The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund for Individual Artists Suitcase Export Fund Launches Twelfth Funding Cycle

The Bradley Family Foundation, in collaboration with the Greater Milwaukee Foundation (GMF), announces the twelfth funding cycle of the GMF’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Suitcase Export Fund for Individual Artists. Created to help visual artists with the cost of exhibiting their work outside the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington), the Fund is designed to provide greater visibility for individual artists and their work as well as for greater Milwaukee. To date, the Fund has supported a diverse group of 213 individual artists and eight artist collectives exhibiting throughout North America, and in Europe, Africa, the former Soviet Union and Asia. The awardees have received a total of more than $124,000 in grants and work in a variety of media, from film to ceramics. They include well-established artists as well as those at the start of their careers. A special effort has been made to support Nohl Fellows as they exhibit work made during their fellowship year. (See below for a list of 2013 awardees.)

The Suitcase Export Fund is open to practicing artists residing within the four-county area who want to export their work beyond the area for public display. Priority is given to artists with exhibitions outside of Wisconsin. The Fund provides support in two areas: transportation of the work (packing/shipping/insurance) and transportation of the artist. The maximum grant available to an individual is $1,000. Funding is only provided for upcoming opportunities (exhibitions or screenings commencing between December 1, 2014 and July 31, 2015 for the Winter Cycle; similar opportunities commencing between June 1, 2015 and January 31, 2016 for the Summer Cycle).

The Suitcase Export Fund opens twice a year, disbursing awards in response to demand until the funds for each cycle are exhausted. The Winter Cycle opens on December 1, 2014; a total of $7,500 will be awarded. The Summer Cycle will open on June 1, 2015 and, thanks to an additional gift from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Joseph R. Pabst Fund, $7,750 will be available. The guidelines are now online at http://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/mary-l-nohl-suitcase-export-fund, and the electronic application will open at 11 am on Monday, December 1. For those without computer access, paper applications will be available from pmorris@lyndensculpturegarden.org or (414) 446-8794.

Artists have responded very favorably to the Suitcase Export Fund and its simple application process. The Fund contributes to the creative health of the region by supporting local artists at all career stages, from the emerging to the established; alleviating some of the financial burden faced by artists who want to exhibit their work at a distance; and by getting the work of Milwaukee artists out into the world. The support provided for artist transportation has enabled artists to be on site to install work–important to most artists and indispensable to those working in the areas of installation, performance and site-specific art. The opportunity to attend openings, where artists can meet with collectors and distributors and make critical connections with gallery owners, is consistently cited as a significant benefit. The Fund also creates opportunities to expose work in new regions and to new audiences, to meet other artists and see their work, to sell work, and to plan new projects. Although the Fund does not directly support residencies or ancillary activities, awardees have taken full advantage of opportunities to make new work, deliver gallery talks, and participate in symposia at their exhibition sites. In 2013-14, as artists continued to stretch their grants by arranging simultaneous events at other venues, scoping out new opportunities, and participating in residency programs, they commented frequently on the benefits of travel: “The impact of traveling and engaging with a new audience expands my art practice and is reflected in new work,” wrote one recipient. In a digital age, travel also expands social media networks, and as one artist noted, her updates about the Milwaukee art scene are now seen by an international group of artists, raising “awareness of the city as a destination for art viewing and making.”

Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. Her $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation is one of the largest gifts the Foundation has received from a single donor in its 99-year history. The Fund, by supporting local visual arts and arts education programs, keeps Nohl’s passion for the visual arts alive in the community.

ABOUT THE 2013 AWARDEES
In its eleventh cycle, the Fund provided assistance with shipping and travel to thirty-one individual artists. These artists–eleven of them past Nohl Fellows—work in a range of media and their exhibitions took them to Birmingham, Alabama; Anchorage, Alaska; Weed, California; DeKalb, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; Kansas City, Kansas; Bangor, Maine; St. Mary’s City, Maryland; Detroit and Grand Rapids, Michigan; Winona, Minnesota; Canton, Missouri; Galloway, New Jersey; New York, New York; Columbia, South Carolina; Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Johnson, Vermont; Blacksburg, Virginia; and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Destinations abroad included Vienna, Austria; Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec, Canada; Shanghai, China; Varennes-sur-Loire and Yerres, France; Reykjavik, Iceland; Ballyvaughan, Ireland; Trondheim, Norway; Malaga, Spain; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Hanoi, Vietnam.

