Lynden Announces Third Cohort of Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Awardees

Lynden is delighted to introduce the third cohort of Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Alumni Awardees: Jon Horvath (Nohl 2015), Xavier Leplae (Nohl 2008), Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg (Nohl 2008, 2014), and Jennifer Montgomery (Nohl 2004). The Alumni Award, one of three artist-supporting regranting programs administered by Lynden, provides $25,000 in unrestricted funds to each artist. It also invites the new cohort to participate alongside the prior Alumni Award cohorts in the co-creation of an artist mutual aid network by developing career-sustaining opportunities for local artists.

The awardees span the history of the Nohl program’s first dozen years. As a group, they demonstrate an ongoing commitment to experimentation in their often multidisciplinary practices. Each has a history of supporting fellow artists in their roles as teachers, curators, mentors, and space-makers.

The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 W. Brown Deer Rd., Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53217. It is open to the public every day except Thursday, 10 am-5 pm. Admission is free.

For further information about the Ruth Arts Mary L Nohl Alumni Awards, please visit: https://www.lyndensculpturegarden.org/nohl/ruth-arts

The original Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists program was designed to encourage emerging and established artists to stay in greater Milwaukee, to evolve as artistic practitioners, and to contribute to our community through the creation of art. Over the course of more than twenty years working with Nohl Fellows and Suitcase Travel Fund awardees across many career stages, we have developed a better understanding of the issues faced by post-fellowship artists, particularly mid-career artists who want to remain in the area: a lack of career-sustaining networks and opportunities outside greater Milwaukee.

The Alumni Award offers a new layer of support for former Nohl Fellows by providing unrestricted funds to the selected artists, and by working alongside current and former awardees to build a program that centers artist self-determination and supports artist-defined forms of success. This extension of the Nohl Fellowship program is funded through the Ruth Foundation for the Arts Wisconsin Artist Grants program, a regranting initiative in partnership with local organizations to offer individual artist grants. Launched in 2022, Ruth Arts has continued to expand its grantmaking and outreach across the country while retaining a focus on its home in Wisconsin.

The cohort’s network-building work is facilitated by Faythe Levine (Nohl 2007 (Emerging), 2012 (Established)) and Polly Morris, Executive Director of the Lynden Sculpture Garden, who administers the Nohl Fellowship and Alumni Award programs.

The third cycle of the Alumni Award was open to artists who had won their most recent Nohl Fellowship between 2003, when the program started, and 2017. Of the seventy-eight artists and collectives eligible to apply, twenty-two did so—sixteen local artists and six former fellows now living outside the four-county area of Milwaukee, Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha. An online workshop and subsequent virtual Q&A session were offered for applicants.

Unlike the Nohl Fellowship program, the Alumni Award is not restricted to local applicants. Our work with the first two cohorts made it clear that former Nohl Fellows who have left the area are anxious to reconnect with Milwaukee and its artists and to share their knowledge, experience, and connections with those who have remained.

The jurying process reflected the program’s dual focus and its intent to reactivate all components of the Nohl Fellowship program, from former fellows to former jurors. This year’s jurors were Evan Garza, a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, Fulbright Scholar, and curator at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Irene Georgia Tsatsos, an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who previously served as Chief Curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and director/curator of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Garza was a Nohl juror in 2013 and Tsatsos in 2012.

Working with interlocutors from a national network, including former Nohl Fellows and jurors, the Alumni Awardees will meet regularly during the award year (February 2026-January 2027). The goal is to share knowledge across the local, regional, and national landscape to build a network of support that can meet the evolving needs of former Nohl Fellows and the larger community of Milwaukee-based artists.

About Mary L. Nohl

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, including the Nohl Fellowship, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center is the steward of the Mary Nohl House, a comprehensive art environment on the shores of Lake Michigan.

About the Ruth Arts Nohl Alumni Awardees

Jon Horvath

Nohl 2015 (Established)

Jon Horvath is an artist and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Influenced by his early formal education in creative fiction writing, philosophy, and composing music, Horvath’s practice has since expanded into the mixed use of photography, video, sculptural objects, and other mediums, often brought into a combined space. Horvath seeks open-ended, poetic narratives that are rooted in an exploration of how we build personal and cultural mythologies as a way to better understand the world around us. Horvath’s work has been published widely and exhibited in solo and group shows internationally.

