Paula Crown JOKESTER, 2018 painted epoxy resin, fiberglass and urethane foam on welded stainless steel armature 84 x 108 x 120 inches 7 x 9 x 10 feet

Paula Crown has an active studio practice of drawing, painting, video and sculpture, using high tech tools and ancient techniques while committing to sustainability. Her practice is also rooted in social activism. She has been involved with the national movement For Freedoms, launched in 2016 by by artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, contributing imagery that juxtaposes the hard fact of guns against the political platitudes of “thoughts and prayers” that attend mass shootings in our country. That Crown’s home of Chicago has had historically one of the highest gun violence rates in the country makes this type of intervention timely and meaningful. In other works Crown highlights the climate crisis, and the personal perils faced by immigrants around the globe.

For several years Crown has created work to bring the growing environmental crisis caused by single-use plastic to our attention. Single-use plastic includes the flimsy plastic bags from the grocery store and expands into virtually every product we buy from amazon, the grocery store, the mall, and the convenience store. There is no escaping this product.

The image Crown uses is the ubiquitous red plastic SOLO cup that has become synonymous with frat parties and floating refuse. Crown suggests through her giant work JOKESTER, 2018, that although there is a big party going on somewhere, someone is responsible to clean up afterwards. The slick red cup—a cry of joy or alarm—sits sedately on the sidewalk, unaware that it is crushed and discarded after a rough night’s use.

The Third Ward is a deliberate site for the work. As the area adjacent to Milwaukee’s Summerfest grounds that plays host to “the world’s largest music festival,” and numerous concerts and ethnic festivals held throughout our warmer-weather seasons, the Third Ward becomes that ground zero for cleaning up refuse left behind by transient visitors.

Like all sites of human habitation, Milwaukee was founded on the shores of a great body of water that sustains life, food, agriculture, manufacturing, sport and recreation. Yet each pond, stream, river, lake and ocean is increasingly under threat from the chemicals that are released through our sewer system, the air-borne particulate matter that settles from the sky, and the tons of garbage that finds its way into the very lifeblood of the earth. Crown’s giant red cup, crafted to perfectly mimic the throw-away culture we live in, becomes a shameful reminder of how we treat Mother Nature.

Paula Crown was born in 1959 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and lives and works between Chicago and Aspen, Colorado. She earned her BA at Duke University, Durham, NC, in 1980, and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.

She has had one person exhibitions at: Fort Gansevoort, New York; Dallas Contemporary in Venice, Italy and in Dallas, TX; 10 Hanover Gallery, London; Marlborough Gallery, New York; and the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas. She has been included in group shows at: the Elmhurst Art Museum, IL; the Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Darrow Contemporary at Performance Ski, Aspen, CO; the Aspen Art Museum, CO; Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Riverside Art Center, IL; and the Manya Rowe Gallery, New York.

Recent public installations include: For Freedoms Congress, Los Angeles and Chicago; Miami Design District; Little Nell, Aspen, CO; and the Aurora Biennale, Dallas. https://www.atelierpaulacrown.com/about/bio/

Jim Dine Jim's Head with Branches, 2018 bronze with patina, ed. 2/3 / 1AP 106 x 80 x 94 inches 8 ¾ x 6 ¾ x 7 ¾ feet

Jim Dine has been part of American art history since the early 1960s. He co-founded the legendary Judson Theater with Claes Oldenburg, helping to launch New York’s downtown “Happenings” scene, where artists began creating inexpensive, accessible works that combined theater, performance and sculpture. He is best known for his use of common, popular imagery (the “Pop” in Pop Art), linking him to artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, although Dine never felt comfortable being lumped in that movement.

Dine is most properly an artist of classical taste, borrowing visual vocabularies from the past to make works fully of the present. His wide-ranging material use shows him to be a curious, restless thinker. He is an inventor, a lover of all kinds of materials and experiences. He is a witness to the events, trials and tribulations that visit us all.

Over the past six decades there have been several threads of imagery found in Dine’s work. His focus on hand tools connects artistic practice to artisanal practice, elevating the saws, hammers and screw drivers that help create the work. This use of hand-held tools was influenced, perhaps, by the loss of his mother at age 12, when Dine began to spend time with his grandparents who owned a hardware store. Another thread is self-portraits and the use of other “characters”—like Pinocchio or Venus—as avatars. Pinocchio is a vulnerable naïf with a heart of gold. By choosing Venus as a surrogate suggest Dine’s sensitivity to others, an interest in the symbolic relationships in the ancient, classical world.

Jim’s Head with Branches is not a “selfie,” a celebration of the unadulterated fabulous self as it does fabulous things. Instead Dine’s self-portraits follow the long tradition by artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, or contemporaries like John Coplans and Robert Arneson, whose works are an unvarnished document of the aging male body and psyche. Are the branches trapping Jim’s head real or imagined, imposed from the outside or from the inside? Dine matches his psychological state with his materials and methods. The work has a heavily scumbled surface, roughed up with scars, as if the mind’s traumas have migrated to the surface.

Jim’s Head with Branches also recalls the fragments of ancient cultures, from partial statues of the Egyptian god Horus to Roman Emperor Constantine’s giant head. Dine’s contemporary fragment suggests social dissociation, a self divided from its own context and time. The artist’s unflinching take on the impacts of ageing, and contemporary society’s dismissal of the wisdom that comes with experience, creates a figure at both monumental and sadly alone.

Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, and splits his time between Paris, France, and Walla Walla, Washington. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, from 1953- 1955, and received his BFA from Ohio University, Athens, in 1957

Over the past two decades, one person exhibitions have been held at: the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; the Centre Pompidou Málaga, Spain; Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung, Munich; Richard Gray Gallery, New York and Chicago; Galerie Thomas Modern, Munich; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Galerie Templon, Paris; Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, Rom; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the J. Paul Gerry Museum, Los Angeles; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Leeahn Gallery, Seoul; Pace Prints, New York; Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Alan Cristea Gallery, London; the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, with travel to three other museums; the Hasselblad Center, Göteborg Museum of Art, Sweden; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Museum of Art; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; and the Magazzinidel Sale/Palazzo Publico, Siena, Italy, among many others.

His work has appeared in group shows in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Monaco, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and at institutions and galleries across the United States.

His work can be found in public collections throughout the world, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum, London; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Cincinnati Art Museum, OH; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Dallas Museum of Art; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Sonja Museum of Contemporary Art, Kyungsangbuk-Do, South Korea; the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; the Tate Gallery, London; the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/jim-dine-1273

Paul Druecke Shoreline Repast, 2017 double-sided aluminum, paint, steel, recycled wood, hardware 72 x 78 x 4 inches 6 x 6 ½ x 1/3 feet Commissioned for Sculpture Milwaukee 2017

Milwaukee-based artist Paul Druecke explores the various forms of public inscription that exist in our landscape. From faux National Park service historical markers to poetry-infused welcome mats, his experiments replace “official” language, that fix value and identity, with alternative narratives and cultural structures that allow us to consider how our world is shaped.

Druecke is interested in all kinds of social gatherings. For example, he documents friends gathering in a kitchen to share their food, which is always at the heart of every community. In these homemade films, the casual atmosphere, low tech aesthetic, and occasional bouts of singing and laughing provide an antidote to modern cooking shows, whose high production value and sophisticated knowledge discourage all but the hearty among us.

Druecke is perhaps best known for his Social Archive project begun in 1997. The artist asked friends, neighbors, and colleagues in Milwaukee to submit one picture from their own family photo album. After 10 years Druecke had 731 pictures, which were shown together at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2017. While this snapshot of Milwaukee does not encompass our broadly diverse community, it does suggest the concentric circles that surround each of us, from home, school, and church to the gym and our other various social groups. These anonymous images counter the money-driven celebrity culture that tries to render meaningless the real relationships that fuel our lives.

Druecke’s Shoreline Repast, commissioned for the inaugural Sculpture Milwaukee 2017, borrows the visual form of a public, commemorative plaque to celebrate Lake Michigan, the most important site of Milwaukee’s public rituals. The plaque appears to sink into the ground. The shift in orientation, which reconfigures the plaque's perpendicular, upright relation to the earth, magnifies the symbiotic, conditional nature of landmarks and the culture that erects them. Each side has a different style of language, showing the difference between our public and private worlds.

