2024 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships Awarded

Five recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 147 applicants in the twenty-first annual competition. Nina Ghanbarzadeh (Afkhamian) and Roy F. Staab were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $35,000 fellowship. Justin Goodrum, Jovanny Hernandez Caballero, and Nicholas Perry will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $15,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All the 2024 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 2025 and receive professional development services and studio visits. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.

The finalists in the Established Artist category are Mike Gibisser, Mariah Tate Klemens, Kim Miller, and Kyle Seis.

The finalists in the Emerging artist category are Amal Azzam, Asher Imtiaz, and Matthew Vivirito.

The panel of jurors included Allison Glenn, independent curator and writer, New York, New York; Misa Jeffereis, Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri; and Anisa Olufemi, independent curator and Fellowship Manager, Hamiltonian Artists, Washington, DC. We were delighted to bring the jurors to Milwaukee for a public talk and studio visits with all twelve 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 Joy Engine, 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 Nohl Fellowship is part of a constellation of artist-supporting programs administered by Lynden that includes the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award and 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

NINA GHANBARZADEH (AFKHAMIAN)
Nina Ghanbarzadeh (Afkhamian) is a visual artist whose work is informed by the geometric and biomorphic patterns, colors, and textures of her Persian cultural traditions. Taking visual cues from the shapes and lines of written language, she uses a wide range of mediums and tools to create works that extend the urgent contemporary dialogue around why some cultures’ traditions are accepted while others are dismissed.

Ghanbarzadeh emigrated from Tehran, Iran in 2001. She earned her BFA in painting, drawing and graphic design from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2013 and completed a two-year Artist in Residence Program with Redline Milwaukee in 2015. She is the recipient of the Student Silver ADDY, Fredric R. Layton Foundations Scholarship, and winner of Best in Show at the 2020 Wisconsin Biennial. In 2019, she launched ARTkee Educational Toys, a company which produces SOFTwords, kits of basic shapes that allow children to explore the shapes as images as well as text. Nina draws inspiration for her educational toy business and her art from cultural differences and the limitations of language.
https://www.ninaghanbarzadeh.com

ROY F. STAAB
Roy F. Staab is an established artist, sculptor, and “drawer-in-space” who works in nature to create geometric forms. Born in Milwaukee, he studied at the Layton School of Art, the Milwaukee Institute of Technology, and received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Originally influenced by abstract expressionism, he left Milwaukee for Europe, where he continued to study art on his own, eventually landing in Paris. There, he experimented with painting and drawing techniques. Relocating to New York City in 1980 and building upon his graphic research, Roy turned to nature, using natural materials to “draw” his outdoor installations. Suddenly, his art embraced the largeness of nature by responding to specific sites. Land art brought him to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and back to Europe to make art in private spaces and public symposiums. Based in Milwaukee, he makes art in his backyard in West Allis, in fallow fields, and in public spaces both here and abroad. A recipient of many prestigious awards and honors, Staab lectures and curates, but most of all he enjoys the challenge of creating land art installations.
http://roystaab.blogspot.com/

Emerging Artists

JUSTIN GOODRUM
Justin Goodrum is a director, producer, and writer. He worked with NBCLX to direct and produce a short documentary on mental health disparities in Milwaukee’s Black community. His company, Good Entertainment, was honored to be chosen to present at the 2021 Culture, Heath, and Wellbeing International conference in the United Kingdom. Justin was a participant in Firelight Media’s 2021 Groundwork Lab with his film, The Stigma of the Durag. The film explores his personal experience of being labeled a gang member at a predominantly white college for wearing a durag. The Stigma of the Durag premiered at the 2022 Milwaukee Film Festival where it won Honorable Mention. The film aired on Milwaukee PBS Black Nouveau in 2023. For the last three years, Justin has been producing One Minute Remaining, an independent feature length documentary exposing the social and economic burden of incarceration on women. Currently in post-production, the film will be released in 2024. Justin is currently in pre-production for his first feature film, which tackles mental health disparities in the Black community through a familiar and entertaining genre. This project won Brico Forward Fund awards, Milwaukee’s largest independent film grant, in 2022 and 2023. Goodrum is also a participant in Milwaukee Film’s 2023 Focus Finder filmmaking accelerator program.
https://goodentertain.com/

JOVANNY HERNANDEZ CABALLERO
Jovanny Hernandez Caballero is a community artist and photographer based in Milwaukee. He is a first-generation American and descendant of Mixtecs, an Indigenous people based in present-day Mexico. His work centers around themes of cultural heritage and identity. Through his photography, Jovanny documents the beauty of Milwaukee’s South Side and his family’s native land of Oaxaca, Mexico. He seeks to showcase the richness and diversity of his community, celebrating its people, culture, and traditions. His work has been recognized and showcased in various venues, including “Creating Milwaukee,” a mini-documentary series produced by Nō Studios that highlights Milwaukee creatives across various disciplines. He received the gener8tor Art X Sherman Phoenix grant, was an Artist in Residence at Arts@Large and is currently at Mitchell Street Arts. He completed his BFA in Photography & Imaging at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2023.
https://www.jovannyhernandezart.com/

NICHOLAS PERRY
Nicholas Perry is a painter based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts in 2018. Nicholas makes figurative paintings that draw on art-historical influences, personal photography, and other visual languages. These different forms of imagery are reinterpreted during the process of painting to create individuals in solitary spaces. For him, painting offers a place to propose questions about representation within abstract compositions. His work explores the history of painting, and particularly portraiture: how a portrait reveals the characteristics of a person through formal and fictional narratives within the alcove of the frame. Nicholas uses portraiture to investigate ideas such as sincerity, obsession, isolation, and anxiety. His work has been published in New American Paintings Midwest Edition (issues 137 and 149) and was selected for the 2018 Wisconsin Artist Biennial at the Museum of Wisconsin Art. In 2019 he had a solo exhibition at The Alice Wilds titled By Themselves.
http://nsperry.com/

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is Wisconsin’s largest community foundation and was among the first established in the world. For more than a century, the Foundation has been at the heart of the civic community, helping donors achieve the greatest philanthropic impact, elevating the work of changemakers across neighborhoods, and bringing people and organizations together to help our region thrive. Racial equity is the Foundation’s North Star, guiding its investments and strategies for social and economic change. Leveraging generations of community knowledge, cross-sector partnerships and more than $1 billion in financial assets, the Foundation is committed to reimagining philanthropy, recentering communities and remaking systems to transform our region into a Milwaukee for all.

Joy Engine, a nonprofit organization, was founded in 2019. Joy Engine uses public art as an “engine” to break barriers, spark meaningful human connections, and create equitable access and belonging within Milwaukee’s arts & culture community. Their goal is to activate creative community spaces through art.

For further information about the 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.