2022 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships For Individual Artists Awarded
Five Artists Share $140,000 in Nineteenth Cycle
Jason S. Yi, installation view from the solo exhibition “Dissimulations” at Arts + Literature Lab, Madison, Wisconsin, 2021. Photo provided.
Five recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 165 applicants in the nineteenth annual competition. Valaria Tatera and Jason S. Yi were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $35,000 fellowship. John W. Balsley, Inna Dmitrieva, and Molly Hassler will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $15,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All of the 2022 fellows are based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows participate in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the summer of 2023 and receive professional development services and studio visits. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.
Finalists in the Established Artist category included Aaron Boyd, Yevgeniya Kaganovich, David Najib Kasir, and Heidi Parkes.
Finalists in the Emerging artist category included Alyssa Ackerman, Britany Gunderson, and Nicholas Perry.
The panel of jurors included Jade Powers, assistant curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri; Victoria Sung, associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Toccarra A. H. Thomas, a media and performance artist, film programmer, and arts administrator who is currently director of the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. The entire jurying process was conducted virtually, culminating in virtual studio visits with the six finalists in the Established Artist category and—for the first time—the six Emerging finalists.
More information on the jurors available at: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/nohl-jurors
Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and Black Box 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. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. She left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Her fund supports local visual arts and education programs, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community.
About the Fellows
Established Artists
VALARIA TATERA
Valaria Tatera is a visual artist, lecturer, curator, and activist whose work investigates the intersection of ethnicity, gender, commerce, and the environment. An enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, Tatera explores self-identity and contemporary Indigenous issues such as the relationship between colonization and Indigenous erasure, visibility and resilience. Her intention is “to create a physical manifestation of work that holds visual and personal space for statistics that often erase the individual.”
Tatera earned an MFA in 3-D from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MA and BFA in Ceramics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She exhibits regionally and nationally in galleries and institutions. Tatera was a finalist for the Mary Nohl Fellowship in 2020 and 2019, and she recently received micro-grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the
Wisconsin Arts Board’s Woodland Indian Arts Emergency Relief Fund. She will be featured in the 2022 Wisconsin Biennial; has a solo exhibition scheduled for fall 2022 at Sweet Briar College in Virginia; and her current installation, Kill the Indian Save the Man, is on view at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend through January 2022. Tatera is co-curator of No More Stolen Sisters, which just opened at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee.
http://www.valariatatera.com/
JASON S. YI
Jason S. Yi is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and site-specific installations. Immigrating from South Korea to United States at an early age, his work is conceived through a bi-cultural lens and interrogates the notion of perception’s equivalence to reality. He explores the effect of cultural and societal tendencies on our understanding of both built spaces and the natural landscape.
Yi has exhibited in regional, national, and international venues. His work was included in the international biennial exhibition at the Inside-out Art Museum in Beijing, Moran Art Museum in Seoul, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the inaugural iteration of Sculpture Milwaukee. His awards include a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Fellowship, a Kamiyama Artist in Residence Fellowship sponsored by the Japan Foundation, and a previous Nohl Fellowship (2005). His works are included in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Kamiyama Museum of Art in Japan, Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation in New York.
Yi is a co-founder of the Plum Blossom Initiative, a curatorial and platforming project dedicated to mentoring emerging artists in Milwaukee; a mentor for the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network; and serves as director of Hawthorn Contemporary, a gallery in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.
http://www.jasonyi.com/
Emerging Artists
JOHN W. BALSLEY
John W. Balsley has been creating drawings and comics ever since he can remember. His work uses anthropomorphic or exaggerated characters in satirical situations often infused with social undertones. Balsley’s drawing style has been heavily influenced by animated cartoons, children’s book illustrations, and alternative comics, both American and international. Over the last decade, he has developed several different comic universes online using various social media platforms and comic collectives, and he continues to explore new possibilities of sharing his work.
After graduating from MIAD with a BFA, Balsley spent several years focusing on learning music/ audio recording and freelancing as an artist in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Busan, South Korea, before returning to Wisconsin to focus on his projects. He is currently freelancing as an artist, creating online comics, and has recently begun 2-D animation with plans to create short episodes based off his characters.
https://www.jwbalsley.com/
INNA DMITRIEVA
Inna Dmitrieva is an experimental filmmaker originally from Saint Petersburg, Russia. She holds a BA in Linguistics and Cross-Cultural Communication from the Saint Petersburg University of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
In her moving-image practice, Dmitrieva combines elements of documentary, essay film, and abstraction to investigate the relationship between language, estranged individuals, and the spaces they inhabit or leave behind. Her past works include personal, autobiographical films as well as those that engage with a larger global community. She uses digital and analogue cinematography, as well as elements of stop-motion and 2D animation. Her films have screened at festivals and exhibitions both in the US and internationally.
MOLLY HASSLER
Molly Hassler is an interdisciplinary artist, who often embraces collaboration and uses drawing and fibers techniques to mine the complex relation between representation and identity as a queer person in the Midwest. Through printing, drawing, weaving, and quilting, she is actively sewing up the past: literally and metaphorically mending. Her fine art practice rests most comfortably between peculiar three-dimensional objecthood and semi-narrative works containing drawings and text that speak to the sweetness and trauma of queer and trans coming of age.
Hassler is a 2020 recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Residency Merit Grant and a Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Grant. Exhibition venues include Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York; The Jackson Dinsdale Art Center in Hastings, Nebraska; and various local galleries. Hassler currently works as a teaching artist-in-residence with Lynden Sculpture Garden and Woodland Pattern Book Center, carrying out multiple community-based projects in Milwaukee Public Schools.
https://www.mollyhassler.com/
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.
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