Paul Druecke was born in 1964 in Milwaukee, where he currently lives and works.

One-person exhibitions and public projects have been held at: the Milwaukee Art Museum; The Green Gallery, Milwaukee; The Luminary, St. Louis; Directors Lounge, Berlin, Germany; Inman Gallery, Houston; and Project Row Houses, Houston.

Over the past two decades his work has been included in the following groups shows: the FRONT Triennial, Reinberger Gallery, Cleveland Institute of Art; The Terrain Biennial, The Suburban, Milwaukee; the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial; Marlborough Gallery, New York; Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee; INOVA Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; A & D Gallery, Chicago; American Fantasy Classics @ Useable, Milwaukee; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Portrait Society Gallery, Milwaukee; Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; Habeas Lounge, Los Angeles; The Great Poor Farm Experiment, Manawa, WI/ Blue Dress Park, Milwaukee; Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, Cleveland; Concours De Monuments II, ENSA Paris-Malaquais / Espace Callot, Paris; Steppenwolf Theater’s Explore Detroit, Chicago; Pioneer Courthouse Square, Open Engagement, Portland; Art Alliance, Austin; Green Gallery East, Milwaukee; Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany; Angstrom Gallery, Los Angeles; Berlin House, Germany; Transmodern Festival, Baltimore; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Aurora Picture Show, Houston; the Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Daley Center, Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs; Locust Projects, Miami; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Market Square Park, Houston; The Suburban, Chicago; Delta Axis, Memphis; and the Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom.

He has lectured, held residencies and appeared on panels in Austin, Baltimore, Berlin, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Memphis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, St. Louis and San Diego. He has been active in Milwaukee’s Blue Dress Park, and between 1997 and 2002 directed the Art Street Window, Milwaukee.

His work has been collected by: the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Northwestern Mutual and Special Collections at UWM Libraries, University of Wisconsin, all in Milwaukee; The Poor Farm, Manawa, WI, and private collections. http://www.pauldruecke.com/

Anna Fasshauer Tallulah Rapsody, 2019 aluminum, car lacquer 80 x 40 x 50 inches 6 ¾ x 3 ½ x 4 1/4 feet

German artist Anna Fasshauer makes Pop-ish, colorful works that bring to mind childhood games of pick- up sticks, and the performative, process-based works of first generation feminist artists like Lynda Benglis. Fasshauer’s work also smacks of the cheerful soft sculptures of Swedish/American artist Claes Oldenburg, who found meaningful forms in the every day. Fasshauer’s works can resemble totems, or industrial cast-offs, or machines ill-suited for their roles. While the works enchant us with their peppy colors, they strike a weighty balance between heavy and light, abstract and figurative, masculine and feminine.

Fasshauer’s first sculptural works, of mysterious carpet-covered forms, bounced between Surrealism and the interactive experiments of Austrian artist Franz West’s, who saw his works “completed” only when the viewer was physically engaged with the works. She made a series of works using cars as her primary image, each a metaphor for our daily disasters.

Tallulah Rapsody is from Fasshauer’s latest body of work that resembles a squashed wind instrument, like a saxophone or clarinet. The artist chose the title Tallulah Rapsody because of its musical associations. “Rapsody” (in English rhapsody) is a one-movement composition, and “talulah” (or Tallulah, either an Irish girl’s name or an anglicized Choctaw name*) means “water source,” which evokes the tinkly sound of water or a one-movement composition according to the artist.

The blue of the work was inspired by the sky in Marfa, Texas, the small town turned into an art world mecca by American artist Donald Judd where Fasshauer made the work. Judd took over an old army base to install his own work, and those of fellow Minimalist and Conceptual artists from the 1960s onward, whose experiments used industrial materials assembled in uninflected (non-expressionistic) ways to find truth through a universal visual language.

While Fasshauer’s work may mimic the classic geometric abstraction of artists like Mark di Suvero and Bernar Venet, her graphic abstraction is typically based on real people, or places, using linguistic slang and puns to give the viewer a clue to start unlocking the work’s meaning.

Fasshauer is in dialogue with these male artists. She shapes, twists and fastens stiff, industrial materials using her own physical capacity to render them soft, pliant and more evocative of the hand-made and personal. We can literally see how the artist has twisted the components of Tallulah Rapsody as she struggled with her large-scale straws—actually aluminum beams sourced from nearby El Paso—creating a cheerful piece that is both abstract and figurative. Like the wide-ranging experiments of German artist Isa Genzken that challenge the male-dominated history of contemporary sculpture, Fasshauer pushes herself and her materials as part of the next wave of global artistic feminism.

* https://www.babynames.com/name/talulah

Fasshauer, born in Cologne, Germany, in 1975, lives and works in Berlin. She attended the De Montford University, Leicester, United Kingdom, from 1996-1999, receiving her BA in Fine Art / Sculpture, and received her MFA from the Chelsea School of Art and Design, London, in 2001.

She has been presenting her work in one person museum and gallery shows since 2002, including: MIER Gallery, Los Angeles; Nagel Draxler Kabinet, Berlin and Cologne; Kunstverein Offenburg, Germany; Galerie Andreas Höhne, Munich; kjubh Kunstverein, Cologne; Galerie Meyer, Marseille, France; the Orient-Institut Beirut, Lebanon; Galerie Blech-Rossi, Vienna; Kunstverein Arnsberg, Germany; Floating IP Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom; and The Tabernacle, London.

Her work has been presented in group shows in Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

She has received numerous scholarships and prizes from organizations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Her work is in the permanent collection of Cedars-Sinai Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles. https://annafasshauer.com/

Leslie Hewitt Forty-two, 2019 technoscape film, running time: 42’ Courtesy the artist and Galerie Perrotin, New York

Leslie Hewitt’s Forty-two rewards time spent in contemplation. The artist’s conceptually driven practice creates a platform for dialogue across media, blurring the boundaries between photography and sculpture, video and concrete poetry. Although this media installation was originally conceived for a 2019 exhibition, Reading Room, it translates beautifully to this uncertain time in which we find ourselves, quarantined and introspective.

Hewitt’s work often seeks to transfix audiences through site specificity, both in how objects relate to each other and to viewers in a space, and how the ideas draw on relevant historical and cultural touchpoints at the intersection of photography, poetics, modalities of power, and the trauma of our cultural heritage. This installation, ubiquitous in form and hidden in plain sight, demands a repositioning of perspectives and points to the systems that shape our cultural infrastructures.

For Forty-two, the artist created a computer programed machine that generates concrete poetry using IBM Plex Mono typeface. Although it is software-generated, it mimics active engagement by slowly typing out (and in certain cases deleting) each word, letter by letter, on the screen via the pulse of a cursor. As each new word is added, the overall meaning transforms and shifts. The sentences it creates are legible but often enigmatic, especially without the necessary references, which pushes viewers back to the form itself—to the shape and sculptural quality of the letters as they form minimal shapes on the blank screen.

Hewitt’s work is informed by the legacy of Minimalism and she is particularly interested in the convergence of this artistic style and the Civil Rights movement. The title of this work references the lifespan of a landmark bookstore in Harlem. Books are an important element in Hewitt’s practice, both as aesthetic form and conceptual symbol. More broadly, she is interested in systematic patterns that underlie the closure of bookstores in the 20th century. To generate the words for this piece, the artist examined photographs of the establishment’s interior and storefront and analyzed their visual language to create a vocabulary.

Following in the framework of Minimalist artists who explored the principles and systems of mathematics, Hewitt (as a post-Minimalist artist) is driven to examine systems of knowledge in her own way. She is a problem solver. Her process mimics scientific experimentation in its rigorous and formulaic adherence to systems she constructs to test variations. Though the form may at first appear cold and clinical, the invitation to participate with its content is vibrant and human. By engaging poetry, Hewitt encourages considerations that are at once, mysterious, and familiar, playful and yet critically focused on notions of erasure and retrieval.

Lisa Sutcliffe, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum

Leslie Hewitt was born in 1977 in St. Albans, New York, and currently lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2000; studied in New York University’s Africana and Cultural Studies programs from 2001-03, and received her M.F.A. at Yale University in 2004.

