Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA)

Every two years the Museum of Wisconsin Art is privileged to showcase the most compelling, engaging, inventive, and unique art from a state rich in creative capital. The 2020 Wisconsin Artists Biennial is open to all contemporary artists from throughout the state, representing a wide spectrum of media and creative perspectives.&nbsp; The Biennial is co-sponsored and organized by Wisconsin Visual Artists and MOWA. It offers cash awards up to $10,000 and the best of show winner receives a solo museum exhibition at MOWA.&nbsp; Call for Wisconsin Artists Application Opens: June 1, 2019&nbsp; Check back for application link and prospectus! Deadline: October 1, 2019&nbsp; Jurors&nbsp; Amy Bauer and Brian Boldon, In Plain Sight&nbsp; Tylonn J. Sawyer&nbsp; Curator&nbsp; Graeme Reid

2020 Wisconsin Artists Biennial

Acclaimed landscape painter and Wisconsin artist Tom Uttech has spent his entire life going into the woods. This fall, MOWA will present a major retrospective of his work in a museum-wide exhibition that will feature hundreds of works that span his entire career. From early photographs to a painting completed in 2018 specifically for the museum, this special exhibition will take you Into the Woods.About the Artist Tom Uttech, painter, photographer and teacher was born and raised in Wisconsin’s north woods. His memories and experiences have emotionally and passionately influenced his art throughout his career.In 1965, Tom received his B.A. from the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and his M.F.A in painting from the University of Cincinnati in 1976. In his early artwork Uttech felt pressured by friends and colleagues to conform to their ideals of art and was soon so disillusioned that he actually quit painting for a few years. This time was spent teaching at UW-Milwaukee as a Professor of Art and enjoying family life. After a few years he re-established himself as an artist and developed his stylistic landscape paintings. Uttech was often inspired by Vermeer and Leonardo da Vinci as he related to their design, expression and storytelling by studying their paintings.In the mid 1980’s, Uttech purchased a farm with a barn studio in Saukville and over the years slowly developed the surrounding fields into natural prairie. His love of nature has made him an advocate of prairie restoration and he is also an avid bird watcher.Uttech's self-taught photography skills date to the late 1960s and peaked between 1972-1983 when he shot and developed close to 1,100 rolls of black and white film. Working on photography and painting simultaneously, the latter came to dominate and formed the basis of his current success. Uttech’s subject matter is usually derived from memories and emotional experiences from his many camping trips in Wisconsin’s north woods and Quetico Provincial Park in Northwestern Ontario; designated reserve for canoeing and hiking, located between Canada and Northern Minnesota.Uttech has been a member and past president of Wisconsin Painters &amp; Sculptors and has exhibited his work throughout the United States. In 2002, an etching by Tom was represented in “The Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Portfolio: 150 Years, 15 Artists.” In 2006, he received a Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award sponsored by the West Bend Art Museum, Wisconsin Painters &amp; Sculptors / Wisconsin Artists in all Media and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. He is represented by Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee and Schmidt Bingham Gallery in New York City. Uttech's wife Mary, is a graphic designer. He has two daughters and a son.As Uttech reflects on his art and the viewer’s understanding of it, he says, “I would like people to understand they’re in the presence of an attitude, or an experience, or a story of a sort that has some kind of content. But they have to figure it out. I give them parameters so that their thinking is focused in certain directions, but yet they have to figure it out themselves. When you hear Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales, you can remember a few quotes, but what’s more important is this incredible spell the story casts over you. That’s what really counts, that spell. Well, that’s what I would like the painting to do, too, to wrap a spell around the viewer and then, being enchanted by the spell, you go out and figure out what the heck this is all about.”&nbsp;

