Exhibition Honoring 2019 and 2020 Nohl Fellow Opens at Haggerty Museum of Art

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University opens the pandemic-delayed exhibition of work by the artists who received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2019 and 2020. The Nohl Fellowship exhibition, organized by Emilia Layden, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, opens on Friday, June 10, 2022, at the Haggerty Museum of Art. A public opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 9, 6-8 pm.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at 13th and Tory Hill Streets on the Marquette campus. The exhibition remains on view through July 31, 2022. The Museum is open daily 10 am-4:30 pm, and admission is free. The museum will be closed July 4-10, 2022.

This long awaited in-person exhibition features the work of Cecelia Condit and Ammar ‘Ras Nsoroma (2019 Established Artists); Ck Ledesma and Nirmal Raja (2020 Established Artists); Vaughan Larsen, LaNia Sproles, and Natasha Woods (2019 Emerging Artists); and Janelle Gramling, Rosy Petri, and Leah Schretenthaler (2020 Emerging Artists). The Nohl Fellowship program, funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and Joy Engine (formerly Black Box Fund) and administered by the Lynden Sculpture Garden, provides unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress.

More information: https://www.marquette.edu/haggerty-museum/nohl-2019-2020.php

During their respective fellowship years, the artists in both cohorts remained committed to their practices despite the climate of uncertainty and devastation created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Each Nohl Fellow exhibited work virtually on the Haggerty Museum of Art’s Google Arts & Culture site. While the online exhibition platform provided the opportunity to contextualize work in new and interesting ways, and to extend the reach of the Museum’s programming, it was no substitute for direct engagement with works of art. The Haggerty is delighted to present this group of artists with the exhibition opportunity that was always intended for them.

Two catalogues, each highlighting one of the fellowship cohorts, are available for purchase at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and online: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/lynden-gift-gallery

2019 Fellows
The 2019 fellows were selected from a field of 159 applicants by a panel of three jurors: Dean Daderko, then Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; and Jessica S. Hong, then Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.

The seventeenth cycle of the Nohl Fellowship got off to a familiar start. The jurors spent two days in Milwaukee reviewing work samples and artists’ statements, making studio visits, and talking to local artists. Studio visits began, Museum layouts were studied, and essayists were commissioned. Then the pandemic came and, with it, months of uncertainty. Artists were exiled from their studios, moving back into attics and bedrooms. George Floyd was murdered, and Milwaukee became the site of daily marches. The exhibition was delayed, and delayed again, as the Haggerty Museum of Art waited to reopen to the public. Monthly studio visits moved to Zoom, where Layden and Polly Morris, who facilitates the fellowship program, peered into the screen and listened as jobs were lost, tests came back negative, artists joined the Black Lives Matter marches, and a Fellow fell ill. Personal loss and mental distress were exacerbated by isolation and loss of income.

We like to think that each year the Nohl exhibition invites us to consider what it means to be an artist in greater Milwaukee at a particular moment in time—somewhere between the November weekend when the jurors select the Fellows and the June night when the exhibition opens its doors. Instead, during this period we were without the certainty of an exhibition, and with five people struggling to understand what it meant to be an artist in a landscape defined by pandemic and social unrest. When it became clear that a physical exhibition would be
impossible, we moved online. Artists reconfigured their exhibition plans, taped video interviews, and worked with Haggerty staff to mount the exhibition on the Museum’s Google Arts & Culture platform. Nonetheless, we lost many of the markers of personal and professional accomplishment that define this as an extraordinarily important program for local artists: the celebratory opening, the personal contact at public programs, the unexpected resonances between works by different artists in a shared physical space, the post-exhibition studio
visits from curators. That the year was not experienced as pure loss owes much to the steadfastness of the five Fellows.

Established Artists
Cecelia Condit (2019)
Exploring the dark side of female subjectivity, Cecelia Condit’s contemporary “feminist fairy tales” focus on friendship, age, and the fragility of life. Her films encompass innocence and cruelty, the beautiful and the grotesque, and they put a subversive spin on the traditional mythology of women in film and the psychology of sexuality and violence. I’ve Been Afraid, the film on view in this exhibition, is a blend of songs and the stories of women who have been threatened.

Cecelia Condit (born 1947, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American artist working in video and photography. She has shown internationally in festivals, museums, and alternative spaces and is represented in collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Centre Pompidou-Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has received numerous awards including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Film Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Wisconsin Arts Council, and the Retirement Research Foundation (National Media Award). Condit studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a BFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia College of Art and an MFA in photography from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She is professor emerita in the Department of Film, Video, Animation and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was the director of the graduate program in film for 30 years. Most recently, her 1983 film Possibly in Michigan, made with singer/songwriter/composer Karen Skladany, has received new exposure on TikTok, where a 15-second clip from one of the songs has spawned a host of videos and a new generation of fans.