Recent one-person exhibitions have been held at numerous museums and galleries, including: Perrotin, New York, Paris and Seoul; Artist’s Space, New York; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; D’Amelio Terras, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Olga Korper Gallery and The Power Plant, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College CCS, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and LAXART, Los Angeles.

Over the past decade her work has been included in numerous group museum and gallery exhibitions including: La Painoire Royale, Brussels; Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; the 57th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Gallery 400, University of Illinois Chicago; Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Scotiatbank CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto; Perrotin, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Pori Art Museum, Finland; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York; Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston; Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden; Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin; Yancey Richardson, New York; Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan university, Middletown, CT; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Aspen Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Bronx Museum of Art; Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea, Rome; and Maisterra Valbuena Galería, Madrid, among others.

Her work has been collected by: the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, all New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Banco Espirito Santo, Lisbon, Portugal; Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Des Moines Art Center; the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, both Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Perez Art Museum, Miami; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has received numerous awards, including: the Tangier Mentor in the Arts, Cornell University; a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; the USA Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz Fellowship; the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize; a Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant; the Urban Visionaries: Emerging Talent, The Cooper Union, New York; and Art Matters Grant; The Helene Rubinstein Foundation Fellowship Award; The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Prize, New York; and the Eliza Prize, Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Sky Hopinka I’ll remember you as you were, not as what you’ll become, 2016 single channel video, sound running time: 12:32’

First Nations artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) creates video, photo, and text works that center around his personal relationship to Indigenous homeland and landscape. He is also highlights language as a container of culture, through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media.

Hopinka switches between languages in his meditative pieces that focus on native beliefs about how individuals experience time, how we connect to the land, and the effort to bring forth ancient forms of wisdom that helped Indigenous Peoples thrive on this land before First Contact.

Hopinka uses new and old technologies to express a sensitive, delicate aesthetic. He builds layers of meaning through a collage of imagery in color and black and white, using historic photographs as well as footage from his daily life and experiences with friends and family. He honors Indigenous social spaces such as pow wows that anchor his stories about the diverse First Nations peoples who lived and managed North America for thousands of years.

In his work I’ll remember you as you were, not as what you’ll become, 2016, Hopinka documents a road trip as the sun rises in the east, and a pow wow, its images of dancers abstracted with the jingle of dresses and the call of the emcee in the background. We see a First Nations woman comedian/poet talk about her world. And we see words floating, like talisman or symbols, etching the shape of a mythical being in a black sky.

Language is a key component to this work. Hopinka has studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the lower Columbia River Basin of Oregon and Washington states. This cultural area is known for its rich landscape of salmon, and the efforts of Indigenous activists and environmentalists to restore the natural flow of the Columbia River, so important to the livelihood of its people and the salmon that sustain them.

Hopinka reminds us that there are tangible reminders of the peoples who lives in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans, and that honoring these ancient cultural traditions should be an important part of our cultural reckoning in this unprecedent period of change.

See the full piece: https://vimeo.com/166668647

For guidance on proper terms for First Nations Peoples: https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-peoples-terminology-guidelines-for-usage

Sky Hopinka, born 1984 in Ferndale, Washington, has cultural ties to the Milwaukee area. He lives and works in Wittenberg, Wisconsin. He received his BA in Liberal Arts from Portland State University in 2012, and received his MFA in Film, Video, Animation and New Genres from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2016, where he taught from 2014-2016. He taught at the University of Illinois-Chicago from 2017-18, and currently is Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and visiting faculty at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.

His works has been screened in museums and galleries including: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; the Great Poor Farm Experiment, Manawa, Wisconsin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Western Colorado University, Gunnison; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Redcat Theater, Los Angeles; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tetsuo’s Garage, Nikko, Japan; FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, with numerous other screenings in museum, gallery and university screenings across the globe.

His works have been screened at many film festivals, including: Tacoma Film Festival, Washington; Cinema Marfa, Texas; Berwick Media + Arts Festival, United Kingdom, among others.

Recent awards include: Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and Art Matters Artist Fellowship, and Art Matters Artist Fellowship, 2019; Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces of Film and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Arts, Milwaukee, 2018; Best New Form Short Film, FilmfestDC, Washington, 2017; Tom Berman Award Most Promising Filmmaker, 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2016; and the Jury Award, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, 2015, among others.

His work has been collected by: The Anchorage Museum, Alaska; the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Northwestern Mutual, Milwaukee; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. www.skyhopinka.com

Alex Katz Park Avenue Departure, 2019 porcelain enamel, steel, ed. 5/6 / 2AP 96 x 31 x 1 ½ inches 8 x 2 ½ x 1/4 feet

American artist Alex Katz has been active in the art world since the late 1940s. He came of age at the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement, animated by a group of émigrés and war veterans scarred by the war, along with recent university grads inspired by philosophy, psychoanalysis, and formal aesthetic considerations. Yet Katz’s clean, flat paintings focused on Madison Avenue and popular culture, pre-dating similar Pop works by fellow artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein by several years.

Katz embodies the false dichotomy between figuration and abstraction since he merges the two seamlessly. He is primarily known for his twisting of two well-established artist genres: portraiture and landscape. Park Avenue Departure is a very flat two-sided sculpture that has the profile of a sign. We see Katz’s life-long muse and model, wife Ada, dressed in a beach-worthy slouchy ensemble, her head protected from the sun. The patches of unmatched color on her tan pants and black shirt suggest light reflected off pavement or a passing car, embedding the figure in her surroundings. The lack of narrative— is she waiting for a friend, has she be left behind?—leave us slightly uneasy about the figure. Viewers perceive the figure like a Cubist puzzle that falls apart and reassembles itself as we walk around the work.

Katz began producing cut-outs in 1959, first on wood then later on aluminum, depicting characters from his New York milieu of artists, poets and friends. The works are only partially about factual representation of real people, concerned more with formal shapes and textures of surface. We do not see Ada’s face in Park Avenue Departure, the artist refusing us any insight into this particular figure. Katz has said his interests are “light, clothes, people,” and this work synthesizes all three.

Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927, and grew up in Queens. He currently lives and works between New York and Maine. Since 1951 Katz has been the subject of over 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions.

Surveys of his work have been held at: The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Jewish Museum, all in New York; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Tate St. Ives, United Kingdom; the Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom; the Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Spain; and The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Dallas Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. Other one-person museum and gallery exhibitions have been held in Boston, Chicago, Hanover, London, New York, Madrid, Salzburg, San Francisco, São Paulo and Zürich, among others.

Katz is represented in over 100 public collections worldwide, including: Albright-Knox Museum, Buffalo; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; the Des Moines Art Center; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of American Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, both part of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

In 2007 Katz was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York. https://www.alexkatz.com/home

William Kentridge Lexicon Medium Bronze (Open), 2018 bronze, ed. 3 / 1 AP 42 ½ x 21 ¼ x 13 inches

William Kentridge, born in 1955 into apartheid-era South Africa, was one of the first major visual South African contemporary artists to bring his politically active art work to the wider world while global boycotts worked to dismantle apartheid.1 Kentridge’s family were Lithuanian Jews who fled to Johannesburg via Europe during a 19th century Russian pogrom. His family was very involved in the politics of the country, from his grandfather’s role in parliament to his lawyer father’s fight, with “incandescent rage,” at the depredations of apartheid, which officially ended in 1994.

Kentridge explores the “instability of knowledge in the world, its provisionality.” He comments on this through the instability of his objects that morph or disappear as a metaphor for the events and experiences of our daily lives. By staging illogical events with often illogical figures, Kentridge questions the solidity of text and of images. We understand Kentridge’s goal: to up-end our understanding of reality and to question our assumptions about the world.

Kentridge is interested in the comedy and tragedy of history, and how the “…universality of laughter rather than the particularity of tears is a better way of approaching…huge social shifts and changes.”2

Kentridge is one of the most stirring and incisive artists of his time, combining artistic forms drawn from Surrealism and Dada, a deep meditation on the history of art in the early Soviet era to the stories, legacy, and ancient narratives of Africa and other parts of the world. He drew as a child, and after moving about in the theater and film worlds, he went back to his original love of drawing. The artist has experimented across forms, from flip books and stop animation to live performance, operas, drawings, sculpture, and shadow plays. He creates an enveloping world of forms and characters that are haunting, mournful, and hopeful as they look towards their common humanity.

