Milwaukee Artist Donates 2,000 Works To Kohler Arts Center
Major gift will anchor a three-decade career in Sheboygan.
Living Rooms installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, work by Michelle Grabner, 2016. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Artist Michelle Grabner is gifting a large piece of her legacy to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.
Grabner is an artist, critic and curator from Wisconsin who has works in collections of museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
She is donating over 2,000 pieces of her work spanning three decades to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Grabner splits her time between Milwaukee and Chicago, where she is a teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago. She said she once wanted to be in a larger art market in cities like New York. Now she sees the value in the art scene of the Heartland.
“I kind of wanted to reject what was close to me and started to look more broadly at art,” she said. “And needless to say, I came right back around to recognizing how exceptional the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is.”
She said she decided to donate her pieces to the Kohler Arts Center because the museum encompasses a broader scope of artwork from its artists rather than choosing their best pieces.
“They take their archive, their manuscripts, and in this case, even my syllabi from teaching at the School of the Art Institute,” Grabner said. “Most legacy institutions don’t have that as their mandate.”
Amy Horst, the executive director of the Kohler Arts Center, said that Grabner’s gifts allow viewers to better understand her full story.
“When an artist’s work becomes dispersed amongst hundreds of collectors, it becomes very hard to see the evolution of an artist’s thinking and really their full network of influence,” she said. “By collecting a large body of work, it allows future scholars, students, artists and our visitors to really be able to follow the entire arc of a career.
Horst said artists produce their best work when they have the freedom to experiment. She said being in Sheboygan allows them to do that.
“I think that being here in Sheboygan particularly, not just the Midwest, but in a working-class town of 50,000, it allows this opportunity for artists to experiment in ways that they can’t when they’re under the spotlight of major art metropolitan areas,” Horst said.
Grabner said that being in the Midwest gave her imagination more freedom than being in a large cultural center.
“There is a kind of distance from those big commercial capitals, cultural capitals on the coast that allow artists the freedom to really explore and think differently,” she said.
Horst said that Grabner’s collection gives the art center access to a new generation of artwork. She said that having a relationship with an artist who is mid-career is unusual.
“We have the rare opportunity to work with an artist while they’re here, living, continuing to make, continuing to teach, continuing to influence and can be active partners in that stewardship,” she said. “It’s a really important moment for the art center.”
A Wisconsin artist donates over 2K pieces of artwork to Kohler Arts Center was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.
If you think stories like this are important, become a member of Urban Milwaukee and help support real, independent journalism. Plus you get some cool added benefits.