2012 Nohl Fellow Danielle Beverly’s screening of her documentary Old South at the Nickelodeon Theatre in Columbia was hosted by the University of South Carolina Film & Media Studies Program. The screening kicked off a community engagement film tour on the theme of “race and place.”

Lois Bielefeld (Nohl Fellow 2012) received support for Androgyny, a solo show at The Rita at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside in Kenosha. The exhibition explores the power and complexity of gender identity in a series of photographic portraits, videos, and a large-scale installation.

Eighteen of Tara Bogart’s photographs from A Modern Hair Study were included in Aspects of the Self: Portraits of Our Times, a group exhibition at the Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech University. She traveled to Blacksburg, Virginia, to give an artist talk and meet with students.

As the recipient of a major award in a national juried Watercolor U.S.A. Honor Society exhibition, Christine Buth-Furness had a painting selected for Watercolor Now!, the 2014 WHS Small Works Exhibition in the Mabee Art Gallery at Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri.

Cecelia Condit, a 2004 Nohl Fellow, traveled to Ireland for A Stone’s Throw, a solo exhibition at the Burren College of Art Gallery in Ballyvaughan. She showed a three-channel video installation, shot in Ireland during a prior residency, and large-format composited photographs.

Larry D’Attilio was invited to participate in Destination II, the International Group Exhibit at the Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi. The exhibition featured ten mid-career artists working in five disciplines from the United States, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam. D’Attilio was present to install and engage in collaborative workshops with the other artists.

Christopher Davis-Benavides and Karen Gunderman both traveled to China to participate in the 2014 Fourth Biennial Shanghai International Contemporary Porcelain Art Exhibition at the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Museum and the International Modern Pot Art Museum in Yi Xing. They exhibited their work, lectured, and served as members of the international awards selection committee.

Raoul Deal received support for a solo exhibition, Ni de Aquí, ni de Allá / From Neither Here nor There at the Paul Watkins Gallery at Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota. The exhibition, which included large-format woodcuts and a motion-activated audio element featuring the voices of Latino immigrants telling their stories, was chosen to align with WSU’s campus-wide theme, “Civic Action: Meeting the Challenge of Improving our World.”

During her residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, Melissa Dorn Richards exhibited new work alongside paintings she brought from Milwaukee.

Paul Druecke (Nohl Fellow 2010) was invited to exhibit a new public sculpture as part of the Marlborough Gallery’s Broadway Morey Boogie in New York City. The group show of outdoor sculpture by American contemporary artists extends from Columbus Circle to 166th Street on Broadway.

Sally Duback is making two trips to Grand Rapids, Michigan to participate in ArtPrize 2014. She is exhibiting Nature’s Children, a large mixed-media mosaic.

Gary John Gresl, a 2007 Nohl Fellow, created a site-specific installation at the Northern Illinois University Art Museum in DeKalb, Illinois as part of Hoarding, Amassing and Excess, an exhibition that explored the “psychological, sociological, and artistic impulses for accumulation, horror vacui, berserk collecting, and excessive mark making.”

Bruce Humphries participated in SHOEBOX: An International Sculpture Exhibition at the Todd Gallery at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Two of Humphries’s small sculptures were selected for the juried show, and he was selected for an Award of Merit.

Leah Schreiber Johnson was one of ten artists selected to participate in Installation Nation 2014, an outdoor installation exhibition sponsored by Primary Colours, an organization dedicated to connecting artists with their communities, at the Indianapolis Art Center.

Jenna Knapp will spend two weeks in Amsterdam at Kulter, an independent gallery and a collective that organizes projects at relevant sites. Knapp, a recent graduate of the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, will be participating with other artists, musicians and performers in a site-specific group show.

