Fellowships for Individual Artists 2004

FELLOWSHIPS THE GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION’S MARY L. NOHL FUND FOR INDIVIDUAL A R T I S T S 2 0 0 4 FELLOWSHIPS THE GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION’S MARY L. NOHL FUND FOR INDIVIDUAL A R T I S T S 2 0 0 4 TERESE AGNEW CECELIA CONDIT JENNIFER MONTGOMERY WILLIAM ANDERSEN JAMES BARANY STEVEN BURNHAM FRANKIE MARTIN THE GREATER MILWAUKEE FOUNDATION’S MARYOCTOBER L. NOHL 14-DECEMBER FUND 11, 2005 INSTITUTE OF VISUAL ARTS 3253 NORTH DOWNER AVENUE MILWAUKEE, WI 53211 EDITOR’S PREFACE The Greater Milwaukee Foundation is made up of charitable In 2003, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation used a portion of a bequest from artist Mary L. Nohl to funds, each created by individual donors or families to serve underwrite a fellowship program for individual visual artists. The program, the Greater Milwaukee the charitable causes of their choice. Grants from these funds Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists, provides unrestricted awards to serve people throughout Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee artists to create new work or complete work in progress and is open to practicing artists residing in and Washington counties and beyond. Started in 1915, Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee or Washington counties. the Foundation is one of the oldest and largest community foundations in the U.S. and abroad. Nohl, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, died in December, 2001 at the age of 87. Nohl rarely exhibited her work, yet she gained national recognition for her art, much of which The Greater Milwaukee Foundation was housed in and around her home in Fox Point on the shores of Lake Michigan. Her bequest to the 1020 N. Broadway Greater Milwaukee Foundation, by supporting local visual arts and arts education programs, keeps Milwaukee, WI 53202 Nohl’s passion for the visual arts alive in our community. Phone (414) 272-5805 Fax (414) 272-6235 As in the first year of the program, seven fellowships were awarded in 2004: three for www.greatermilwaukeefoundation.org established artists (Terese Agnew, Cecelia Condit, Jennifer Montgomery) and four for emerging artists (William Andersen, James Barany, Steven Burnham, Frankie Martin). This group of Nohl Fellows was selected from a field of 160 applicants by a panel of recognized visual arts professionals Published by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee working outside the four-county area: Patty Hickson, associate curator and gallery manager of the Peck School of the Arts Des Moines Art Center Downtown; Habib Kheradyar, director of POST, a gallery and project space P.O. Box 413 he founded in Los Angeles; and Cincinnati-based independent curator Sue Spaid. The panelists Milwaukee, WI 53201 spent three days reviewing work samples and artists’ statements, making studio visits, and talking Phone: (414) 229-4762 to local artists. Fax: (414) 229-6154 arts.uwm.edu The fellowship program was designed to provide significant support to local artists at two critical career stages, to encourage artists to remain in Greater Milwaukee where they can continue to enrich our community, and to create—through the jurying process—an opportunity for ©2005 by Greater Milwaukee Foundation curators from outside the area to see the work of a large number of local artists. The Suitcase All rights reserved. Export Fund, which funds the travel of artists and their work to exhibitions outside the area, ISBN: 0-9761205-4-2 serves a complementary purpose. Already, in the second year, the symbiotic nature of the Printed in the United States of America programs became clear: three of the 2003 Emerging Artists were invited to exhibit work, created during or immediately following their fellowship year, at venues outside Wisconsin and received Suitcase awards to do so. The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships are administered in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts and Visual Arts Milwaukee (VAM!). The program owes much of its success to the volunteers—Milwaukee artists, curators and arts administrators— who established guidelines for the fellowship competition; organized and administered the jurying process; assisted with the curation of the exhibition; and participated in the production of the catalogue. Polly Morris Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee ESTABLISHED ARTISTS TERESE AGNEW The Collective Embrace Traditional quilt making is a process of collaboration. Scraps of fabric from worn clothing and other Unlike such contemporary activist artists as Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, Agnew doesn’t sources are collected by and shared among quilters. Patterns are handed down within families deny or diminish the “aesthetic, material, sensual” beauty of work to make a point. Instead, she and communities and historically the labor of quilting was an occasion for communal gatherings. embraces it in a way that sets her apart from many contemporary