2025 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 157 applicants in the twenty-second annual competition. Michelle Grabner and Michael Newhall were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $20,000 fellowship. Sarah Ballard, Margaret Griffin, and Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen) will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $10,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All the 2025 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 2026 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 Ben Balcom, Phoenix Brown, Tate Bunker, and Ariana Vaeth.

The finalists in the Emerging artist category are Michael Lagerman, Seth Ter Haar, and Brandom Terres-Sanchez.

Headshots, images of the artists’ work, and image credits available at:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/wdwxvon7vnza8i2ajvwhl/ADHqMAxZ5OpFUlR1ReUUkB4?rlkey=fpy2v4tjqi2n8yi9agquo5d3c&st=9yo2q943&dl=0

The panel of jurors included 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. We were delighted to bring the jurors to Milwaukee for a public talk at the Haggerty Museum of Art and for studio visits with all twelve finalists.

More information on the jurors available at: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/nohl-jurors

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). Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Nohl Fellowship program is a central pillar of Lynden’s support for artists. 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

MICHELLE GRABNER

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and curator. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cranbrook Academy of Art; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2018 National Academician in the National Academy of Design, and a 2024 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Fellow.

For forty years, Grabner’s work has rearticulated familiar patterns and commonplace formal arrangements. Painting, cast metal, and ceramics are important material languages in her practice. Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Luxembourg; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio; Milwaukee Art Museum; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; RISD Museum of Art, Providence, Rhode Island; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts; Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, New York; Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Art Omi, Ghent, New York; among other public collections. Grabner, along with artist Brad Killam, runs the artist-run project spaces The Suburban, Milwaukee (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm, Little Wolf, Wisconsin (est. 2008).

https://www.michellegrabner.com/

MICHAEL NEWHALL

Michael Newhall is originally from Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin. The son of an artist, he had early exposure to both academic and contemporary art through the University of Wisconsin. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the Art Students League of New York, was an organic farmer in northern Wisconsin, and taught at SAIC, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the University of Western Michigan, and at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Newhall received the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Painting, the Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship for Painting, and other awards. He has shown at Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee, at Dobrick, Oskar Friedel and Zaks in Chicago, and Robischon in Denver. A later change in life-direction, from an interest in Eastern philosophy, developed into a vocation as a Zen Buddhist monk and later as a Zen teacher. After a visiting lectureship at Osaka Institute of Art, Newhall studied Zen in Japan, undertook monastic training, and became the Abbot of Jikoji Zen Center in California. He is presently the emeritus teacher at that institution.

Newhall’s painting evolved from academic to abstract expressionism, to neo-expressionist figuration, to cityscape retro-representation, to a conceptualism based on Asian influences, to Chicago Imagist variations of faces or heads in paintings and drawings, to large sumi ink installations, and into sculptural variations. A current series of textual and atonal pattern-field paintings of overlaid imagery was recently shown at the Grohmann Museum in Milwaukee. His newest work involves a return to expressionist narrative themes and continues the focus on the head/face/bust motif in paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

https://www.michaelnewhall.com/

Emerging Artists

SARAH BALLARD

Sarah Ballard is a filmmaker and educator. Through non-fiction and experimental modes, her practice fuses personal narratives with historical research to address broader structural inequalities based on gender and class. Her most recent film, Full Out, is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between accounts of mass hysteria, the body’s capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can simultaneously fracture and heal. Her films understand mental illness as existing beyond the individual and explore how the body’s uncontrollable impulses can act as both a site of vulnerability and an instrument of resistance.

Ballard received a BFA in Film Production from the University of Central Florida and an MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened nationally and internationally at venues and festivals such as Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Crossroads, Antimatter [Media Art], Florida Film Festival, and Onion City Experimental Film Festival, among others. She was granted the 2023 Princess Grace Award in Film and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

https://www.sarah-ballard.com/

MARGARET GRIFFIN

Margaret Griffin is a sculptor whose work investigates humans’ relationship with industry and particularly the physical labor demanded of workers. Inspired by her father’s work as a pipefitter and her own foundry and factory work, Griffin utilizes weight-bearing, hazard-resistant materials and equipment that she manipulates to reference the human form. She puts the conversations between laborers’ bodies and their work sites on display, drawing attention to the safety measures required to subsist in these environments as well as our instinct to protect ourselves. After receiving her BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 2023, Griffin was accepted into Plum Blossom Initiative’s Bridge Work, a ten-month professional development program. She has also received the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix emerging artist grant. In 2023, she collaborated with other artists on a public project for Sculpture Milwaukee’s Dear Nature exhibition in downtown Milwaukee. Griffin has exhibited her work throughout the Midwest, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, and Michigan.

https://www.margaretgriffin.com/

OPEN KITCHEN (Rudy Medina + Alyx Christensen)

Open Kitchen (OK) is a Milwaukee-based art collective founded in 2017 by Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen in partnership with Alan Medina. OK stages events, installations, and a residency program that engages the public in critical cross-cultural conversations on food, identity, and ecology. Each of the programs takes shape through regional and seasonal food-related research projects, gastronomic gatherings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific happenings. In 2020, OK were invited to be artists-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. They have since become stewards of the Cultural Garden and have developed the Lynden Apiary. During this period in residence, the collective has been experimenting with methods of growing diverse foods and flora that integrate Indigenous environmental knowledge; exploring the parallels of soil and gut microbiomes; and developing a visual and sensuous language that prioritizes the sustainable, the hyperlocal, and ecological reciprocity.

https://okmke.org/

The five fellows selected in the 2024 cycle of the competition—Nina Ghanbarzadeh (Afkhamian) and Roy F. Staab in the Established Artist category; and Emerging Artists Justin Goodrum, Jovanny Hernandez Cabellero, and Nicholas Perry—will open an exhibition of their work at the Haggerty Museum of Art in June 2025.

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.

The Lynden Sculpture Garden 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. We develop programs in collaboration with those we serve, focusing on place-based K-12 education; CALL & RESPONSE, an artist-driven initiative that celebrates the radical Black imagination as a means to re-examine the past and imagine a better future; and HOME, a space of leading, coming together, and celebrating refugees through art, food, and performance. Artists are at the center of everything we do. The Nohl Fellowship, the Suitcase Export Fund, and the Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Award are three of our key programs that support artists.

For further information about the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program, 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.