Exhibition Honoring 2023 Nohl Fellows Opens at Haggerty Museum of Art on May 31

The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University opens an exhibition of work by the artists who received the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists in 2023 on Friday, May 31, 2024. The artist reception is on Saturday, June 1, from 4 to 6 pm. The exhibition brings together work by Mikal Floyd-Pruitt and Janelle VanderKelen in the Established category; and three artists in the Emerging category: Siara Berry, Fatima Laster, and Alayna N. Pernell. The exhibition remains on view through August 4, 2024.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is located at 1234 West Tory Hill Street, on the Marquette campus. The Museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 am to 4:30 pm. The museum will be closed June 26-July 7 and July 14-21.

A catalogue highlighting the work of the 2023 Nohl Fellows, with essays by Gina Buenfeld-Murley, James McDevitt-Stredney, Katie “KT” Mullen, Austin Walker, and Nakeysha Roberts Washington, will be available for purchase at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and online: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/content/lynden-gift-gallery

The 2023 Fellows were chosen in late 2022 from a field of 157 applicants by a panel of three jurors: Jadine Collingwood, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Thomas James, independent curator and executive director of The Last Resort Artist Retreat in Baltimore; and Kimi Kitada, the Jedel Family Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. 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 Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties.

Eighteen months after the fellows were chosen, it is clear that the 2023 Nohl jurors selected a cohort of artists whose eyes are firmly on the world around them. Issues of home and housing thread their way through the work of Floyd-Pruitt, Berry, and Laster. For VanderKelen, imminent environmental catastrophe is the subtext for her exploration—across time and space—of the connections between the nonhuman and the human. Though Pernell’s investigations turn inward, she is using her own experience to shine a light on the “mental well-being of Black people in relation to the spaces we inhabit whether physically or metaphorically.”

Faced with destruction—of neighborhoods, ideals, ways of life, planets, individuals—these artists practice different forms of repair. This can be literal, as when Pernell captures herself piecing together torn pictures of a younger Alayna. She secures the images to the wall with fire-engine red tape, summoning an additional layer of protection in the wake of these acts of violence.

Berry, a new homeowner, confronts suburbia’s paradoxical notions of neighborliness. This is a place where white picket fences enclose lawns, while owl decoys scare off birds and small mammals, and “Beware of Dog” signs deter humans. Berry uses sculptural form and the inversion of space (am I inside or outside?) to interrogate the rhetoric of harmonious coexistence in a landscape of isolation and exclusion.

For Fatima Laster, silence and inaction are impossible in the face of the gentrification of her neighborhood. Goaded into action, she began cutting down the ubiquitous “Cash for Home” signs and, in the long tradition of artists who transform found objects (more like hunted objects) into art, she fabricated a welcome runner. In this exhibition, she invites you inside a warm Black home–a home like many she knew growing up—whose exterior is simultaneously under threat from rapacious property speculators.

Play is the technology that Floyd-Pruitt uses to make change. Although part of his practice includes an artist housing initiative in Bronzeville, an historic Black Milwaukee neighborhood, he also moves across the city, sharing “creative frameworks” that invite participation. As Austin Walker observes in his interview with the artist, his is a practice that “stains the real world with art,” identifying the divots in the quotidian landscape and filling them with artmaking. Floyd-Pruitt invites this peripatetic and ephemeral practice into the museum, popping up a toy shop and using the gallery and its surrounds as a stage for social and creative engagement.

VanderKelen reaches deep into the past to understand our current ecological dilemmas. Taking Hildegarde von Bingen, a medieval abbess and proto-feminist naturalist, as the subject of her feature-length film, she draws a line from Hildegarde’s 12th-century attempts to describe the life force to contemporary scientists’ interest in plant communication. VanderKelen also used her Nohl resources to resume making large-scale ceramic sculpture, nesting these “vegetal imaginaries” among her experimental film work in an installation that speculates about interspecies collaboration.

The 2023 Nohl Fellows come down heavily on the side of connection: across borders, time, and species. But by showing their work together, we come to understand that boundaries are defended and breached within hierarchical political, economic, and social systems in which all claims are not equal. Each of these artists asks us, in a different way, to pay attention to what is being kept in and what excluded—and why.

About the Artists
Mikal Floyd-Pruitt: Possibility Space
Mikal Floyd-Pruitt is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural producer whose work includes visual art, music, performance, and community engagement. After receiving a BA in Visual and Environmen¬tal Studies from Harvard University, he returned to Milwaukee to produce artwork and experiences calibrated for significant cultural impact. Circumventing strata, Mikal creates throughout the entire city while also exhibiting and performing nationally. In 2023, he exhibited and spoke at Charlotte Street in Kansas City, Missouri; attended The Last Resort Artist Retreat residency, founded by Derrick Adams, in Baltimore; and was selected for the Mitchell Street Arts TWIG residency and the gener8tor x Sherman Phoenix Artist Accelerator in Milwaukee.

Janelle VanderKelen: Vegetal Imaginaries
Janelle VanderKelen was born in DePere, Wisconsin, and received her MA in Intermedia Art and her MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her films have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, True/False, Antimatter, and the Athens International Film + Video Festival. Recent honors include a 2023 MacDowell Fellowship and jury awards at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival and the 2023 Thomas Edison Film Festival. Janelle is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Time-Based Arts at the University of Tennessee. She also co-curates aCinema, an experimental screening series.

Siara Berry: For the Curious and the Furious
Siara Berry is a sculptor, writer, and arts administrator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She studied sculpture and creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute and, upon graduation, received the Windgate-Lamar Fellowship from the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Asheville, North Carolina. In 2023, she completed an eight-month residency at the Charles Allis Museum of Art in Milwaukee that culminated in a solo exhibition in the museum’s courtyard. Her work has been exhibited at Woman Made Gallery, Chicago; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio; the Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend; and at numerous regional galleries. Berry currently serves as the Arts/Industry Residency Program Director at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

Fatima Laster: Interrupted: Cash for Home
Fatima Laster is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist, curator, and proprietor of 5 Points Art Gallery + Studios. In both her independent and communal practices, and with a Black American vantage point, Laster broaches racism, sexism, classism, cultural appropriation, and housing/land displace¬ment, a.k.a “gentrification” or “deracination.” She produces resistance art, disarming viewers with humor or irony as she reveals rejected or overlooked perspectives and people. Laster’s honors include the Wisconsin Artists Biennial 2022 at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Wisconsin Triennial Guest Curator (2022), City of Milwaukee Arts Board Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year (2024), and her solo exhibition, Enough Too Fly Solo (2024), at 5 Points Art Gallery + Studios.

Alayna N. Pernell: for the record
Alayna N. Pernell (b. 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Heflin, Alabama. She is an associate lecturer in photography and imaging at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is also a contributing writer for Lenscratch. Pernell received her BA in Studio Art in Photography with a minor in African American Studies from the University of Alabama in 2019 and her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Honors include the SAIC Department of Photography’s 2020-2021 James Weinstein Memorial Award and the Museum of Contemporary Photography 2021 Snider Prize. Her work has been exhibited in various spaces across the United States and is currently held in private collections including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and Illinois State Museum.