artists who seek political and Finally, the quilts themselves are shared, given as gifts, passed to subsequent generations and social change. Her quilts are close in spirit to an earlier tradition of history painting practiced by pulled from closets to make bedding for overflow guests. David and Gericault. Like Agnew, these artists dealt with significant themes: freedom, human dignity, man’s role in nature. Agnew, it would seem, shares their belief that change begins in a While some contemporary quilting has become a more solitary activity, Terese Agnew has collective embrace. discovered ways to integrate both historical and contemporary practice. Her quilts raise issues: from our impact on the environment to our relationship with third world labor. The stitched and pieced surfaces are as much those of a painter and an assemblage artist. At the same time, Agnew Frank C. Lewis, Director of Exhibitions and the Curator of the Collections engages the public by referencing familiar subjects and images or, in the case of Portrait of a Textile Wriston Art Galleries at Lawrence University Worker, soliciting contributions of clothing labels to create an artwork of dense textural beauty and conceptual complexity. Viewers trace the tight network of stitches and 3-D relief with their eyes, not their fingers, yet the material presence still envelops. As in all large-scale works of art, the overall image dissolves into abstract patterns and colors as viewers come closer. In Agnew’s case, the quilting is not simply a by-product of the need to hold multiple layers together but a process rich with nuance and textural sensuality. In a formalist vein these optical and tactile effects would insure a successful work but Agnew ups the ante by taking on narrative content. In The D.O.T. Straightens Things Out the regular pattern of squares common to many quilts becomes a witty commentary on how bureaucracies erase complexity and “the natural” from our experience for the sake of “efficiency.” Practice Bomber Range in the Mississippi Flyway, too, illustrates the tendency to literally frame nature and find uses for the landscape, subtly referencing, though ironically inverting, the way that early quilters found uses for fabric scraps of clothing and locked these into a rigorous pattern. In Portrait of A Textile Worker the artist also continues the collaborative tradition of quilt making. The quilt is constructed from labels taken from mass produced garments. Using a photo made by another, passed along like a template pattern, Agnew translates and reconfigures the stark black and white snapshot, articulating areas indecipherable in the original and subduing distracting details. The results are painterly rather than photographic. The small size of the labels and the variety of textures and sheens that they provide create a surface that seems like an impressionist painting with the deep rich tonal luminosity of Jan Van Eyck’s grisaille panels. Over thirty thousand labels were collected by individuals and groups, literally throughout the world, who snipped them and sent them to the artist in Milwaukee, creating a network as real as the millions of stitches in the final piece. In the past one might have recognized a scrap of material from a mother’s dress or a familiar shirt–now viewers recognize a name brand familiar through wear but devoid of the personal uniqueness of the homemade. Viewers read the image and then move closer to read the labels. Each label, thought or read aloud, is a secular novena for the human capital spent. ARTIST STATEMENT The way we typically think of something is often disconnected from how it actually stands in the world. For example, when I read the words practice bomber range, I think of a landscape with chunks of rubble and big holes—I don’t think of small farms or the people working there. These thoughts are separate even though they may occupy the same physical place. As an artist I’m interested in how to put them together. The traditional process of quilting involves assembling fragments into a cohesive whole. Using the medium to make art gives me a way to connect thoughts and images, too. We rarely think about gar- ment workers when we shop for clothes in stores…but seeing an image of one worker composed of thousands of apparel labels that she and others like her produce may remind us of the connection. ABOUT THE ARTIST Terese Agnew began her art career as a public sculptor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1985. Her early work included several temporary installations that engaged hundreds of people in the art making process. Her permanent works include the Wisconsin Workers Memorial in Zeidler Union Square in downtown Milwaukee, created in collaboration with Mary Zebell in 1995. In 1991 Agnew began making art quilts in addition to sculpture. Agnew’s intricately detailed quilts are included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, the Milwaukee Art Museum and the John M Walsh III Collection of Contemporary Art Quilts.

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