Twenty arts programs awarded grants from GMF’s Nohl Fund

The Mary L. Nohl fund has made grants of more than $7 million since 2001 in support of visual arts and arts education in the metropolitan area.

Twenty visual arts and arts education programs in the community were recently awarded $338,000 in funding from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund. Established by renowned local artist the late Mary L. Nohl, the fund has made grants of more than $7 million since 2001 in support of visual arts and arts education in the metropolitan area.

Supported projects include:

Bradley Family Foundation: $130,000 in support of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Individual Artists Fellowship Program, which recognizes visual artists who are making or will make significant contributions to their fields and who promote the arts in the greater Milwaukee area. The annual program provides fellowships of $20,000 each to established artists and $10,000 each to emerging artists. It also provides support through its Suitcase Export Fund to help local artists with costs associated with exhibiting their work outside of the four-county area.

Bradley Family Foundation: $20,000 to enable the Lynden Sculpture Garden to host a multi-layered art project led by Chicago-based artist Fo Wilson, who will create a structural and conceptual world of a fictional 19th-century enslaved woman of African descent, starting with the fabrication of a structure to house her cabinet of curiosities. The project also will include an installation, exhibition, educational programs, presentations by other local artists and performances.

La Casa de Esperanza: $20,000 toward construction of a 14-foot by 26-foot mosaic mural that will surround the façade of the entrance to a new building for the La Casa Charter School. Milwaukee-based mosaic artist Ann Wydeven will lead more than 50 youth and community members in discussions and workshops from the planning through installation phases. The 20-month project will culminate with an unveiling ceremony in spring 2018.

Friends of Hank Aaron State Trail: $15,000 toward an initiative that will create a public permanent artwork commemorating the history of the Milwaukee Road, one of Milwaukee’s largest employers in the early 1900s. The art will activate the portion of the Hank Aaron State Trail in the Menomonee Valley where the Milwaukee Road Rail Shops’ chimneys stood.

Milwaukee Art Museum: $15,000 to help launch the museum’s Teen Leadership Program in 2016-17 with three primary goals: youth engagement, leadership development and career exploration for teens. The grant will support the first year of a teen advisory council and the 15th cycle of its summer teen program, ArtXpress. ArtXpress will culminate in the creation of a collaborative mural reflecting a socially relevant theme that will wrap a Milwaukee County bus for at least eight months and be viewed by an estimated 16,700 people daily.

Woodland Pattern Book Center: $15,000 to present an 18-month project in which six women artists and/or writers will be artists in residence at Woodland Pattern. In their art and/or literary practice, these women explore the meaning, value and stories of “women’s work,” a theme which will inform the exhibitions, readings, discussions and workshops of their visits. One of the artists is based in Milwaukee. The other five will travel from various parts of the country.

Milwaukee Jewish Federation: $12,000 to support the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s first solo museum exhibit in Milwaukee of Beth Lipman, a Jewish artist based in Wisconsin who has exhibited internationally and received many awards and honors for her work. “Once & Again: Still Lifes,” organized by the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, represents a mid-career retrospective for Lipman. It will include large-scale glass sculptures and photos. The museum also will present public educational programs featuring Lipman, and a series of presentations celebrating noted local artists representing varied artistic disciplines titled “Local Lives, National Voices.”

Wisconsin Black Historical Society Museum: $12,000 to engage an artist-in-residence to lead the restoration of the mural on the west exterior wall of its building at 26th and Center streets. Lead artist George Gist will engage the community in the process and conduct visual art workshops at the agency for high school students during his residency. Gist will work with two graduate student artists from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts and youth from the mural workshops, as well as other local artists, on the painting component. The restoration will take an estimated three months to complete, after which a communitywide unveiling ceremony will take place.

American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin Foundation: $10,000 toward the Youth Social Justice Forum, a one-day conference at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for about 500 high school students from Milwaukee that includes numerous artmaking sessions related to advocacy and social justice, conducted by professional artists. Expanded versions of forum workshops will take place throughout the year with local visual artists as part of the Public Art Student Alliances at partnership schools, primarily from MPS.