Ras ‘Ammar Nsoroma (2019)
Ras ‘Ammar Nsoroma is a muralist, portraitist, and mixed media painter. His work centers around the spiritual, cultural, and political consciousness of the African Diaspora. For the past ten years, he has been exploring the world of the Orisha—African deities of the pantheon of the Yoruba people—in a series of large portraits, four of them on view in the exhibition. Each painting highlights the attributes of a specific Orisha through the use of color, significant objects, and African fabric designs; the paintings, on poly-tab, drape onto the floor, forming a makeshift altar where items are arranged as offerings. For the paintings in this exhibition, Nsoroma created sketches of Orisha and posted them on social media platforms, asking interested individuals to recreate the sketches as photos featuring themselves. He then used aspects of these photos, as well as photos of friends, to give the subject matter a more modern feel and to encourage the participants to see themselves as African divinities.

Ras ‘Ammar Nsoroma has worked as an artist, teacher, and mentor of youth for 35 years. He has shown his work and curated exhibitions at many galleries and museums, most recently at 5 Points Art Gallery & Studios, Ayzha Fine Arts Gallery, and the Milwaukee Art Museum as part of Wisconsin Thirty, a counterpart to the touring exhibition Thirty Americans. Nsoroma is an active public artist, and his work can be seen on schools, community centers, businesses, and public buildings across Milwaukee and further afield. In 2020, he was named a Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee Arts Board. Nsoroma studied at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Emerging Artists
Vaughan Larsen (2019)
Vaughan Larsen began working on the series of photographs in this exhibition as they were contemplating hormone replacement therapy, and this body of work ultimately evolved into a journey of radical self-love and acceptance. Larsen has long grappled with decisions about altering their body, weighing whether they should allow themself to age naturally or choose to feminize their figure as they see fit. These self-portraits mark a stage in that decision-making process. As Larsen worked through feelings about the “natural” state of their body, the artist photographed themself as a feminine figure in the American landscape. These vulnerable moments in nature allowed them to explore their body in a way they never have before, learning to view their current state as an effeminate form, without the help of feminine clothing, hormones, or surgeries. As they placed their body among naturally occurring forms, and asked how they’d like to be seen, the gender metaphors we impose upon the landscape led to the inevitable question: What does it mean to be perceived as feminine or masculine? In these photographs, from the series Cotyledon, the landscape bends to accommodate Larsen’s queer body, and the images queer the traditionally male gaze imposed on the landscape by male photographers. Larsen has come to understand their gender as a reflection of their soul, situated somewhere between masculine and feminine.

Vaughan Larsen received their BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in May 2019. That same year, they earned first place in the Getty Images Creative Bursary Award, took first prize in the Amsterdam Pride Photo Award, and received a Nohl Fellowship. Their work has been exhibited in Milwaukee, Brooklyn, New Orleans, at the campus gallery of Pratt’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, and with the Reclaim Kollektiv in Cologne, Germany. Larsen’s work has been written about in publications such as Humble Arts Foundation, Urban Milwaukee, and Photo Emphasis and included in the publication Witness, curated by Efrem Zelony-Mindell. Larsen is the founder and curator of That Way, an online platform and printed zine, started in 2018, that highlights the work of LGBTQ+ artists from around the globe. In July 2021, Larsen organized and co-curated Queering the Cream City, a monthlong exhibition that replaced advertising with LGBTQ+ art on twelve Milwaukee billboards. They love butterflies, the color pink, and making new friends!

LaNia Sproles (2019)
LaNia Sproles’ work heightens gestural moments of longing and quests for satisfaction that span across various methods of making. The use of collage allows for the form to be crystalized, expanding beyond the two-dimensional form. Painting, drawing, and printmaking allow her to build vivid environments that shape the subject’s narrative. The figures in her work ratify our imprinted faiths of marginalized bodies as a site incapable of credence. The viewer meets their qualm gazes, a reminder to tread lightly and proceed with caution. Swathed in patterned crop tops, platform shoes, and opulent weaves, these characters find refuge in the artist’s self-curated dreamscapes. Her hope is that their utopias harvest and protect their softness from being relocated between the lips of white men. The environments are intertwined with nostalgic emblems of shared memories and a mutual admiration for the people she finds solace in. Collectively, the figures in this exhibition activate her reclamation of space as a queer Person of Color and pay homage to the ones she loves.