Kentridge’s lexicon of “props” appear across his various art forms, drawn from the ancient and modern worlds, from art history, and from his own encyclopedic concordance of images drawn from his films. Recurrent images include the carrier pigeon, a pre-radar listening device, a gas mask, a war horse, and a tank to a cat, reclining nude, flowers, a fan, and German artist Albrecht Durer’s rhinoceros. Kentridge manipulates his figures like chess pieces, each move impacting how we read the next, each outcome in the game of unique.

Lexicon Medium Bronze (Open), 2019, is from a recent exhibition in New York that was based on the forms and figures from three performances from the past two years.3 Lexicon Medium Bronze (Open), is drawn from the “corkscrew” figure Open. The headless, sci fi figure tilts upwards, as if proud of its place in the world, never mind missing head and arms. Like most of his figures created for his artistic forms, Kentridge uses found objects immediately at hand, allowing for an improvisational yet recognizable object that has vaguely human attributes.

This skeletal figure may suggest humanity hollowed out by the depredations of persistent social and political denigration. As a white man Kentridge sees this devastation. He critiques the mechanisms of power in order to inspire his viewers to dismantle them or contest them in whatever ways they can.

1. https://www.history.com/topics/africa/apartheid

2. https://art21.org/watch/william-kentridge-anything-is-possible/full-program-william-kentridge- anything-is-possible/

3. The three performances upon which the 2019 New York show was based include: The Head & the Load, co-composed by Philip Miller and Thuthuka Sibsi, shown at the New York Armory in 2018; the opera Wozzeck, by Alban Berg, which the artist directed at the Salzburg opera festival in 2017; and Ursonate, the performance of Kurt Schwitter’s 1952 sound poem, performed in New York in 2017.

William Kentridge was born in 1955 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he currently lives and works. He attended the University Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1973-76; the Johannesburg Art Foundation, South Africa, from 1976-78; and the École Jacques LeCoq, Paris, from 1981-88.

Recent major exhibitions of his work include Thick Time which opened at Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 2016 and travelled to subsequent venues including the Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen, and the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, Germany, in 2017. In 2016 his 500 meter frieze Triumphs and Laments was presented along the banks of the Tiber River in Rome. Notes Towards a Model Opera, shown at the Ullens Center in Beijing, 2015, travelled as Peripheral Thinking to The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 2016. A major traveling exhibition, Fortuna, toured multiple venues in Latin America from 2012-2015. Kentridge has participated in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1997, 2002, and 2012; and his work was presented in the Venice Biennale in 1993, 1999, 2005, and 2015.

Kentridge is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities including Yale University, New Haven, and the University of London. In 2012 he presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. In 2013 he served as Humanitas Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art at Oxford University, and Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of Rochester, New York. In 2015 he was appointed an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy in London. In 2017 he received the Princesa de Asturias Award for the Arts, Spain, and in 2018, the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize, Italy. Previous awards include the Kyoto Prize, Japan, 2010; the Oskar Kokoschka Award, Vienna, 2008; the Kaiserring Prize, 2003; and the Sharjah Biennial 6 Prize, 2003, among others. In 2009 he was on Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people in the world. https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/49-william-kentridge/

Julian Opie Natalie walking, 2016 LED double-sided monolith 82 5/8 x 35 3/8 x 11 ¾ inches 7 x 3 x 1 feet

Julian Opie has been making art work rooted in the world around him—buildings, animals, places, and people—for over three decades. His paintings, sculpture, video, and “moving” portraits draw from ancient Egyptian portraiture, Japanese woodblock prints, Old Master portraits, public signage, and 1960s Pop Artists such as Patrick Caulfield and Roy Lichtenstein. He balances realism and abstraction while using new and traditional technologies to challenge those traditions.

Opie explores the unique rhythms of the city through his animated light box works like Nathalie walking, 2016. In his trademark style, Opie captures the way we present ourselves to the world—the tilt of the head for attitude, the donning of clothes to express aspiration or social-economic status, the accoutrements to show profession or affiliation. He acknowledges what is common about humans but preserves what is unique in each.

Nathalie walking shows a young woman wearing a fashionably youthful short skirt, her hair in a tight bun that suggests control. We build our own narrative about Nathalie; she is a purposeful woman who is serious about her life but playful about her wardrobe. By placing Nathalie outdoors the viewer asks: do young women feel safe in public space? How do we gaze at total strangers walking through the city? Can clothing truly be individual, or, as we learned in The Devil Wears Prada, how much are we shaped by the decisions and choices of others?

For a recent exhibition in New York, the artist revealed that he has been concerned with the homogenization of our cities through globalization. Although the internet has allowed us to expand to sample the world and “curate” our own lives and spaces, the corporatization of our public spaces, clothing, vacation, and lifestyle choices shows we still choose from a pre-existing menu. We are simultaneously trying to create a unique self while panicked by “f.o.m.o.”—fear of missing out—that prompts us to conform to what is trending. Opie fights the drive for sameness through the small nuances of his figures.

Opie uses the technology of life-size light boxes so his characters stand out in different climactic conditions—in the fog of morning, the bright glare of high noon, in the shadowy colors of dusk, or the tinted midnight sky. The artist has said “We use vision as a means of survival and it’s essential to take it for granted in order to function, but awareness allows us to look at looking and by extension look at ourselves and be aware of our presence.”

Julian Opie was born in 1958 and currently lives and works in London. He attended Goldsmiths College, London, graduating in 1982.

One person exhibitions have been staged at the: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia and F1963, Busan, South Korea in 2018; National Portrait Gallery, London, the Suwon Ipark Museum of Art, South Korea, and the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China, all in 2017; the Kunsthalle Helsinki, Finland, 2015; the Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow [MoCAK],Poland, in 2014; the National Portrait Gallery, London, 2011; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern [IVAM], Spain, 2010; Museum of Applied Arts [MAK], Vienna, 2008; museo y centro de arte contemporáneo [CAC] de Málaga, Spain, 2006; Neues Museum, Nuremberg, Germany, 2003;Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2001; Kunstverein Hannover, Germany, 1994; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts [ICA], London, in 1985.

His work has been included in group exhibitions at the following: Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio, 2019; 'This Is Not The Reality. What Kind Of Reality?,' the 57th Venice Biennale, Italy, 2017; the Institute of Contemporary Art [ICA], Boston and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2016; Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2014; Tate Britain, London, 2013; the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] New York, and the Shanghai Biennale, 2006; the 8th and 11th Biennials of Sydney, Australia, in 1990 and 1998; Newport Art Museum, Newport Beach, California, 1990; documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987; and the XIIème Biennale de Paris, 1985.

Public projects can be seen: at the Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, 2018; Carnaby St, London, Taipei, Taiwan and Tower 535, Hong Kong, in 2016; Takamatsu City, Japan, 2015; PKZ headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland, 2014; Calgary, Canada, 2012; La Jolla Village, California, 2013; Seoul Square, Seoul, South Korea, 2009; Indianapolis, Indiana, 2006; Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, 2007; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 2004.

His design for the band Blur’s album “Best of Blur,” 2000, was awarded the Music Week CADS for Best Illustration in 2001. https://www.julianopie.com/

Roxy Paine Cleft from the series Dendroids, 2018 304 stainless steel rolled plate, pipe, rod, concrete 444 x 550 x 480 inches

Roxy Paine is one of his generation’s most inventive conceptual artists, whose practice revolves around the impact of modern human technologies on nature, including human nature. He creates facsimiles of natural forms (trees, mushrooms), which allow us to ask about the deep connections we have to the other species of our planet.

Paine is most celebrated for his series of haunting silver trees based on the branching habits of cells. Each branching “tree” is wildly unique, some grasping for the sun’s embrace, some rooted stoically to a site that can no longer nourish them. While nature is at the heart of the Dendroid series, Paine’s works suggest the human figure. Ultimately we see how the microcosm is repeated in the macrocosm, and how humans are part of nature.

