Surrendering to Experience at the Art Preserve at Kohler

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courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center

The Art Preserve of the John Michael Kohler Art Center sends a folksy, vernacular impression along county road PP off which it sits. It is nestled in the lap of a grassy hill west of Sheboygan, dotted with whirligigs by Tom Every, aka Dr. Evermor, and Vollis Simpson, and patrolled actively by gangs of wild turkeys. Even the spectacular rising wood-beam colonnade at its entrance hints at the raw, unvarnished creativity visitors might expect inside.

The collection at the Preserve houses work that emphasizes self-taught artists and the idiosyncratic environments they animate. Housed in a glorious new three-story building which opened in June, designed by Denver-based firm Tres Birds, the museum’s body reflects the spirit of the collection, and honors Ruth DeYoung Kohler, who collaborated closely with the team closely until she passed only months before the project was completed. The materials used are raw, the spaces soaring, the galleries quirky and irregular, the institutional presence welcomingly informal, and the overall takeaway, verging on magical.

But let me not get too far out over my skis; I have maintained a dash of skepticism with respect to the proposition of self-taught art and am on the record for it. Nothing too extreme, but as I entered the Preserve, even as I marveled at the grounds and building, I harbored needling questions about the nature of the relationship between institutional interests and the so-called “naïve” art they bless.

My apprehensions were met on the other side of a very welcoming front desk by a haunting installation of hundreds of pale driftwood figures carved and painted by North Carolina artist Annie Hooper. The works depict scenes from the Bible and were inspired by Hooper’s deep and exotic version of the Christian faith. Frozen by their gazes, I thought about nature of creative agency, and whether its origins mattered. If one is touched, does it matter who does the touching? Monotheistic gods, animistic spirits, reason, formalism, absurdity itself?

Alternative Visions

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Photo via John Michael Kohler Art Preserve

I lost myself in the ground floor galleries before I could answer my own questions, then headed upstairs where an installation, or environment, of word art by Fulton, Missouri artist Jesse Howard triggered me again. It smacked as equal parts spectacular artwork and ranting, paranoid Jeremiad. The dizzying display of hand-painted signage read like an index of footnotes referring to various passages in the Bible, returned me to thoughts about agency and inspiration … reminded of Hooper, but also of Henry Darger, Norbert Cox and countless others who were inspired by mystical, alternative, and fringe-y visions. I wondered, if Howard’s works were encountered in situ, in Fulton, outside the safety of an art museum, how they might be received? If seen from the side of the road by a suburban family nursing a flat tire, would Howard’s work cause papa to usher his children into back seat of the Subaru for safety, clutching his tire iron?

As I tumbled the problem of naïveté around my head, a curious thing happened. Somewhere between a series of works and personal artifacts belonging to Chicago Imagist Barbara Rossi, an astounding environment of bric-a-brac, furniture, and art by Rossi’s instructor and mentor at SAIC, Roy Yoshida, and the punctuated darkness of Emery Blagdon’s miraculous Healing Machine with my two mesmerized daughters, my hesitations were overcome.

My questions about designations started to dissolve into a smaller and smaller particles until they surrendered to perception and experience altogether. The integration of life, material, and practice swept me to points of origin years before and miles away. I imagined the environments like scattered little Big Bangs whose rocky outcomes failed to fully convey their original fire. I’ve always maintained that the best way to see work is in an artist’s studio, and the Preserve confirms this enthusiastically.

Depth of Obsession

Only, the studios of the artists in the Preserve happen to be barns, homes, and yards far from the art beltway. In the back of the 3rd floor gallery, my final submission came in the face of hundreds of ghostly figural sculptures by Pakistani artist Nek Chand, who spend a good portion of his adult life surreptitiously constructing a city out of stone and concrete in a nature preserve outside of his hometown in India. The depth of his obsession is only hinted at by the dozens of concrete and glass figures in the museum but do help convey a sense the real-life Andy Dufresne story of perseverance that will drop your jaw a little.  

Having recalibrated, I revisited the floors below again, with institutional questions on hold. I saw the Preserve a second time with more chest and less head, from Mary Nohl’s prismatic paintings to Fred Smith’s ghostly figures to wild and colorful universe of Eddie Owens Martin, aka St. EOM. I still couldn’t deny that the saturated paintings by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein might very easily pass for an MFA exhibition at RISD ca. 2021 despite being produced 70 years prior. As I departed, ontological questions persisted, because, well, they are legitimate. But, as the Preserve lets us know with a most delicate touch, it’s only one perspective among many. Private fantasies, religious ecstasies, spontaneous visions, moral lessons, physical struggles, and even paternal joys all merge into a single integrated lived experience somewhere downstream. Down to the glass encrusted beer taps by local artist Becca Kacanda, and the artisanal bathrooms, the Preserve gets it arms around as much lived, individual magic as any museum I’ve visited in years.