The last days in July brought out the crowds for a pleasant Summer Gallery Night with bright stars hanging in the sky overhead. This artistic weekend flowed seamlessly into Milwaukee's Festival schedule and the outdoor seating. Especially at the cafes and occasional rooftop that snugly placed the participants elbow to elbow at these tables while they talked enjoying a cool drink. In the Historic Third Ward, walking through the streets offered an easy stretch for anyone wishing to explore all and any interesting venues.
On the second floor of the Marshall Building, Zina Mussmann and Rachel Quirk glowed when introducing their freshly renovated gallery, greymatter, to anyone entering the similarly colored studio. Both artists featured new work: Mussmann filling one wall with approximately 40 tiny mixed media drawings, several with only text. Quirk placed her series titled 12/12 Turn along another wall to portray a girl in a hat seen from behind, the 12 piece phototransfer suite created multiple views of the hat in quarter turns.
Graphic Designer James Young mounted his own studio in the Marshall Building's 5th floor hallway that he named, Press5Studio. Young has worked in the building for multiple years as a graphic designer and these approximately one dozen repurposed paper collages showcase meticulous cuttings applied to paper with spray mount. The fantastical images incorporate what Young says is, “Oodles and oodles of magazine clippings” to imagine the image for the desired result where Young says in his artistic statement, “I hope you find a narrative.”
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The Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) announced the winners to the “Milwaukee and the River" exhibition on Friday evening. The event honored a memorial to Shirley Jeffrey (1933-2010) with the express intent that the art competition would acknowledge “the river's healing presence and that everyone might appreciate or be supplied with drinkable, fishable and swimmable waters.”
Out on the Riverwalk outside MIAD's lower level Brook Steven's gallery, the four winners to the art
exhibition were finally awarded: 4th Place River March by Thomas L. Janezic, 3rd Place Riverfront Photography by Eddee Daniel, 2nd Place River Path Sea by Marsha McDonald and 1st Place KK River 2 by Corey Gaffery
Upstairs in the lobby gallery the entire exhibition could be viewed with the ribbons attached to the Honorable Mentions.
Contemporary realist painter Craig Bleitz attended Tory Folliard's “Summer in Wisconsin” reception while Kari Garon was engrossed in a penetrating dialogue regarding her etchings and phototransfers at Grava Gallery. The Broadway Theatre Center hosted a free preview of the 2011-2012 show season to involve the performing arts. Katie Gingrass Gallery continued her soothing exhibition “Stay Still” while several reports indicated that more than 100 people attended Walker's Point Center for the Arts exhibition “Quiet” displaying the work of Kevin Giese, Tyler Mueninck, and Melanie Pankou.
Elaine Erickson Gallery featured Tyler's father, fine art ceramicist Tom Mueninck. His complex, inlaid vessels or and those ornamented with underglaze pencils demonstrated sophisticated techniques rarely used. Tom Mueninck said the abstract expressionists including Dubuffet inspire him. The most ironic comment was also overheard at Elaine Erickson's Gallery. There were two men intently studying a drawing by Tyler Mueninck that also on disgraced the gallery walls, an verified original artwork. After a long several minutes one rather pseudo-intellectually proclaimed to the other, “It's a copy!”
