2020 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Panelists Announced

The eighteenth cycle of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program continues with the appointment of a panel of recognized visual arts professionals to select five Fellows from among 151 applicants. The 2020 jurors are: Kimberli Gant, McKinnon Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA;
Ashley James, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; and Shamim M. Momin, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA.

Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the Lynden, the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows can participate in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University opening in June 2021, public health conditions permitting. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). The program also includes a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.

The Covid-19 health crisis has altered the 2020 jurying process, which is now entirely virtual. The panelists are reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and will make virtual visits to the studios of seven finalists in the Established Artist category. The two Established Artist awards, worth $20,000 each and the three $10,000 Emerging Artist awards will be announced on Monday, December 7, 2020.

About the Jurors
Kimberli Gant, PhD is the McKinnon Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA. She was previously the Mellon Doctoral Fellow in the Arts of Global Africa Department at the Newark Museum, in Newark, NJ, and worked as the Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MoCADA). She has also guested curated for Deutsch Bank NY and Dept of African American/African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas Austin. Her exhibition experience includes Multiple Modernisms, Wondrous Worlds: Art & Islam Through Time & Place (2016), De-Luxe (2012), and There is No Looking Glass Here: Wide Sargasso Sea Re-Imagined (2010). Kimberli received her PhD in Art History from the University of Texas Austin (2017), as well as holds both a MA and BA in Art History from Columbia University (2009) and Pitzer College (2002).

Ashley James joined the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2019 as Associate Curator, Contemporary Art. Prior to joining the Guggenheim, James served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she was the lead curator for the museum’s presentation of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018–19), organized Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019), and is co-curating the forthcoming John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance (2020). James also served as a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Drawing and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, where her work focused on the groundbreaking retrospectives of Adrian Piper (2018) and Charles White (2018–19), and has held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Yale University Art Gallery. She has contributed essays and research for books, magazines, and catalogues, including publications on Charles White, Palmer Hayden, and Howardena Pindell. James holds a BA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Yale University in English Literature and African American Studies.

Shamim M. Momin is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, WA. She joined the organization in fall 2018. At the museum, Momin oversees the Curatorial, Exhibitions, and Programs departments, and has during this tenure curated a number of exhibitions, most recently the museum-wide group exhibition, In Plain Sight.

Previously, Momin was Director, Curator, and co-founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), a non-profit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects, in Los Angeles and beyond (nationally and internationally). LAND was founded in 2009 and has since presented over 150 discrete exhibitions and programs with contemporary artists. Previous to founding LAND, Momin was Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum, where she co-curated both the 2008 and 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions of Alex Bag, Terence Koh, Mark Grotjahn, Raymond Pettibon, Banks Violette, and Alex Katz, among others. As Branch Director and Curator of the former Whitney Museum at Altria from 2000-2008, she was responsible for organizing exhibitions and commissioning more than fifty new projects by emerging artists for both solo and thematic presentations, as well as overseeing the branch educational programs and performance series, Performance on 42nd. Notable Altria projects have featured artists such as Andrea Zittel, Rob Fischer, Sue de Beer, Luis Gispert, Mark Bradford, Dario Robleto, Ellen Harvey, Do-Ho Suh, and E.V. Day. Momin has an extensive publications history, including artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and art periodicals. She participates frequently on juries and panels, lectures regularly in the US and abroad and is a recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award and the Smithsonian Foundation Ingenuity Award. She is currently Affiliate Professor of Art at the School of Art, Art History and Design, University of Washington.

For more than a century, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation has helped individuals, families and organizations realize their philanthropic goals and make a difference in the community, during their lifetimes and for future generations. The Foundation consists of more than 1,400 individual charitable funds, each created by donors to serve the charitable causes of their choice. The Foundation also deploys both human and financial resources to address the most critical needs of the community and ensure the vitality of the region. Established in 1915, the Foundation was one of the first community foundations in the world and is now among the largest.

For further information about the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program, please visit https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl.

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.