I’ve spent my life in the arts, working as an editor at the Milwaukee Art Museum, earning a graduate degree in art history, publishing an art magazine, teaching art history at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, curating, writing arts criticism, and now running a contemporary art gallery.
Portrait Society Gallery began small: $200 a month for a 300 square-foot room on the Marshall Building’s fifth floor. It was low stakes, low stress—a conceptual space for thinking about the portrait as a democratic art, so ubiquitous that it lingers in wallets, hallway walls, in secret drawers, in every cell phone and Instagram account. The portrait is the art of everyone. Over the next 15 years, the gallery grew from this initial focus into a broader contemporary platform with 1500 square feet, one full-time employee, two storerooms, 20-some artists represented, six shows a year, and participation in two international art fairs. The gallery’s clients include institutions, international collectors, and a handful of prominent individuals whose names I shall be discrete about.
Portrait Society holds a similar philosophy to Art Muscle (1986-1996), a publication I published and edited. I am interested in art practices that fold in on unexpected affinities with the everyday world and sometimes live outside the art world proper. Art should push against hierarchies of authority or these forces will remain invisible. PSG supports artists with academic backgrounds along with those who did not have had the opportunity for professional art training. Our current exhibition presents Tom Antell, an Ojibwa artist who ended up in relative isolation in northern Wisconsin, decades after earning his art degree at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).
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The desire to look beyond the obvious parameters of the art world led to the founding of an affiliated non-profit (through a fiscal receiver) called On the Wing. This program supports larger, socially engaged, curatorial projects such as the current Art Against the Odds, an exhibition of 65 incarcerated or formerly incarcerated artists from 20 of Wisconsin’s carceral institutions. The exhibition, curated by gallery manager Paul Salsieder and myself, opened at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in January 2023. More than 7,000 individuals visited the show in seven weeks and more than 900 wrote personal notes to the artists. A 178-page catalog accompanies the exhibition which is touring for three years. The next iteration opens on March 16 at the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, WI. In September 2024, it will be hosted by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art for six months. (If interested in this topic, see Wisconsin Humanities Podcast Human Powered for a new season hosted by Dasha Kelly Hamilton and Adam Carr).
In addition to these curatorial activities, I write regularly for the New York-based art publication, Hyperallergic. Writing helps me think while breaking down my own predispositions and blind spots. I’ve been working on a book of essays for the past decade that looks at some of the world’s most famous works of art, asking what they might mean to us now, in this altered contemporary world. Art continues to amaze me with its power to realign histories and tell stories that have little traction elsewhere. It feels like freedom at a time defined by polarities and opinions.
Visit: Portrait Society Gallery of Contemporary Art
Photo Credit: Erol Reyal
