It’s not a stretch to say that the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists has become something of a brass ring in Milwaukee’s visual art community. It offers $20,000 to two “established” artists and $10,000 to three “emerging” practitioners, which is a great windfall in a community not known for its commercial vigor. The most recent winners are currently on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art through Aug. 5, as is a supplemental show honoring fellows from the past 15 years.
The “established” awardees are both well-respected local ambassadors. Lois Bielefeld’s work approaches the personal with a documentarian’s distance and a photographer’s empathy. The photographs in her “Celebration” series initially appear intimate, tender and candid. Something’s off, though. They’re too perfect to be slices of pure reality. And as it turns out, they are staged events. Emry’s Tea Party (2018) features a young girl hosting a large stuffed bear for tea. Like the other photos, it’s an artful recreation of an actual event. There’s no tangible “tell” to let the viewer know that what they are seeing is a dramatic reenactment, but the wizard behind the curtain will be sensed if not seen. Bielefeld’s artistic wizardry leaves in enough verité to keep us guessing about their nature and in the process addresses weightier issues about artistic authorship and the integrity of visual media.
Tom Berenz’s paintings reside in a twilight zone between process-driven abstraction and symbolic personal narrative. His paintings don’t just happen to live in between, they are designed to, dexterously exploiting the margins between the formal and the literal. He deputizes familiar motifs—gingham, plaid, floral patterns, stylized socks—in the service of abstraction. Or vice-versa. Are the stockinged legs in Bedtime Socks (2018) braided shapes snaking towards a formal crescendo? Or are they the visual literature of a waking fever dream? Both and neither; they are seen then read, then seen again, continuously unsettled.
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The work of the emerging artists is more of a mixed bag. The life-size and casually staged genre portraits of Ariana Vaeth have all the hows of painting, but the whats are still becoming. As in, “What might this unusual gift for moving paint around be best equipped to tell us?” Probably something more than stories of her and her friends eating takeout, but that will work itself out in time.
Sara Caron’s Unknown Potters, is the most categorically amorphous work in the show—an arrangement of makeshift fountains constructed of found and borrowed pottery that happens to also function as a site for ritualized social gatherings. The social aspect of her work might puzzle viewers unaware of her many other relational projects. But work that merges art and life so thoroughly has always faced this problem. Caron might have something to say about social ecology. Maybe about relational esthetics. Or the readymade. But its meta-intention I suspect is more about anti-monumentalism and archness as a form of institutional critique.
Sky Hopinka’s new media installations are 180 degrees from arch. His “Fainting Spells” #s 1, 4, and 5 transport the viewer through a series of haunting soundscapes, trippy video loops, and lines of poetry addressing loss, longing and his relationship to his Native American ancestry. With much diaristic, confessional and/or identity-based work, viewers sometimes feel as if they’ve accidentally found themselves sifting through the artist’s psychic dirty linens. Hopinka avoids these pitfalls and anything like solipsism simply by being intelligent and sincere.
The “Nohl Fellowship at 15” exhibition is a little scattered and uneven, exhibiting dozens of individual works that require greater context than they are afforded. And it’s shoehorned into a space too small to hold it, accentuating the problems. Rather than punish the exhibition for these shortcomings, though, we might instead celebrate it as a reflection of the riotous (formal) diversity of the Milwaukee art world as seen through 15 years of the Mary Nohl Individual Artist Fellowships. Because if there’s anything we can say for sure, it’s that Milwaukee’s art world is feral, fertile and fiercely independent, and anyone familiar with Mary Nohl knows that she wouldn’t have it any other way.