Horvath’s work is currently held in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Haggerty Museum of Art, the Snite Museum of Art, and is included in the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His first monograph, This Is Bliss, was co-published by Yoffy Press and FW:Books in 2022. Horvath’s work has been featured in publications and websites including CNNStyle, British Journal of Photography, Museé Magazine, Booooooom, Photo District News, Feature Shoot and others. Horvath currently teaches in the Fine Arts + New Studio Practice program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

“I am excited to help organize new community support structures that don’t rely on traditionally reliable, but increasingly vulnerable models, such as schools, galleries, and other cultural organizations. I fear that if we lose any of these spaces, many in our community will struggle to make connections that will encourage, support, and advance their creative practices. I am grateful and motivated to direct energy into supporting a meaningful social infrastructure for the Nohl alumni cohort in order to expand the interactive and collaborative potential of the group.”

https://www.jonhorvath.net/

Xavier Leplae

Nohl 2008 (Established)

Xav Leplae is a Milwaukee-based filmmaker and artist who treats media as a form of public space—built to be used, not merely consumed. His 2008 Nohl Fellowship recognized his filmmaking; since then, his practice has expanded into long-form, systems-based social work through Riverwest Radio. Founded in 2012 as a neighborhood art-walk installation and on the FM dial since 2016, the station operates as a street-level broadcast commons spanning terrestrial radio, podcasting, and selective livestreaming—grounded in access, experimentation, and local authorship.

In recent years, Riverwest Radio has grown from a small weekly schedule into a dense ecosystem of original programming shaped by hundreds of producers across genres and formats, supported through one-on-one training and a deliberately welcoming culture. Leplae has also extended the station’s formal language with cameras, allowing shows to broadcast live, publish as podcasts, and archive video. In 2024, in partnership with Pacifica Radio and WBAI, Riverwest Radio produced nightly live coverage of the RNC in Milwaukee that aired in New York City as a counterpoint to mainstream narratives.

As part of the alumni network work, Leplae hopes to contribute practical, artist-friendly infrastructure: recorded conversations, shared tools, and durable templates that keep artists connected between convenings.

Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg

Nohl 2008, 2014 (Established)

Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg are a collaborative artist team based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Since receiving the Nohl Fellowship in 2008 and 2014, their practice has expanded from narrative-driven projects into ambitious site-responsive projects engaging with architecture, materiality, and landscape. In 2018, they completed Skew, a large-scale public sculpture commissioned by Sculpture Milwaukee, constructed from a single tree from their family land. In 2024, they intentionally pivoted toward experimental, process-driven making with The Amaranthine Room, an exhibition featuring a timber-framed shelter built from salvaged materials and studio remnants. This shift follows a decade devoted to exploring imagined ancestry through photography, sculpture, architectural miniatures, and The Inhabitants, a film collaboration with Tate Bunker (Nohl 2008).

McCaw and Budsberg are currently developing the Iola Woods Project: installing the structure at the center of the Amaranthine Room on family land in rural Wisconsin and exploring how invasive plant species can be transformed into creative materials through artistic research and experimentation.

Through their design and fabrication business, Current Projects, they have built a network of museum professionals, curators, and skilled craftspeople. Within the Ruth Arts Nohl Alumni cohort, they hope to share these resources and this expertise, connecting mid-career artists with fabrication support and institutional contacts to help them realize ambitious projects and expand creative possibilities.

https://www.mccawbudsberg.com/

Jennifer Montgomery

Nohl 2004 (Established)

Jennifer Montgomery’s film titles include After the Final No There Comes a Yes (2024), Allocution (2022), One Species Removed (2015),The Agonal Phase (2010), Deliver (2008), Notes on the Death of Kodachrome (2006), Threads of Belonging (2003), Transitional Objects (2000),Troika (1998), Art For Teachers of Children (1996), Age 12: Love With a Little L (1990), and Home Avenue (1989). These films range from experimental essays to experimental features, and are distributed by Zeitgeist Films, Women Make Movies, and Video Data Bank.

Montgomery’s work has been shown internationally, and she has been the recipient of many grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Anonymous Was a Woman. Since 2016, she has taught filmmaking and film theory in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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.