Tom Uttech: Into the Woods

Take a deep dive into the wonders of the Dells with Curator Tyler Friedman.From remote natural wonder to “Waterpark Capital of the World,” Wisconsin Dells has reigned supreme as the state’s premier tourist destination for nearly 160 years. Among the Wonders of the Dells presents more than 100 photographs from eight artists recounting the fascinating history and transformation of Wisconsin Dells.&nbsp; Among the Wonders of the Dells will feature photographs by Leroy J. Gates, the first photographer of the Dells, H. H. Bennett, the great nineteenth-century photographer touted as “the man who made the Wisconsin Dells famous,” Bennett Studio, John A. Trumble, who documented the Dells’ postwar tourist boom in the twentieth century, Dennis Darmek, and three contemporary Wisconsin photographers commissioned by MOWA to spend a year photographing the Dells from their unique perspectives: Mark Brautigam, Tom Jones, and Kevin J. Miyazaki.Free with Membership&nbsp;&nbsp;

Wonders of the Dells: Curator Talk

The Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) looks forward to seeing you at its annual Art &amp; Chalk Fest. This free, outdoor, fine arts festival features <a href="https://www.artchalkfest.com/artists/">65+ fine artists selling their work</a> and <a href="https://www.artchalkfest.com/chalk/">15+ chalk artists</a> from across the nation creating ephemeral masterpieces before your eyes.Art <a href="https://www.artchalkfest.com/kids/">activities for all ages</a> are offered throughout the weekend along with live <a href="https://www.artchalkfest.com/music/">entertainment and music,</a> <a href="https://www.artchalkfest.com/food/">food vendors</a>, a beer garden, an art raffle, and free admission for the weekend to the <a href="http://www.wisconsinart.org/">Museum of Wisconsin Art</a>.Save the date! Art &amp; Chalk Fest 2019 Saturday, July 27 | 9:00-5:00 Sunday, July 28 | 10:00-4:00Free festival and museum admission!&nbsp;

Art & Chalk Fest 2019

Join Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for a look at Ho-Chunk culture. As a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a scholar of Indigenous history, Lonetree has both an insider’s perspective and intellectual insight on the historical use of Ho-Chunk culture to attract tourists to the Dells. &nbsp;Free with Membership&nbsp;

Ho-Chunk History in the Dells

MOWA’s year-round exhibitions take deep dives into the historical and contemporary Wisconsin art scene, but there is no better demonstration of the depth and diversity of Wisconsin art than the annual Members’ Show, which showcases works by 250 MOWA members hanging salon style in the State Gallery. With work by professional artists and weekend warriors installed on equal footing, this exhibition offers an invaluable look into the creative vision of contemporary Wisconsin art. &nbsp;Members' Show 2019 Online Artist Registration Information <a href="https://wisconsinart.org/exhibitions/2019-mowa-members-show.aspx">Here</a> Wednesday, June 5 | 9 a.m.&nbsp;

Members' Show 2019

Photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki discusses the fine art of travel and food photography, and his experiences shooting for the New York Times, Bon Appétit, National Geographic, and other nationally-acclaimed publications.&nbsp; &nbsp;Free with Membership&nbsp;

Food & Travel Photography

Take a deep dive into the wonders of the Dells with Curator Tyler Friedman. &nbsp;Free with Membership&nbsp;

Join Wisconsin historian John Gurda as he unites the Dells past and present through the biographies of three decisive figures who made the Dells a destination: Byron Kilbourn by building the railroad, H.H. Bennett by artfully promoting the scenic wonders, and Tommy Bartlett by ushering in the modern period. Free with Membership&nbsp;

John Gurda: How the Dells Became the Dells

Mark Brautigam, Tom Jones, and Kevin J. Miyazaki share their year-long experiences photographing the natural and manufactured wonders of the Dells. Learn about their creative processes and hear personal stories about documenting Wisconsin’s top tourist destination.&nbsp;