LaNia Sproles lives and works in the segregated city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she also graduated with a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2017. Her body of work spans several disciplines, including printmaking, drawing and collage. The philosophies of self-perception, queer and feminist theories, and inherent racial dogmas are essential to Sproles’ work. She examines the works of feminist artists and writers such as Octavia Butler, Kara Walker and Rebecca Morgan. In 2020, she completed her year as a 2019 Nohl Fellow, continued as a teaching artist-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and guest curated an exhibition with the Green Gallery at the NADA art fair. Most recently Sproles has exhibited several artworks with Elijah Wheat Showroom hosted by David Zwirner’s online exhibition space, Platform.

Natasha Woods (2019)
Moonlight, Milorganite, and You meditates on Milwaukee’s socialist history, specifically the city’s “Sewer Socialists,” who led efforts to improve public health in the early nineteenth century. Offering a close look inside the facilities and inner workings of invisible infrastructure systems, the film outlines the journey of wastewater through sewer pipes, water reclamation facilities, and the Milorganite plant. Milorganite, a portmanteau for Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen, is a fertilizer created from the by-product of the sewage sludge produced by the citizens of the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Municipal Sewerage District (MMSD), located on Jones Island, has been at the forefront of sewage sludge recycling since the 1910s thanks to the city’s “Sewer Socialists.” The production of Milorganite diverts billions of pounds of waste from landfills to a nitrogen-rich fertilizer that is still used in gardens and golf courses across the country today.

Natasha Woods was born in New Hampton, Iowa, and is currently based in Columbus, Ohio, where she is pursuing her MFA at The Ohio State University. She programs monthly screenings with the graduate-led group Cinéseries at the Wexner Center for the Arts. In 2018, she received her BFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has screened in various spaces including Cactus Club, the Athens International Film Festival, the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee Film, ULTRAcinema, and with the nomadic microcinema, No Evil Eye. In addition to screenings, Woods has shown work at Gluon Gallery and curated exhibitions at local galleries Real Tinsel and Facilitating Situations.

2020 Fellows
The 2020 Fellows were selected from a field of 151 applicants by Kimberli Gant, then 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.

The eighteenth cycle of the Nohl Fellowship took place entirely in the COVID-19 pandemic world. Jurying, which had always been in-person, moved online, unfolding in several stages over a period of seven weeks instead of across a concentrated two and a half days. We missed the mysterious chemistry and the camaraderie of the jury room, and the opportunities to learn more about the jurors and their interests through their public talks and the informal conversations that take place over lunch breaks or while travelling from one studio visit to another. We missed introducing curators to the city, its artists, and its art spaces, and the spontaneous interactions that occur when a curator enters an artist’s studio. In the ongoing calculus of challenge and opportunity that has defined the pandemic, we also saw advantages: the convenience of completing at least some of the selection process online, a studio visit format that encouraged artists to think deeply about presenting their work concisely, in images and words, to the jurors. If the studio visits were less interactive, they were also more focused and, perhaps, a little less nerve-wracking for the artists than having three strangers invade their space.

Layden and Morris had been watching the toll the pandemic was taking on artists for nearly a year, and were determined to keep the 2020 cycle as straightforward as possible. The goal was to support the Fellows in any way that seemed necessary without burdening them with (changing) expectations. If this helped five artists survive another year, that was enough. Knowing from the outset that the exhibition would be virtual, we encouraged artists who already had projects underway to adapt to this exhibition environment by providing progress reports or creating archives rather than rushing production of new work. Ck Ledesma had already been cooking conbíf, a beloved childhood dish made by his grandmother, to gather people, but with the advent of COVID-19, Proyecto Conbíf snapped into focus. Ledesma offered an antidote to isolation by snail-mailing care packages of ingredients, instructions, and a play list to participants; what had begun as a personal act became a conversation about the effects of enslavement and colonization on the cultural landscapes of the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Rosy Petri posed a question to her community—a
community that had witnessed suffering and death: What is your message to Black women in the future? She completed twenty-five interviews with Black people of marginalized genders
and captured them mid-interview in digital portraits. Nirmal Raja, an artist who has spent her career examining global movement, the cultural and material legacies of colonialism, and the lingering traces of memory from the perspective of one who has lived in several places, turned to repetitive mark making in sumi ink and homemade gouache on hanji for Recall and Response. This linking of the artist’s inner and external worlds was also visible in Janelle Gramling’s work. She took advantage of this opportunity to experiment with performance for the camera, collaborating with filmmaker Maeve Jackson to produce a video documenting the artist’s interaction with her latest sculpture, Chrysalis. A reflection on the transformation of her life in the past year, the video also enabled Gramling to explore the latent capacity for movement, change, and response in her shape-shifting objects. Leah Schretenthaler confronted her experiences as a K-12 art educator during a pandemic head-on. She transformed the sense of being weighed down by an impossible and ever-growing pile of tasks by collecting the to-do lists of colleagues far and wide and using them to construct a monument to her fellow teachers.