Cleft is the latest in the artist’s Dendroid series, and one of the only pieces the artist has created purely for himself. The tree is cleaved down the center, “V”-trimmed down the middle by an arborist, cutting away at the tree’s heart to accommodate power lines. As biologists reveal more about the complex network of communication and nutrient-sharing that goes on underground between trees of one species, the more this brutalized tree evokes sympathy. Paine honors the hidden life of trees while suggesting the invisible damage we do to them—and, by association, to each other.

While Paine’s work appears clean and minimal, there is a complex network of support structures beneath the dirt that holds the tree upright—a massive concrete base, robust bolting mechanism, rebar. The work is also grounded to avoid attracting lightning—as any tall tree might. Installation requires six people approximately five days to install, two lifts, welding equipment, a water tank, and active security around the perimeter to protect the piece, the installation team and the public.

Roxy Paine was born in New York in 1966, and lives and works between New York and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He studied at the Pratt Institute, New York, and the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Over the past two decades, one-person exhibition of his work have been held at: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Villa Panza, Varese, Italy; Madison Square Park, New York; the Portland Museum of Art; the Aspen Art Museum; the Rose Art Museum, Boston; the De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, The Netherlands; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and the Lunds Kunshall, Sweden. He has been included in group shows across the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Germany, France, Denmark, Canada and Australia.

His work is included in the collections of: The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Meijer Sculpture Garden, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Wanås Art, Knislinge, Sweden; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the St. Louis Art Museum; the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and many others. http://roxypaine.com/about

Beverly Pepper Curvae in Curvae, 2013-18 Cor-Ten steel, ed. 3/3 106 ¾ x 118 1/8 x 90 ¾ inches 8 ¾ x 9 ¾ x 7 ½ feet

Beverly Pepper had a long and extraordinary career. Like her contemporaries Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson, Pepper forged a unique path as a mid-century feminist artist. She worked against the prevailing attitude towards women making big, physically demanding art. Pepper learned to weld by working in actual factories, and there is increasing recognition that she was, indeed, the first American artist to work with Cor-ten steel.* Pepper reveled in both the built and rural environment, drawing energy and imagery that connected her work to the continuity of human life.

Pepper started her art training in painting and industrial design in New York before World War II. She moved to Paris after the war, and through her studies and travel, was exposed to the richness of the world’s cultures. She abandoned painting by the 1960s, and was one of the pioneers of large-scale outdoor Earth works, art that escaped the clean spaces of museums, shaping our experience in and of the landscape. Pepper was also a leading artist in creating large-scale, muscular indoor and outdoor sculptures, using the materials of industry to evoke ancient totemic forms from ancient cultures from around the globe.

Pepper moved permanently to Italy in the 1950s, first from her own artistic interests, but stayed because of the work she and her journalist husband embarked upon at a time of great change and promise on the continent. Pepper’s work is infused with the colors and history of her Umbrian home, and while she is not as well-known as her American contemporaries due to her living and working abroad, her location allowed her to develop a distinctive vocabulary.

Pepper’s goal was to dominate the materials of the earth—metal and stone—so that they took on a personality and texture that runs counter to the neutral face of modern architecture. She held in tension the forms of culture using the materials of nature; she held in tension the past while suggesting the future.

Curvae in Curvae uses the Latin feminine word curvae, singular of curvus, or bent, curved. There is something languid about the work, like a tender shoot snaking out of the earth and curling back down into it. Pepper is able to balance the deep earthy tinge of the work’s surface while suggesting the freshness of nature in the spring.

*https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/beverly-pepper-marlborough-contemporary- 1470469?fbclid=IwAR2MMPuKzE4eO1QcfRFGJMLwc48PCCJ2NMlwuEvyhaq9v9drzQpf9xN6yq8

Beverly Pepper was born in New York in 1922, and passed away in 2002. She lived between Todi, Italy and New York. She studied in Paris in 1949 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière; attends classes with André L’Hôte at the studio of Fernand Léger. She received her Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1982; and her Doctorate of Fine Arts from The Maryland Institute, Baltimore, in 1983. She also studied at the Accademico di Merito, Accademia di Belle Artist in Perugia, Italy in 1987.

Pepper has had one-person museum exhibitions at: Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park - Grand Rapids, Michigan; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia; The Graduate Center, the City University of New York; Studio Art Center International, Florence, Italy; Caja de Ahorros del Mediterràneo, Majorca, Spain; and Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey; the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Piazza Maggiore Mostra, Todi, Italy; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Palais Royal, Paris; the Princeton Art Museum, New Jersey; Dag Hammarskjold Plaza Sculpture Garden, New York; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York, among others.

Her work is held in public collections of: the Albertina Museum, Vienna; ART/OMI Sculpture Park, Ghent, New York; the Barcelona Museum of Modern Art, Spain; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Dallas Museum of Art; the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Fattoria Celle, Pistoia, Italy; the Florence Museum of Art and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence, Italy; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Galleria Civica d'Arte, Turin, Italy; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; the Detroit Institute of Art; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Arboretum, Washington; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Instituto Italiano de Cultura, Stockholm, Sweden; the Jerusalem Foundation, Israel; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museu d’Arte Contemporari de Barcelona, Spain; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan; Neo-hodos, Adachi-ku Machizukuri, Tokyo; the Power Institute of Fine Art, Sydney; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; The Jewish Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Weizmann Institute, Rehovath, Israel, among many others.

The artist was commissioned for site-specific works in: Assisi, Italy; Atlanta; Barcelona; Brooklyn; Buffalo; Calgary, Canada; Cassino, Italy; Dallas; Dartmouth, New Hampshire; Denver; Detroit; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Irvine, California; Kansas City; Kitakyusha-city, Japan; L’Aquila, Italy; Memphis; Mercerville, New Jersey; Minneapolis; Narni, Italy; New York; Princeton, New Jersey; New Smyrna, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; San Anselmo, California; Sacramento; San Diego; Southfield, Michigan; Spoleto, Italy; Todi, Italy; Tokyo; Toledo, Ohio; Torgiano, Italy; and Vinsebeck, Germany, among others.

In 2013 Pepper received the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in in Sculpture Award. In 1994 she received the Women’s Caucus for the Arts’ Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts, and alongside numerous other awards in recognition of her career. http://www.beverlypepper.net/sculpture

Thomas J. Price Within the Folds (Dialogue I), 2020 cast silicone bronze, ed. 2 108 x 27 x 27 inches 9 x 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ feet

Multi-media British artist Thomas J. Price is known for his experimentation across diverse media including film, performance, photography, and sculpture. His work is deeply philosophical, the artist often referring to ancient culture to probe its influence on contemporary Western art and society. While Price’s work is very specific to his time, place and background, there are broad ramifications as he questions our narrow conception of who shapes our world.

The underlying theme that links across his bodies of work is the subconscious bias that humans share. For example, in a series of photographs Price manipulates art history books of classic Greek sculpture. He folds and overlays images to tell his own subtle narratives, reflecting the times we live in today. In a series of stop animation videos, Price mimics the way that archaeologists imagined our ancient ancestors. Price’s plasticine figures are not ancient homo sapiens or Neanderthals, but rather, black male figures whose hairstyles betray them as contemporaries. Price suggests how outdated assumptions about black men, shaped by 19th century scientific experiments, restricts the real lives of contemporary men of color.

Most recently Price has focused on traditional forms of figurative sculpture to challenge our assumptions about public monumentation. In Within the Folds (Dialogue 1), 2020, the artist’s most recent work, Price hacks into the tradition of public sculpture of almost exclusively male generals, patricians, and noblemen by presenting a black British man, standing in comfortable fashion-forward sportswear, and looking into space. Price has created a series of these portraits of idealized black male subjects, drawn from an area of London with a large Caribbean diasporic community.

Price’s title, Within the Folds (Dialogue 1), suggests that Price is bringing his figure “into the fold” of art history, but also shows his facility in rendering fabric in a hard material. Dialogue 1 suggests Plato’s Dialogues, whereby the philosopher used the format of give-and-take discussion to educate his students and readers on complex topics. Price’s first bronze, clothed figure created was New Drape, from the Angell Town series of 2011, was intended to create a “…reverence to a different (contemporary) form of clothing and “type” of individual…”.