Nicolas Lampert, a former Nohl Fellow (2005, 2011), traveled to Black Butte Center for Railroad Culture in Weed, California for a one-day show of prints on environmental themes and a public talk in the Center’s boxcar gallery.

2008 Nohl Fellow Xav Leplae and his Riverwest Radio project (a neighborhood radio station that broadcasts live from the window of his Riverwest Film & Video store) have been invited to participate in the Detroit iteration of The People’s Biennial, a traveling show curated by Jens Hoffman and Harrell Fletcher. Leplae will travel to MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit) with three other Milwaukee artists to create and activate a fantasy web radio installation inside the museum.

Faythe Levine (Nohl Fellow 2007, 2012) returned to Tune Farm in the environs of Birmingham, Alabama to exhibit work and screen her recent film, Sign Painters. As artist-in-residence at Tune Farm, Levine collaborated with the collective Elkmont on a winter solstice happening; she also installed mixed media work outdoors and participated in a performance ritual.

Patrick Lichty traveled to Anchorage, Alaska for a solo exhibition at the Institute for Speculative Media at Out North Contemporary Arthouse. He also taught a workshop on drone cinema using a DJI Phantom Drone, and continued his field research in Alaska, using his drone for artistic purposes, mapping and scientific study of global warming at the Exit Glacier in the Kenai National Forest.

In conjunction with her residency at Lademoen Kustnerverksteder (LKV) in Trondheim, Norway, Robin Luther had an exhibition at Babel Art Space that included photographs, video and audio created in Trondheim and back home.

Kevin Miyazaki exhibited photographs from Camp Home, a series that launched with the assistance of a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship in 2007. The two-person exhibition at the Richard Stockton College Art Gallery in Galloway, New Jersey, addressed the Japanese internment camp story. Other activities included a gallery talk–attended by eight former internees–a radio interview, and a video interview for the college’s social media and online library.

As a finalist in the 6th edition of the Pollux Awards, Joseph Mougel was invited to exhibit Blanc 016 in the 3rd International Biennial of Fine Art and Documentary Photography at the Municipal Heritage Museum in Malaga, Spain.

Mark Mulhern, a 2003 Nohl Fellow, exhibited works from his pigeon series in the gallery at Le Manoir de Champfreau in Varennes-sur-Loire, France. Aptly, the gallery was entered through a 16th-century pigeonnier. Mulhern, who also makes artist books and monotypes, met with a curator at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

Christopher McIntyre Perceptions received support for a solo exhibition of his photographs at KAHBANG Arts, a nonprofit arts organization in Bangor, Maine.

Paul Rabe was invited to screen two abstract, non-representational films at the 2014 Reykjavik Visual Music*Punto y Raya Festival in Iceland. He attended the festival to participate in interviews, artist talks, and discussions, and to meet other filmmakers.

Michael Senise traveled to Vienna, Austria, at the invitation of AFG for a solo exhibition of photographs, paintings, wooden sculptures, banners and screen-printed T-shirts that “translate iconography and the everyday into ‘art-objects.’”

Colette Odya Smith has been invited to be the guest of honor of the Societe des Pastellistes de France at their fall international exhibition of pastel paintings at the Caillebotte Park in Yerres. She will exhibit fifteen paintings and meet society members in Paris and at the public opening reception.

Marc Tasman, a 2004 Nohl Fellow, exhibited twenty photographs from Laurentian Internationale at Galerie Remise in Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec. The documentary series spans six years and explores one family’s connection, over five generations, to a land community and their attempts to preserve its culture and natural resources,

Lynn Tomaszewski will travel to St. Mary’s City, Maryland, for a solo exhibition at the Boyden Gallery at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Tomaszewski will be exhibiting paintings, large wall drawings, and two interactive installations.

Christopher Willey received support for Lanterns, a collaborative exhibition/installation with Tonia Klein at The Hown’s Den: A Nomadic + Domestic Exhibition Space in Kansas City, Kansas. The work references doorknockers and lanterns that Willey saw in China, and incorporates Klein’s screen printing practice.

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is a family of more than 1,200 individual charitable funds, each created by donors to serve the local charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties. 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 and Suitcase Export Fund, please visit lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.