Kantara Souffrant, in her catalogue essay for Ck Ledesma, references African art historian Babatunde Lawal’s concept of “art for life’s sake,” the profound creativity of art that fosters human hopes and desires. Immersed in what Rosy Petri describes as “the concurrent pandemics of COVID-19 and racism,” the 2020 Nohl Fellows did not look away. In this exhibition, nearly a year later, they offer a new series of progress reports.

Established Artists
Ck Ledesma (2020)
The intersectionality of Ck Ledesma’s identities acts as a departure point to play with the realities of diasporic life while exploring culture, history, place, ancestry, and experiences. These explorations manifest in a range of disciplines and materials shaped by the nature of each project: many of them socially engaged through the performance of culture and rooted in sharing and building community. Their practice is a conversation about the unknown effects the legacies of enslavement and colonization have on the cultural landscapes of the Caribbean and Puerto Rico.

For this exhibition, Ledesma has created BaquiNÉ, an installation rooted in the Afro-Puertorican tradition of a Baquiné. A Baquiné marks the passing of an innocent child with a celebration and serves as a festive ritual to ensure the child’s safe transition into heaven. Customarily, the event gathers loved ones to share food, poetry, song, dance, and games until sunrise, followed by a burial in the morning. BaquiNÉ is an interactive space to contemplate transitions through a joyful experience with food, music, poetry, and literature. It is an invitation to pause, to remember, to honor, to be present, and to celebrate.

Ck Ledesma is an undisciplinary artist from Borikén, what is now known as San Juan, Puerto Rico, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Besides art practices, they are passionate about serving their community while building authentic relationships and the liberation of all BIPOC people. They co-founded Cosecha Creative Space, a community focused “space” that centers connections, understanding, and building togetherness through creative engagement, mutual aid, and the arts. Ledesma has served as an artist-in-residence for the Cesar Chavez Drive Business Improvement District in Milwaukee, the Mitchell Street branch of the Milwaukee Public Library, and Casa Candela in Cayey, Puerto Rico. In 2022, Ledesma was named a Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee Arts Board.

Nirmal Raja (2020)
Memory is an important part of Nirmal Raja’s practice. As an immigrant who has spent a lifetime moving from one place to another, all things, people, and places seem transient. In this never-ending cycle of holding on and letting go, memory appears in Raja’s work as a shell or impression of what once was, or in the transformation of what was hollow into a solid object. The loss of her father in 2021 profoundly impacted her artistic practice. The connections to Indian rituals of mourning and loss took center stage in the time that followed. The studio became a place for understanding the bittersweet beauty that loss seems to bring. For the artist, beauty entered through the kindness of family, funerary rituals, and the “material remains” of her father. She utilized writings, objects, and clothing left behind and transformed them into artworks that explore presence in his absence. Material Remains- My Father’s Shirts 1, 2, and 3 were made by dipping her father’s shirts in plaster slip, then glazing and firing them to mimic cremation–the actual shirt gets burnt away and a shell remains. In the other works in this exhibition, Raja uses ritual and natural materials and memorial or commemorative actions of making to explore transience.

Nirmal Raja is an interdisciplinary artist who lived in India, South Korea, and Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States thirty years ago. She holds a BA in English Literature from
St. Francis College in Hyderabad, India; a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. Raja’s work has been exhibited widely in the Midwest, nationally, and internationally. She often collaborates with other artists and strongly believes in investing energy in her immediate community while also considering the global. She is a mentor for the Milwaukee Artists Resource Network’s mentorship program. In 2022, Raja was named a Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee Arts Board.

Emerging Artists
Janelle Gramling (2020)
Themes of ecology, gender, and personal symbolism speak through the ways in which Janelle Gramling’s traditionally craft-centric materials interact with each other within a contemporary, minimalist aesthetic. Ceramic, wood, and natural fibers colored with plant-based dyes are materials that feel basic and elemental. Combining “animal, vegetable, and mineral” in very simple and deliberate ways can highlight the narratives of each material. Craft processes reveal the human: forms that are mathematical and perfect in concept become flawed and natural when brought to life in clay and fiber. Geometric shapes are slightly imperfect, ceramic pieces warp in the kiln, and surfaces bear blemishes, including the artist’s fingerprints. Gravity, too, is an important element in Gramling’s wall- and ceiling-mounted sculptures, activating her intended drape and balance by distorting and bending the arrangement of objects.

