On a frigid, five degree Winter Gallery Night there might have been fewer visitors on Milwaukee's streets, although the art proved to be inspiring and added a generous portion of warmth to the Friday night event.
An early evening glimpse at the galleries in the Historic Third Ward's Marshall Building uncovered Bernie Newman's photographs at Gallery 218 where two abstract images from Wisconsin's Huntington State Park depicted the landscape in March and December. A pair of relative newcomers to the Marshall Building, also on the second floor, opened their petite gallery named Mussmann and Quirk. The two young women artists exhibit equally diminutive images that invite close study.
Rachel Quirk's mixed media figurative work, often an opaque paint on a mere two by two inches of pale rosy beige or taupe paper, portray ghostly shadows with ambiguous facial expressions the viewer questions or connects with personal meaning. Zing Mussman photo transfers bird like forms to a delicate cotton canvas. One of her larger prints she titles ConstantRendition places a summer blooming tree's shadow between two aviary forms, the gradations to gray in each simulating subtle shade variations.
Portrait Society Gallery's exhibition “The Winter Chapel: Chapel of Bones” offered a respite in the cold weather with candles aglow from Linda Wervey Vitamvas' organic white ceramic votives. Viewers were asked to light one for a treasured memory or purchase a creamy porcelain bone from the vast array lining the glass shelves on the walls.
Beneath the flickering candlelight and dimmed overhead lighting, Vitamvas' sensuous bones and oval dishes shadowed the walls below through the translucent glass while owner Debra Brehmer described the effect being similar to “dancing calligraphy.” Repeating that theme and scripted in gold on a frieze around the chapel walls was written something similar to, “What you are now we used to be. What you are now we will be.” Vitamvas garnered the wisdom from her travels in Rome, a hint that the bones eventually turn to dust, and to dust human bones will return. The meditative thoughts gave Milwaukee an opportunity to contemplate in this spiritual atmosphere before venturing out into January's freezing temperatures again.
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The dominant winter color inspired the theme to the exhibition at Katie Gingrass Gallery titled “White.” Fluttering from the gallery's high ceilings was the Washi paper work of international Japanese artist Kyoko Ibe. Ibe handmade the Washi paper used in her sculptures from a process over 1400 years old, which she surrounds herself in at her studio. Then she deconstructs Origami paper folding to its essence by sculpting reductive natural forms. Gingrass features Ibe's Seagulls and Snowflakes alighting in mass from Ibe's ethereal sculptures in the gallery, where any amount of forms may be purchased, from only one to entire collection to construct a unique personal mobile.
The Art Institute of Wisconsin in the P.H. Dye Building presented their first gallery exhibition featuring faculty members Julie Ashlock, Terri Barrie, Lisa Danker, Muriel T. Eden-Paul, Allison Gruber, Jessica Little, Mark Rooney Leslie Schotzko and Scott Taylor. The small inaugural show will be sure to expand as the Art Institute grows each year.
Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design hosted several exhibitions, including one with colored photographs from Palladio's visionary architectural work, his Italian Renaissance Villas. This Thursday, January 27 at 6:00 p.m., MIAD plans a Panel Discussion on the “Villas of Andrea Palladio (Italy 1508-1580)' featuring five distinguished scholars in the field and will be free of charge to attend.
A Saturday afternoon trip to Peltz Gallery found the front parlour filled with a large community of artists discussing the exhibition “ Visions, Voices, Viewpoints and Victories of African American Artists.” Participant Mutope Johnson explained that his small watercolors, controlled and detailed, all contained people painted with blue faces. He discovered that the “blue” related to the indigo plants grown on Southern plantations during slavery to produce the valuable dye.
The blue also uncovered meaning in the color of the Union soldiers' uniforms, the war that freed the slaves from the plantations, instead of the “blues” or depression related associations many viewers assume the color reflects. Johnson indicated that what an artist applies to his canvas or paper can be interwoven with numerous related and mysterious themes from his life that emanate completely from the inner soul.
A stop at Grava Gallery on Saturday afternoon found artist Jason Fricke enthusiastically discussing his line drawn artwork, spontaneously flowing with fluid movement, with the numerous admiring visitors. That interview will appear online here later in the week. All these exhibitions continue through January, and many into February, so when the city experiences that January or winter thaw one can find their way back to these galleries and venues for the first, or even a second time, and revisit Milwaukee's exceptional winter art.