Photographers Panel

MOWA is pleased to announce the opening of its new location—MOWA | DTN—inside Wisconsin’s first-of-its-kind arts hotel, Saint Kate. MOWA’s inaugural exhibition, simply titled Downtown, will consider the vibrant historic traditions of Milwaukee’s core as well as the social realities that characterize its urban environment.&nbsp; Earlier this year, MOWA invited ten artists who live or work in Milwaukee—Mark Brautigam, Brema Brema, Adam Carr, Portia Cobb, Mark Klassen, David Lenz, Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Lon Michels, Keith Nelson, and Nathaniel Stern—to create a visual conversation about Milwaukee as a city of the twenty-first century. The results are an exciting visual cacophony of diverse views and interpretations.&nbsp; Three artists, Brautigam, Brema, and Carr, use photography to challenge traditional notions of the iconic and the social hierarchy of architecture. Brautigam finds merit in the city’s crosswalks and abandoned railroad lines while Carr’s charming vignettes of local neighborhoods disrupt established hierarchies when they are presented as postcards of mainstream tourist attractions. Brema, the youngest artist in the exhibition at twenty-two, takes the most radical and unexpected view of Milwaukee in drone photographs of spectacularly lit night scenes that are immediately recognizable as both somewhere and nowhere.&nbsp; Klassen and Nelson find meaning in the banal and uncertainties of urban living. Klassen’s strangely sterile and disconcerting sculptures of ordinary objects raise questions about artifice. Nelson likewise draws inspiration from the humble, recalibrating curbside trash with the mindset of a modernist.&nbsp; Michels’s large-scale sculpture of “downtown” women whimsically celebrates femininity while slyly confronting gender biases in the city’s traditional bastions of power.&nbsp; Printmaker Meuninck-Ganger and digital artist Stern have combined media to create an installation of “moving images on paper.” Their unexpected combinations explore distinctions between static and moving elements in three downtown neighborhoods. Images of cars, people, streets, and signs ebb and flow to reframe our understanding of their relationships to each other and to their surrounding communities.&nbsp; Cobb and Lenz each focus on the racial challenges and inequities of Milwaukee’s communities. As a filmmaker who has worked in the city for almost thirty years, Cobb examines her own early years in the city as well as changing relationships as seen through the politics of place and identity. Lenz’s hyperrealistic paintings similarly confer stature and commanding presence on individuals who live on the periphery and otherwise go unnoticed.&nbsp;Image: Photograph by Brema Brema

Downtown

Among the Wonders of the Dells explores the emergence and transformation of the Wisconsin Dells into what is today the single-most important tourist destination in Wisconsin. The exhibition and its 192-page catalog will include photographs by LeRoy Gates, the first photographer of the Dells, H.H. Bennett, the great nineteenth-century photographer touted as “the man who made the Wisconsin Dells famous,” Oliver Reese, John A. Trumble, who documented the Dells’ postwar tourist boom in the twentieth century, Dennis Darmek, and three contemporary Wisconsin photographers commissioned by MOWA to spend a year photographing the Dells from their unique perspectives. The work of Tom Jones, Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and member of the Ho-Chunk nation, flips the script of Native Americans being represented through the outsider’s lens and investigates contemporary representations of native culture in the Dells. Working out of H.H. Bennett’s historic studio, Kevin J. Miyazaki, whose photographs often appear in the New York Times, has been taking portraits of tourists, townsfolk, and overseas students working in the Dells on J-1 visas. Mark Brautigam’s work presents lush landscape views of the natural and artificial aspects of the Dells. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue where the photographs will be contextualized in essays by celebrated Wisconsin historian John Gurda and MOWA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art J Tyler Friedman. The uniqueness of the Dells encompasses a range of themes to be discussed in the essays: shifts in leisure practices and family vacations since the nineteenth century, the uneasy assimilation of the Ho-Chunk tribe with early settlers and contemporary tourists, and the Dells’ as a subject of both commercial and artistic photography. The exhibition will comprise new and never-before-seen photographs. The catalog essays will also reflect new archival research undertaken at the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the records of the Wisconsin Department of Tourism and the Wisconsin Dells Visitor and Convention Bureau.&nbsp;Image: Mark Brautigam, Mt.&nbsp;Olympus, Digital photograph, 2018&nbsp;