RedLine Milwaukee: $10,000 for its 2016-17 programming, which includes a local artist-in-residency program, offering subsidized studio space to mentoring and emerging Milwaukee-based artists, and a visiting artist program, engaging international, national and local artists for on-site residencies. Both programs include a season of visual art exhibitions representing various mediums, to take place from July 2016 through June 2017. One of the exhibitions is being curated by Milwaukee native Terese Agnew, who is collaborating with more than 20 Wisconsin arts, writers and historians on an installation titled “Writing in Stone” that will open in January 2017.

Latino Arts: $10,000 to support the agency’s 2016-17 visual arts season, which will include gallery exhibitions featuring the work of Chilean installation artist Ximena Sosa, Ecuadorean painter and teacher Rafael Salas, and Guatemalan Mayan artists Pedro Rafael Gonzalez Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cumez. The grant also will support visual arts-related ALMA programming (Advancing Literacy and Math through the Arts) with Bruce-Guadalupe Community School students.

Milwaukee Artist Resource Network: $10,000 to host at least three MARNsalons as professional development opportunities for the local visual arts community. National and international curators, critics and other art professionals will visit Milwaukee for multi-day residencies to include roundtable discussions about relevant contemporary art issues, studio visits and portfolio critiques. MARN will stream the roundtable sessions, host online discussion forums and publish a compilation of writings by visiting artists/critics/curators.

Riverworks Development Corporation: $10,000 to engage residents, business owners and employees of neighborhood businesses in a public art project to create three murals on the recently extended Beerline Railway Trail during the summer and early fall, with completion and a launch celebration taking place before winter. The agency, in collaboration with its advisory work group, will select 10 local artists who have experience in street art, murals, creative signage and community engagement processes to lead this project.

TRUE Skool: $10,000 for its 2016 summer program, which includes projects such as the restoration and repainting of two existing public murals (on Bruce Street and Cesar Chavez Drive) and a leadership workshop series, “The Art of Coping,” a curriculum about the impact of trauma on young people’s mental and emotional health. Muralist and visual arts instructor James Tomasello will lead 25 youth as they engage in paid internships over seven weeks. The summer session will culminate in a presentation day to showcase participants’ individual art portfolios created during the program, as well as the community-based group projects they will have accomplished.

Walker’s Point Center for the Arts: $10,000 for the 2016-17 exhibition season, which includes 10 planned exhibitions: Dia de los Muertos, WPCA members show, CoPA photography show, Wisconsin Visual Artists, Midwest Artists Studios, Youth Arts Exhibit, and WPCA’s 30th anniversary exhibition in April and May 2017, among others. WPCA’s visual art education programs will expand to include a community outreach component at local schools. More than 200 artists will show their work in these exhibitions, and 25 teaching artists will play a role in the art education programming.

Benedict Center: $7,500 to support art-making sessions with local artists, Elizabeth Vogt and Muneer Bahaudeen, who will work with the agency’s female participants to create graphic and ceramic art that expresses their life histories and lessons. A final exhibition will take place at Washington Park Partners Center.

Milwaukee Environmental Consortium: $7,500 for Milwaukee Water Commons to offer art-integrated projects that reinforce the significance of water in the lives of individuals and communities at five diverse sites in Milwaukee. Working closely with a lead artist, each partner organization will select water-themed art projects specific to their site that may include murals, mosaics, sculpture and other mediums. The project will culminate with the “We are Water” celebration at Bradford Beach in late summer 2016.

COA Youth & Family Centers: $5,000 to engage a local artist-in-residence to lead teens ages 13-18 in the creation of a youth-designed mural at the Goldin Center in the Amani neighborhood. The mural will be completed during summer 2016 and will be unveiled at a fall COA community fun night.

HeartLove Place: $5,000 for a 10-week summer art program for teens ages 11-13 to expand their horizons about art resources accessible to Milwaukee residents and to teach a variety of art-making techniques. Milwaukee-based artist Christopher McIntyre will lead the program, which will include field trips to museums, galleries, art installations, murals around the city, as well as hands-on instruction in several art mediums. The program will culminate with a youth gallery night showcasing the work created.

SHARP Literacy: $4,000 to partner with Journey House on a mural project in summer 2016 under the direction of artist Sally Duback. The media will be glazed clay and recycled materials, so students will learn how to cut clay, glaze, grout and mount tiles, all while reinforcing aspects of their school curricula. In line with SHARP’s mission, the summer program will link to curricular areas including language development. Journey House will unveil the mural for participants and families in late August.