From left to right: “Into the Woods” at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, “The Land Describes Itself” at The Green Gallery, “Bouguereau & America” at the Milwaukee Art Museum and “Drape Wave” at The Ski Club.
There are as many reasons to like art as there are to make it, especially in the contemporary art world, with its ever-pluralizing tastes and values. It is mind-blowing to consider that, once upon a time, pre-modern European academies maintained official qualitative hierarchies, with history painting at the top and still life at the bottom. Given the current lack of such objective standards, it might seem almost futile to try to announce the “best” art exhibitions mounted in any given year. But, as I tell my studio art students, “Postmodern subjectivity doesn’t end criticality, it only complicates it and demands context.”
With this in mind, I offer my list of Milwaukee’s best exhibitions with context and caveats, noting various ways in which each served the viewing public. So, in no particular order, here are some of the highlights of 2019.
Sculpture Milwaukee
The sprawling urban intervention along Downtown’s Wisconsin Avenue was every bit as diverse as the setting for which it was designed. In order to capture the broadest audience imaginable (anyone walking the street), it featured everything from blue-chip trophies to site-specific surprises that electrified corporate spaces like only art can; most notably, Carlos Rolón’s brilliant transformation of the Chase Bank lobby. We love it! Keep it here forever, please! We should root for and support this ongoing project and look forward to its herculean efforts year after year.
Read my "Walking Tour of Sculpture Milwaukee."
“Into the Woods” at the Museum of Wisconsin Art
Tom Uttech is Wisconsin’s de facto artist laureate. His painterly blend of the natural and the supernatural in the service of Northwoodsy viewsheds is beautiful, brilliant and resoundingly local. Obviously, there are innumerable perspectives and practitioners represented in Wisconsin, to the point that a thesis show at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design looks a lot like one in any other corner of the world, what with fiber optics and all. When the dusk of time settles, Uttech’s paintings of this region’s flora and fauna will tell us more about the local psyche than the average local artist’s Instagram feed. His retrospective, “Into the Woods,” which runs through Jan. 12, demonstrates the endurance of place and the practice of painting. It’s a dedication to a life’s vision that seems increasingly impossible in a fickle digital universe.
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“The Land Describes Itself” at The Green Gallery
In the age of Donald Trump, in a socially divided nation, ideas around personal identity have become increasingly politicized. In this climate, a defiance of norms often passes as an examination of them. Defiance may be socially necessary, but as an artistic motivation, it’s usually recriminatory and often less meditative. Sky Hopinka’s work navigates these choppy waters with grace and equanimity, sifting through layers of physical and mental space in ways other artists don’t, and words alone can’t. His sequential work especially maps personal onto cultural onto geological histories with hypnotic, formal rhythm and heavy, psychic gravity. The eponymous video at The Green Gallery was one of the most haunting sequences of moving images I’ve seen in years. I still replay moments from it every so often as I’m walking by Lake Michigan, thinking about eons against the cadence of waves tick-tocking on the shore like a comparative stopwatch.
“Bouguereau & America” at the Milwaukee Art Museum
In a flattened, Instagrammed world, it seems mid-sized cities like Milwaukee could benefit by mounting more shows that dip into its local artistic flavor. It’s standard for institutions to traffic in shows based on a predictable Janson-style canon, usually prepackaged to travel. “Bouguereau & America” seemed to be about the canon as much as drawn from it, featuring an artist who sits on the thinnest margins of modern art history. The show was co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Brooks Museum of Art; it underscored the value of tradition and why institutions might cling to it. Few shows generated the turnstile numbers or gaping mouths and in the face of utter suspicion by edgier art lovers, not to mention humans who appreciate women and children. That dynamic alone was enough to make the show notable. To be fair, William-Adolphe Bouguereau might have been the best technical painter ever, so a better lightning rod is difficult to imagine. And these days, lightning rods are welcome.
“Drape Wave” at The Ski Club
This brilliant exhibition featured one of the most efficient, effective and amusing works I’ve seen in years. This collaboration between Jordan Tate and Rick Silva starred one of those inflatable wacky dancers writhing against a backdrop of Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic icon, “Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog.” The work exhibited the best of what surrealism and appropriation are capable of: pairing improbable contexts and creating something entirely unique. It was so informative that I reimagined my very understanding of the grammatical structures of comedy and conceptual art as I wrote my review. I’ve since used it as the basis for a curatorial project about art and comedy. Makes me think of a line from Brian Eno that the Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one started a band. Some art makes you look, some art makes you think, and other art inspires you to actually produce something new.
Finally, other notables of 2019 include Jon Horvath and Hans Gindlesberger’s “Street Scene” at the Ploch Art Gallery at the Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts; Jenna Youngwood’s “Firmament” at The Alice Wilds; and David Harper’s “A Mouth-Shaped Room” at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.