Among the Wonders of the Dells: Photography, Place, Tourism

Several artists from the <a href="https://wisconsinart.org/exhibitions/handmade-for-home.aspx">Handmade for Home</a> exhibition will be in the galleries to discuss their work. Free with Membership&nbsp;

Handmade for Home: Gallery Conversations

Attend a lively talk on the <a href="https://wisconsinart.org/exhibitions/handmade-for-home.aspx">Handmade for Home</a> exhibition by Curator Graeme Reid. Free with Membership

Handmade for Home: Curator Talk

Part of opening party that begins at 5:45Artist talk for Saint John's On The Lake on view April 25- August 9&nbsp;Image: Robin Jebavy, J.S. Bach's Organ, Acrylic on canvas, 2015&nbsp;

Artist Talk: Robin Jebavy

Of all the adjectives that might describe Robin Jebavy's large paintings, dazzling is the perfect fit. Jebavy takes mundane, everyday glass vessels and plates, and renders them in an ethereal kaleidoscope of form, light, and color. Her inspiration is equally complex. On a formal level, her works pay homage to historic seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting as well as stained glass windows in cathedrals. Informally, these spectacularly immersive and intriguing compositions invoke a sense of wonder where everyday objects transcend to become something greater than the sum of their parts.&nbsp;Image: Robin Jebavy, J.S. Bach's Organ, Acrylic on canvas, 2015&nbsp;

Robin Jebavy: Kaleidoscopic Tensions 

Interior design experts discuss how to integrate fine art into your home: &nbsp;<ul><li>Tory Folliard, Tory Folliard Gallery</li><li>Cori and Gunnar Hedman, Decorators and Founders, Wildflower Organics (Austin, Texas)</li><li>Emily Winters, Principal Designer, Peabody’s Interiors</li><li>Laurie Winters, Executive Director | CEO, Museum of Wisconsin Art</li></ul>Free with Membership

Interior Design Panel

Wisconsin’s rich history of traditional craft and modern design come together this spring for a unique, artistic experience about home. Handmade for Home features the work of nearly thirty of Wisconsin’s top contemporary artists and designers who create sophisticated, functional objects for the home. Through an extraordinary display of vignettes, this exhibition celebrates the tradition of handmade one-of-a-kind pieces as well as new methods of customized design and production. From classic to high-end rustic and reclaimed, there is something for every aesthetic sensibility.&nbsp; Time-honored techniques in furniture making find consummate expression in the work of Reid Eric Anderson, Patrick Burke, Tom Loeser, Charles Radtke, and Randy Sahli, while MIAD senior Maggie Jo Sanderson takes the newcomer award for her sleek contemporary desk design. Jeffrey Clancy, Chloe Darke, and Michael Route are featured with tour de force examples of silver and ironwork. And, modern rustic designs are celebrated in Cathy and Mario Costantini’s La Lune Collection and Dona Look’s birch bark baskets.&nbsp; Cutting-edge methods of design and fabrication also make statements in unconventional museum displays of shower curtains, wallpapers, bed covers, lamps, and more in the innovative work of Reginald Baylor, Kelly Frederick Mizer, and Chasing Paper’s Elizabeth and Michael Rees. Re-envision home this spring at MOWA.&nbsp;

Handmade for Home: The Craft of Contemporary Design 

Comprised of seventy-two ceramic sculptures of animal heads glazed in various shades of blue, A Fear of Unknown Origin is inspired by two things that seem completely unrelated. The first inspiration comes from the cyanometer, an esoteric tool alpinists used to measure distance by the shades of the sky. The second is the idiom “Entre le Chien et le Loup” (between the dog and the wolf), which describes the effects of dusk and being unable to differentiate between friend or foe. Harper’s installation unifies the two with a gradual gradient of blue and a corresponding range of expressions, from smiles to snarls.&nbsp;

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