Like many artists of the late 20th and 21st centuries, Price moves beyond the traditional public art narratives of community or nation-building by presenting us with our neighbor, someone whose history is often buried beneath the prejudices of our time. His “art history hack” is part of the contemporary impulse by women, artists of color, and artists of different sexual orientation to simultaneously celebrate and critique art of the past in order to insert new narratives of life into our shared spaces.

Plato, Greek, 429?-347 B.C.E. from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

Thomas J. Price was born in London in 1981, where he currently lives and works. He received his Art Foundation Btec diploma from Camberwell College of Art and Design, London, in 2001; his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art, London, in 2004; and his Master of Fine Arts, Royal College of Art, London, in 2006.

Over the past decade he has had one person exhibitions at: Hales Project Room, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Hales Gallery, London; Studio FCA, London; Harewood House, Leeds; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom; and MacBirmingham in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

His work has been included in groups exhibitions at various museums and galleries including: Sculpture in the City, London; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Hales Gallery, London; Rennie Museum, Vancouver; East London Sculpture Trail, United Kingdom; Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids; ASC Gallery, London; The Royal Academy of Art, London; British School at Rome, Italy; Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton, United Kingdom; Tricycle Short Film Festival, London; Cork Film Center, Ireland; Andipa Gallery, London; among others.

In 2010 Price was awarded the Arts Council England’s Helen Chadwick Fellowship, and featured in the BBC Three documentary “Where is Modern Art Now?”, and from 2004 to 2006 he received the Sir John Cass Foundation Scholarship. He has work in the Government Art Collection, United Kingdom and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, among others. http://www.thomasjprice.com/

Carlos Rolón Gild the Lily (Caribbean Hybrid I, II, III), 2019 vinyl, adhesive 516 x 540 x 504 inches Commissioned for Sculpture Milwaukee 2019

Carlos Rolón is known for his socially-active practice that engages audiences in bright, expressive, multi- layered installations, paintings, and sculpture that use gold leaf, mirrored glass, tile, and iron. In addition to more traditional art forms however, he has also created playful nail designs in boutiques staged in galleries and at art fairs; decorated cars like the Latino Kustom Kulture tradition of the American south west; and most recently, decorated a basketball pink with bright green palm fronds as a fund raiser for re- building basketball courts in Puerto Rico. Rolón’s expressive works reach into pop culture and daily life and challenge the spare tradition of post-war Minimalism and Conceptual art.

Rolón is explicit about his own cultural in-betweenness. He is first generation Puerto Rican-American, and uses natural forms and social traditions as a way to explore overlapping political and cultural histories. He references the vernacular architecture and design of Puerto Rico, pointing to the island’s history of immigration, colonization, sugarcane production, industrialization, and tourism. In recent projects in Puerto Rico and New Orleans, Rolón used the decorative iron fences brought to Puerto Rico and the American south by African slaves, and the tiles, macramé, and mirrors of tourist hotels and impoverished Caribbean homes to explore common human desire for beautiful space. Just as all landscapes hold their histories within them, Rolón embeds history through his use of luxe and common materials.

For Sculpture Milwaukee, Rolón has sheathed the outside of the lobby cube of the Chase Bank building with a translucent diorama of tropical flowers, making the “bird cage” lobby the largest sculpture in the region.

The choice of the Chase Bank lobby is specific. The modernist cube is emblematic of the urban renewal and revitalization schemes that took place across the country in the post-war period. The International style of architecture, redolent of the idealism of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, reminds us how post- war America salvaged the style as a marker of our own global power. As a resident of Chicago, Rolón grew up with the dreams and problems of urban life.

By turning the transparent lobby into a glowing jewel box Rolón’s installation will be like a flame that attracts us to a key city intersection, where east meets west, north meets south, and where water meets street. Rolón’s unexpected cube will connect to the summer sky, the blue water of the Milwaukee river and concrete that flows beneath and through the lobby space. Rolón’s luminous beacon signals the reinvigorated vibrancy of our downtown.

Rolón was born in 1970 in Chicago to Puerto Rican parents. He graduated from Columbia College, Chicago, in 1989. One person exhibitions have been held at: the New Orleans Museum of Art; Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Chicago Cultural Center, Peal Lam Gallery, Singapore; Rockford Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Galerie Henrik Springmann, Cologne; Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York; The Dallas Contemporary; Salon 94, New York; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; Deitch Projects, New York; Emily Murphy Contemporary, Madrid; Contemporary Arts Society, Rome; the Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; The Bathhouse/Shiraishi Contemporary, Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others.

He has been awarded Artist-in-Residence grants at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New Orleans; the instituto Bueno Bisa, Curacao Center for Contemporary Art, The Netherlands; the Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom; and the National Museum, Nairobi, Kenya. His work is included in the collections of: the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; the Brooklyn Museum and Museum del Barrio, New York; the City of Chicago; Collection Vanmoerkerke, Oostende, Belgium; the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan; the Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine; the Yuz Art Foundation, Shanghai; and the Daegu Museum, South Korea, among others. www.carlosrolon.com

Maggie Sasso Too Much Sea for Amateurs—Marooned, 2016 outdoor rated coated polyester fabric, conduit pipe, pipe connectors and feet, Velcro 180 x 144 x 108 inches 15 x 12 x 9 feet

Milwaukee-based artist Maggie Sasso is interested in the unique culture that exists along the shores of Lake Michigan. She explores the myths, legends, and metaphors of maritime culture, and how they represent the fragility of life. Her diverse background in craft, woodworking and metalsmithing has allowed her to create a wide array of objects, from the flags and semaphores used to guide ships to clothing inspired by nautical wear.

In her piece Too Much Sea for Amateurs—Marooned, 2016, Sasso has recreated the 1926 Art Deco Coast Guard station along Milwaukee’s harbor breakwater. While the building seems like a toy miniature from a distance, the building is enormous, isolated, and dangerous to get to from land or water. Sasso’s work recalls the work of our forbearers, their hard work and sacrifice in trying to tame the lake while protecting those on land.

Maggie Sasso was born in Almo, Kentucky, in 1983. Sasso received her MA and MFAs from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and her BFA from Murray State University, Kentucky, in 2006.

She has had one-person exhibitions at the: James Gallery, Madison; Bolivar Art Gallery, Lexington, KY; Doppler PDX Gallery, Portland; and in Milwaukee, at Gallery 2622 and 10th Street Gallery. Her collaborative work with artist Karen Ginther has been shown at the Commonwealth Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, with an outdoor component funded by a grant from BLINK!

Her work has been included in group shows at: the Frederick Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design; the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts, Cedarburg; Var Gallery, Milwaukee; the Ruth Davis Design Center, Madison; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Effjay Projects, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, the Frederick Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Ayzha Fine Arts, 10th Street Gallery, Makerspace, Hide House, MARN Gallery and the Jazz Gallery, Milwaukee; the Archer Gallery, Vancouver, Washington; the Hoffman Gallery, Portland; Lydia Panas, Reading, Pennsylvania; Carroll University, Waukesha, Wisconsin; the Haystack School of Craft, Deer Isle, Maine; the Appalachian Center for Craft, Smithville, Tennessee; Saskatchewan Craft Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada; the Racine Art Museum Wustum, Wisconsin; and Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago.

She received a Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists grant in 2015, a travel grant from the Hawaii Artist Collaborative in 2012, a Brooks Scholarship from Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass, Colorado; and a travel grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009, among other awards. www.maggiesasso.com

Tony Tasset Blob Monster, 2010 fiberglass 96 x 96 x 96 inches 8 x 8 x 8 feet

Over the past three decades, multi-media artist Tony Tasset has created several related major bodies of work. Early in his career he explored the post-modern impulse to make art about art—by making art about art. Tasset showed his love and passion for both the post-modern copies and the modern originals, his references ranging across artistic generations, using traditional and contemporary materials.

Tasset’s area of focus turned to identity politics alongside a broad art world press for more diversity and equity in our cultural realm. This push, led by women, people of color, artists of different sexual orientation, and immigrants, challenged how we see authority and authenticity, making room for narratives beyond our worship of the hero-conqueror model of history. Tasset made work about his own middle class, white male life, exposing the personal inside the larger context of the political.

