the carefree teenaged years and an adult sexual awakening. This exhibition is worth your time for the range of exposure it promises, both in a regional sense and a visual one. Plus, the gallery is situated on a busy corner. If you’re the social type, you can easily tack a brief visit onto your other evening weekend plans. Impress your date with a visual feast and your knowledge of contemporary painting (lifting directly from this blurb is encouraged).

All told, you can squeeze in at least 100 paintings this month if you visit the interlinked 50 Paintings exhibitions plus the other shows described above. It’s a promising time to visit new voices and established careers alike, and growing emphasis on the local art scene further cements our city as a vibrant hub in the regional artistic conversation.

Annie Raab has been writing about art since 2014 for print and online publications. You can find more of her critical and creative writing at www.annieraab.com. She lives in Milwaukee.