2025 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship Panelists to Give Public Talk at Haggerty Museum of Art, November 14

The twenty-second 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 157 applicants. Efe Igor Coleman, Independent Curator, Memphis, Tennessee, Raphael Fonseca, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art, Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado, and Adia Sykes, Independent Curator and Program Manager, United States Artists, Chicago, will be welcomed at an informal reception on Thursday, November 14, 2024, at 6 pm at the Haggerty Museum of Art. The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at 1234 West Tory Hill Street on the Marquette campus.

The panelists will offer brief overviews of their home institutions and curatorial interests beginning at 6:30 pm. The event is free.

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 ($20,000 each for up to two Established artists; $10,000 each for up to three Emerging artists) and a $5,000 professional development/production budget, the Nohl Fellows can participate in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University opening in June 2026. The eighteen-month fellowship period, January 2025-June 2026, will include professional development opportunities such as studio visits from curators and artists outside the area and occasional public programs. 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 panelists will spend two days visiting the studios of twelve finalists:  six in the Established Artist category and six Emerging Artists. The awards will be announced in early January 2025.

About the Jurors
Efe Igor Coleman is an independent curator and a nonprofit administrator. She previously served as the inaugural Blackmon Perry Assistant Curator of African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Her curatorial interests encompass migration, displacement, and diaspora. By engaging with postcolonial and feminist methodologies, she challenges widely held Eurocentric narratives. Coleman is currently a PhD candidate in History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.

Raphael Fonseca was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He lives in Denver, where he works as a curator of modern and contemporary Latin American art at the Denver Art Museum. Fonseca is also the chief curator of the 14th Mercosur Biennial, which opens in March 2025 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and part of the curatorial ensemble for the next Counterpublic Triennial, which opens in St. Louis in 2026. From 2017-2020, Fonseca was a curator at MAC Niterói (Contemporary Art Museum of Niterói, Brazil). He curated the 22nd SESC Videobrasil Biennale, along with Renée Akitelek Mboya and Solange Farkas (2023).

Fonseca’s research focuses on curating, art history, art criticism, and education. The juxtaposition of different temporalities and how this can trigger contemporary reflections for audiences is crucial in his practice. Humor, absurdity, pop culture, and the notion that an exhibition relates to the ideas of assembly, set design, and spectacle have grown among his research interests. He works with artists from everywhere but with a more significant focus on the ones born and/or based in the so-called Global South. Recently he curated Full gas: visual arts and the 1980s in Brazil (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2024); Sandra Vásquez de La Horra: the awake volcanoes (Denver Art Museum, 2024); Raio-que-o-parta: fictions of modern in Brazil (SESC 24 de Maio, São Paulo, 2022), Sweat (Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2021) and To-and-fro (Centro Cultural Bank of Brazil, São Paulo, Brazil, 2019). Fonseca holds a PhD in Critic and Art History (State University of Rio de Janeiro).

Adia Sykes is an arts organizer, curator, and dancer based in Chicago. Her practice seeks to center philosophies of improvisation, intuition, and care, engaging them as tools through which meaningful relationships between artists and viewers can be cultivated, while leaving space for the vernacular to mingle with constructs of history and theory. As an administrator advocating for racial equity and sustainable ecosystems for creative practitioners, she has held roles with organizations like Chicago Artists Coalition, where she started their SPARK Grant and as a Lead Organizer of the Chicago Art Census. She has also realized curatorial projects with the Art Institute of Chicago, Centro Arte Opificio Siri in Terni, Italy, Chicago Mayor’s Office, Woman Made Gallery, ACRE, Material Exhibitions, and Engage Projects. Adia earned her Masters in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

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.

Lynden works with artists, educators, students, and communities to create, support, and share experiences at the intersection of art, nature, and culture. We operate as a laboratory, continually re-imagining Lynden’s landscape, collection, and place in the community through exhibitions, performances, residencies, and hands-on education programs.

For further information about the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Program for Individual Visual Artists, please visit http://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.