As a Nohl Fellow, Gramling took the opportunity to work in video, a brand-new medium for her. Those months brought a lot of change in her life, and she felt called to create work that was
more personal and emotional. She made Chrysalis, a sculpture for her body to interact with. The resulting film, also on view, is a narrative about transformation.

Janelle Gramling is a Milwaukee native who has been working as a sculptor for over fifteen years. She operates her fine art practice, as well as a business selling her small works as functional pieces and home décor, out of her Milwaukee studio. She lives with her three children and their two pet mice in Bayview.

Rosy Petri (2020)
Rosy Petri is a self-taught artist fusing printmaking, photography, and multimedia storytelling in her fiber arts practice. Inspired by the sacred art and architecture of churches and cathedrals, she creates contemporary iconography seasoned with Black history, music, and culture. Part autobiography, part documentary, her work is about self-discovery, history, and radical Black Joy. It is important for Petri to acknowledge that her ancestors are the descendants of the survivors of the Middle Passage. In her art, she hopes to honor the ancestors (known and forgotten) by carrying on cultural traditions as they have manifested in her life. Her work is an offering of rhythm, color, and celebration for them.

The American Altars photo collections in this exhibition are an organic response to her 1,400-mile Storycatcher tour in the summer of 2021. After two years of staying home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, access to the vaccination and a month-long artist residency at the bell hooks center demanded that she cast off her cocoon and dive back into the world. Driving alone as a Black woman cross-country from Milwaukee to Clarksdale, Mississippi (home of the legendary crossroads, the Delta blues, and land of her father’s people), New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Berea, Kentucky, was a journey of cultural remembrance, ancestral grief, and the emotional reckoning required of Black people on the move in America in every generation. These images are her attempt to share the spiritual nature of that journey.

Rosy Petri is a mother, self-taught artist, and storyteller from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her multidisciplinary works fuse fabric portraiture, multimedia storytelling, and illustration as an act of witness. In 2019, as the 11th Pfister Artist in Residence, Petri created a space to celebrate creative traditions of the African diaspora. In 2020, in addition to receiving the Nohl Fellowship, she was selected as a Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year by the City of Milwaukee Arts Board. In 2021, Petri served as the inaugural Artist in Residence at the bell hooks center at Berea College. Her work can be viewed in several prestigious collections, including the bell hooks Center at Berea College, the Pfister Hotel, Northwestern Mutual’s Giving Gallery, African American Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin and the Milwaukee County Courthouse.

Leah Schretenthaler (2020)
Beginning in the spring of 2020, COVID-19 drastically changed K-12 education in this country. Teaching shifted online and teachers were asked to transform their curricula within a matter of weeks. Teaching has always been a demanding profession and expectations continued to be piled on teachers. The new school year brought more tasks for educators. Suddenly, it felt like everyone was teaching for the first time again: whether simultaneously inhabiting virtual and in-person classrooms, or adapting music, art, and the library to travel from room to room while trying to find new places to prep, plan, and grade.

For the project In These Unprecedented Times, Schretenthaler turned to familiar methods—photography and laser etching—to create a monument to the often-invisible struggles of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these unprecedented times, educators have relied heavily on to-do lists to keep up with their personal and professional lives. The scribbled language of each list, only understandable to its writer, has been etched onto repurposed plexi that was used to divide students and teachers during the first year of the pandemic. When lit, the etched words are transformed into sprawling and ephemeral shadow sculptures. As an artist-educator teaching in the suburbs of Milwaukee, her notes have joined those of her fellow educators, bearing witness to the tasks that have weighed all of them down.

Leah Schretenthaler was born and raised in Hawaii, and Hawaii remains a point of reference in her research and studio practice. She was named one of LensCulture’s Emerging Talents of 2018 and placed second in the Sony World Photography Awards the same year. In 2019, she received the Rhonda Wilson Award through FRESH2019 at the Klompching Gallery as well as a Film Photo Award. The following year she was awarded the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship for Visual Arts. Her work has been displayed nationally and internationally. Schretenthaler holds a BFA, a master’s degree in art education, and an MFA, and currently teaches elementary art education in Wisconsin.

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.