Tasset’s more recent vein of work is of surreal, large-scale sculptures that draw imagery from American popular culture. Tasset pulls ideas and inspiration from music, literature, movies, amusement parks, and public swimming pools, his polyglot interests putting high and low art forms on the same playing field. From giant pumpkins cast from a state fair winner to melting snowmen encrusted with shared of shiny glass, Tasset reflects the realities and disappointments of the American dream.

Tasset’s giant sci-fi Blob Monster, 2009, recalls The Blob, a 1958 movie, featuring Steve McQueen in his debut. The Blob was about a creeping menace that could not be stopped, a post-war parable about the Cold War. The figure’s sad droopy face looks like a child’s toy left out in the sun too long. Tasset’s monster refers to the monsters inside of us, or perhaps the untouchable forces of culture, both large and small, that define our world.

Tasset uses iconographic imagery, recontextualizing familiar objects in a scale that can compete with architecture. In light of the current pandemic, Blob Monster embodies an unstoppable force that we human must band together to stop.

Tony Tasset was born in Cincinnati in 1961, and currently lives and works between Sawyer, Michigan, and Chicago. He received his B.F.A. from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in 1983, and his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he taught from 1986 until 2017. Tasset has received the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, among others.

Recent one-person exhibitions have been held at: Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, Berlin and Leipzig, Germany; The Suburban, Milwaukee; Leo Koenig, New York; Rochester Arts Center, MN; Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; VonZweck Gallery, Chicago; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; Feigen Contemporary, New York; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago; Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Institute of Visual Arts (inova), Milwaukee; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Galeria Pedro Oliveira, Porto, Portugal; Shedhalle, Zürich, Switzerland; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Birmingham, MI; Feature Gallery, New York and Chicago; and Christine Burgin Gallery, New York.

His work has been featured in groups show, including: FRONT Triennial, Cleveland, 2018; the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Smart Art Museum, Chicago; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; the Elmhurst Art Museum, IL; the Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, IL; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL; Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthaus Essen, Germany; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berman, Germany; Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Art Institute of Chicago; PS1 / MoMA, Long Island City, NY; Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Italy; and Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, among many others.

Tasset’s work appeared in Sculpture Milwaukee 2017 and 2018.

His work can be found in the collections of: the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; Laumeier Sculpture Park, St Louis; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Nathan J. Manilow Sculpture Park, University Park, IL; the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Pittsburgh; and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany.

Tasset’s large-scale sculptures are on permanent public view at the Art Trail at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Sony Pictures Studios, Culver City, CA; and public plazas in Chicago, Cleveland, and Dallas, among other cities. http://tonytasset.info/cv.html

Nari Ward Apollo/Poll, 2017 steel, wood, vinyl, LED lights 360 x 144 x 48 inches 30 x 12 x 4 feet Originally presented and commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park, New York

New York-based artist Nari Ward is a bricoleur. He recuperates left-over objects and images from his walks around New York, particularly his Harlem neighborhood, and breathes new life into them in sometimes elegiac, something shocking juxtapositions. These objects range from furniture and tools to a child’s crib. Ward honors how these objects become part of our lives, and end as talismans of a time and place that no longer needs them. These objects speak of loving care by their owners as well as of the unseen forces that end in displacement and abandonment. He is interested in “cultural identity, social progress, material histories and a sense of belonging.”

Ward explores themes and imagery from African American culture, sports, politics, and place. He investigates the power and hidden histories of objects, embracing this past while allowing them to resonate with today’s politics. The artist uses African and African-American traditions—weaving, wrapping, recycling—that embrace old and new, that show us how the flavor the past colors how we live in the present. There is often an air of melancholy, of meaning slipping away in his sculptures, but Ward’s goal is to bring them back to us with lessons of the past.

Ward’s most recent show played with visual tropes of outdoor structures: signage, lawn ornaments, playgrounds, and monuments. Apollo/Poll in an homage to the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, epicenter of Black Renaissance fueled by the Great Migration from the South to the North between 1910 and 1970. The sign, commissioned by the Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, reflects Ward’s rumination on enterprise and the “…art of self-promotion, performance, originality, and the meaning of communal acceptance.” The Apollo was founded in 1914 as Hurtig and Seamon’s New Burlesque Theater that did not allow African Americans as patrons or performers. In 1934 the name changed, and the owners marketed specifically to African Americans. Apollo, the Greek god of light, healing, music and truth, is an appropriate name for this cultural site, which has withstood profound cultural shifts over the past 100 years. Apollo/Poll holds particular resonance in our historical moment, when belonging, access, and community are under attack. While the Apollo’s audience members get to vote for their favorite acts on Amateur Night at the Apollo, voter suppression tactics like gerrymandering and voter i.d. laws are designed explicitly to suppress participation in the democratic process by people of color. By linking entertainment to voting, Ward suggests that the distractions that waste our time mask the truly nefarious things happen around us.

Ward creates works that are hard to pin down, the artist allowing for the slippage of images to yield a range of meaning. He grew up speaking Patois, where English, French, Spanish, and African languages are intermingled, not spoken sequentially or hierarchically. Ward slips between visual languages, bringing critique and pathos in his installations.

Nari Ward was born 1963 in St. Andrew, Jamaica, and currently lives and works in New York. Ward received a BA from City University of New York, Hunter College in 1989, and an MFA from City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1992.

One-person exhibitions of his work have been organized by: the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and The New Museum, New York, 2019; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, 2017; The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, 2016; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA, 2015; Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge, 2014; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA, 2011; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, 2002; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2001.

Select group exhibitions featuring his work include: Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, 2019; UPTOWN: nastywomen/badhombres, El Museo del Barrio, New York, 2017; Black: Color, Material, Concept, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, The Great Mother, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Palazzo Reale, Milan and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2015; NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star, The New Museum, New York, 2013; Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Rotunda, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York , 2010; the Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial, New York, 2006; Landings, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002; Passages: Contemporary Art in Transition, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, Projects: How to Build and Maintain the Virgin Fertility of Our Soul, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, The Listening Sky, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and the Whitney Biennial, New York, 1995; and Cardinal Points of the Arts, 45th Venice Biennale, Italy.

Ward’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; GAM, Galleria Civica di arte, Torino, Italy; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Victoria, Southbank, Australia; the New York Public Library, New York; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ward has received numerous honors and distinctions including the Fellowship Award, The United States Artists, Chicago, 2020; Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts, Vilcek Foundation, New York, 2017; the Joyce Award, The Joyce Foundation, Chicago, 2015; the Rome Prize, American Academy of Rome, 2012; and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1998; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, 1996; and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1994. Ward has also received commissions from the United Nations and the World Health Organization. www.nariwardstudio.com/

Lawrence Weiner AT THE SAME MOMENT, 2000 vinyl dimensions variable

One of the leading figures of the global Conceptual art world from the late 1960s onward, Lawrence Weiner was among the first to propose a new relationship to art and to redefine the status of the artist. Artists stretched our understanding of art, adopting and adapting new and old technologies to express something about our changing world. Weiner and his peers “dematerialized” art works, deliberately evading strict genre definitions. Weiner specifically questioned the connection and obligations that link artist to audience through objects. Weiner instead chooses to make these connections through language, the very material that shapes our relationship to the world and to one another.

Each of Weiner’s works are part of the series LANGUAGE + THE MATERIALS REFERRED TO, where work often describes material components, colors, spatio-temporal delineations, and interactions. The poetic ambiguity of the pieces allow viewers to develop their own personal interpretation through real life experiences.

Although Weiner does not consider his works site-specific, each piece builds a distinct relationship with the urban and cultural environment in which it is inserted. The artist has proposed placing a fragment of a phrase on the skywalk linking the Hilton Hotel and the Wisconsin Center District. This location is the “welcome” site for visitors and residents as they move eastward, into the dense central core of downtown Milwaukee. For visitors heading west, their movement becomes a beacon to carry into other parts of our community.

And for the visitors who pass through the skywalk—sometimes every day, sometimes just for their convention or meeting—they become part of the living art work, animating it for the viewers below.

Weiner appropriates a piece of architecture known to folks living in a cold climate. This very same piece of architecture—a bridge over the street, helping visitors avoid snow and each other—becomes an empty tunnel in the summer. By drawing attention to the skywalk—and lifting our eyes up, towards the sky— Weiner helps us appreciate the function and space of the skywalk. Weiner literally takes over the spaces he is invited to exhibit in, disrupting our expectations for art, making the very building and environment part of his art work.

Lawrence Weiner was born in 1942 in the Bronx, New York. He lives and works in Amsterdam and New York City. He has been showing his art work in museums and galleries around the globe since the early 1960s.

Important solo exhibitions have taken place at the Museo Nivola, Orani, Italy, 2019; Milwaukee Art Museum, 2017; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, 2016; Blenheim Art Foundation, United Kingdom, 2015; South London Gallery, United Kingdom, 2014; Villa Panza, Italy, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain, both 2013; and the Jewish Museum, New York, 2012.

A major retrospective survey was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, from 2007-2009.

Weiner has been the recipient of numerous awards, recently the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Prize, 2015, and the Wolf Prize and the Aspen Award for Art in 2017. https://www.mariangoodman.com/artists/70-lawrence-weiner/

Richard Woods Holiday Home (Milwaukee), 2019 168 1/2 x 185 1/4 x 145 3/4 inches 14 ¼ x 15 ½ x 12 ¼ feet Commissioned for Sculpture Milwaukee 2019

British artist Richard Woods has a funny take on the frenetic rise of DIY culture and the English tradition of caravan camping, while pointing to urgent issues like housing insecurity and population displacement.

His cheery houses, built on spec using commercial products and local labor with a paint job that matches a site’s mood, history or light conditions, are everyday homes, scaled small to make them doll-like and intimate. The various positions they assume—floating on a barge in the middle of a lake, perched atop a parking lot battlement, tossed onto a sandy beach close to the high tide line—suggest a family in slight peril, up-ended by the dramatic economic and political forces shifting around them. A home is considered the pinnacle of middle-class success and stability, and was one of the most important markers of arrival in our post-war period. Yet residents of the United Kingdom are facing a dramatic shift in their global leadership with the Brexit vote, which is making residents nervous about their historical standing in the world.

Woods’ cartoonish sculptures point to the bold Pop aesthetic and visual wit of British painter Patrick Caulfield. However, Woods’ 2018 exhibition at Alan Cristea Gallery, titled The Ideal Home Exhibition, shows him indebted to British artist Richard Hambleton’s famous collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, that defined Britain’s post-war obsession with consumer culture. The graphic, modular nature of the work also recalls American painter Peter Halley’s paintings of schematized systems, which are both architectural plans and nightmare mazes. Woods creates a range of objects that could fill and cover any home too, including paintings, flooring, and furniture. The artist creates a portrait of contemporary Western society grappling with a new definition of “home”.

In 2019, Sculpture Milwaukee partnered with the Great Lakes Community Conservation Corps [GLCCC] to fabricate Woods’ house. GLCCC, based on the Work Progress Administration’s Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s (which hired unemployed workers across the country during the Great Depression), provides job training skills to a range of students and young adults. This project is unique for the GLCCC team because of the arts focus. Sculpture Milwaukee and the GLCCC leadership will organized a range of learning opportunities for the students so they might see the arts as a possible industry for future employment; from this partnership, the GLCCC launched an arts-focused unit to show their students other industries for future work. For Sculpture Milwaukee 2020, the GLCCC will return to paint new colors onto the work.

In a world that has radically changed since 2019, evoking home is even more radical than before. When our very freedom to move about has been compromised by the deadly novel coronavirus, and the security of home is threatened due to the brittle, intertwined global economy, Woods’ modest home feels like a refuge as never before.

Richard Woods was born in Chester, England, in 1966, and lives and works in London. He graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 1990. Woods has created dramatic architectural interventions, including transforming Cary Grant’s former home in Hollywood for dealer Jeffrey Deitch, and designing a spectacular store interior for Comme des Garçon in Osaka, Japan. He has recently bedazzled DKUK, a hybrid hair salon / exhibition space run by artist Daniel Kelly that receives funds from the Arts Council England.

Over the past decade one-person exhibitions of Woods’ works have been held at: Cristea Roberts Gallery and the Skip Gallery, London; David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen; Friedman Benda Project Space, New York; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Bloomberg SPACE, London; the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK; and Grieder Contemporary, Zurich. Museum exhibitions of his work have been held at: Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Woods’ work has been included in the following group shows: Frieze Sculpture Park, the Festival of Love, Southbank Centre, and the Saatchi Gallery, all in London; the Folkestone Triennial, UK; The Red Brick Sculpture Show, Milan; and the Liverpool Biennale, UK. Woods was commissioned to do a work by Hyundai for the XXIII Winter Olympics in South Korea in 2018. His work is in the collections of: the Residence du Parc; Turin; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the British Museum and The Saatchi Collection, London. www.richardwoodsstudio.com

Amy Yoes Mobile Animation Unit, 2019-20 color animation with sound, running time: 5:32’

Amy Yoes combines photography, painting, sculpture, and performance in her installations. While she is interested in upending traditional forms of cultural practice, she does so by tweaking high Modernism’s seriousness by injecting in some technicolor fun. She uses the vocabularies of art history and architecture, infusing them a bright flash of color that stands against the austere International Style that dominates our contemporary cities.

Previous projects include a series of large-scale, moveable sculptures that resemble giant Swiss Army knives, and a secret type of Morse code projected onto large forms, animating them as if they are communicating to us. In her Kitchen Project, every kitchen cupboard door has its own sound track of scrapes and pings, suggesting a secret life for each. The artist helps us see that the supposedly “neutral” objects of our world shape us as much as we shape them.

The work Mobile Animation Unit, 2019-20, comes from the Hélio Lab workshops she set up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, organized to coincide with the Art Institute’s Hélio Oiticica exhibition in 2017. Oiticica was a Brazilian artist whose mid-20th century cross-genre work freed artists to create works that were of, and for, the people of his time.

In response to the Oiticica show, Yoes created a workshop of colorful shapes and forms that were manipulated by teams of students and volunteers who helped the artist choreograph the abstract shapes as they made micro-movements in a dance of time. The stop-animation elements were made of cardboard, plexiglass, acetate, paper, and wood. These were supplemented by Yoes’ larger sculptures that supplied an additional range of machine-like motions.

The work is at once funny and a little menacing. While watching the small, brightly colored elements twirl and turn without any outcome or output, it makes the viewer wonder if their own daily machinations have as little return for the energy invested. Occasionally elements will clank and clash against one another, which in the real world this would cause a bottleneck on an assembly line or stress at a staff meeting. Here, all is dissipated in a loss of energy.

This visual vocabulary recalls the work of the Russian constructivists from the first half of the 20th century. Their commitment to non-expressive abstraction was intended to create a universal language for everyone. But the menace of man dominated by machine, so celebrated as freeing humans by the constructivists, is found in work such as Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis. Lang showed workers fed to machines to keep them going. While Yoes does not explicitly convey whether she thinks machines are good for us or bad, she charges us with sorting that out for ourselves. https://vimeo.com/384317892

Amy Yoes was born in Germany in 1959 and raised in Houston. Yoes completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago [SAIC] in 1984. Yoes is based in Chicago and rural New York state. She has been a visiting artist at many institutions, including, University of Las Vegas Nevada, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and the Siena Art Institute, Italy, and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her work has been included in exhibitions in numerous museums and galleries, including: the Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museu Internacional de Escultura Contemporânea, Santo Tirso, Portugal; Michael Steinberg Fine Art, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, Ace Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, Exit Art, and Philips, De Pury & Luxembourg, all New York; Stefan Stux Gallery, Houston; Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, N.A.M.E. Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Space Gallery, Gallery 312, ARC Gallery, Fassbender Gallery, Randolph Street Gallery, all Chicago; College of DuPage, IL; Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Madeira, Portugal; Fundaçao Luso-Americana, Lisbon, Portugal; and Casa de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, among others.

Her videos have been seen in many venues, including: the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art [MassMoca], North Adams, MA; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH.

She has held residences at: the Maison Dora Maar, Ménerbes, France; AIR Artist-in-Residence, Krems, Austria; the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and The British School at Rome, Italy. www.amyyoesprojects.com