Artists Selected for Nohl Fund Fellowships

MILWAUKEE— The first seven recipients of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 176 applicants.

Mark Mulhern, Michael Howard, and Dick Blau were chosen in the Established Artist category, and each will receive a $15,000 fellowship. Paul Amitai, Peter Barrickman, Mark Escribano, and Liz Smith will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $5,000 each.

Blau is a professor of film at the UWM Peck School of the Arts, Amitai received his BFA in Inter-Arts and MFA in InterMedia at UWM and has had solo exhibitions at UWM, Barrickman is a recent UWM graduate, and Escribano has taken film courses at UWM.

In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in an exhibition at UWM's Institute of Visual Arts in September 2004. An exhibition catalogue also will be published and disseminated nationally.

Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts in collaboration with Visual Arts Milwaukee! (VAM!), the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties. The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.

The panel of jurors included Barbara Hunt of Artist's Space in New York City, Tim Peterson of Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, and Lorelei Stewart of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois-Chicago. The panelists spent two days reviewing work samples and artists' statements and visiting the studios of finalists in the Established Artist category.

Established Artists

Dick Blau

Blau, a professor of film at the UWM Peck School of the Arts, came to photography in the late sixties as the result of his work as a director in the theater. In addition to photographing his own productions, Blau began a series of photographs of his domestic life, a series that is now in its fourth decade. Other work includes photographs taken in conjunction with ethnomusicology projects that have resulted in two books: Polka Happiness and Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia. Working alongside Charles and Angeliki Keil, these projects enable Blau to consider the world outside the house. Blau also is known for his series of portraits for the TimeSlips Project. These studies of people with Alzheimer's disease have been exhibited widely. Blau received his BA in English from Harvard College and a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University. His work has been shown internationally, and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Focus/Infinity Fund, the Milwaukee Art Museum, as well as several institutions in Europe.

Michael Howard

Michael Howard is an assistant professor of painting in the Fine Arts program at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. His work explores painting as "a metaphorical structure, or metonymical slip of contextual meaning; the manner in which painting may house ideas and expression." Architectural structures—both houses and construction sites--are a recurring image in his work. Howard intends to use the fellowship to develop and complete larger-scale paintings while continuing his small-scale works. Most importantly, Howard notes, the fellowship will provide time in the studio and on site: "There is simply no substitute for the time needed to produce the work. The fellowship would actually buy time." Howard received his BFA from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and his MFA from the University of Cincinnati. He has exhibited regularly in Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle.

Mark Mulhern

Mulhern was born in Portage, Wis., and has been a practicing artist for 28 years. During that time, his work has progressed from densely packed Expressionist narratives to a more open, meditative space, with figures caught in fleeting gestures that evoke change and temporality. "The fellowship would be a great help to my work...providing me with needed resources at a time when the work feels primed to advance to exciting new places." He received his BFA from the Layton School of Art and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has exhibited widely in the Midwest and New York. His work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Elvehjem Museum (Madison), the Madison Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art (NY), and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

Emerging Artists

Paul Amitai

Media artist Paul Amitai places himself at the intersection of technology and culture, constructing alternate narratives, recontextualizing mass media representations, and examining the connection of technology to perception, memory, time, and decay. He uses digital recording and sampling technologies "to collect artifacts from the cultural dustbins and to document visual/audio spaces found in public spaces." This material is processed and re-presented in the new context of an installation space. His current project, Indian Gaming, juxtaposes images from the Milwaukee Public Museum's Native American displays (created in two different eras) with images from the Potawatomi Bingo Casino. Indian Gaming "reflects on the specificity of living in the Milwaukee area and the dominant culture's (dis)connection to a major local cultural and historical influence." During the fellowship period, Amitai will explore "ways to merge my past methods of live video/sound performance with studio-based processes." Amitai received his BFA in Inter-Arts and MFA in InterMedia at UWM. He has had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis University Museum of Art and at UWM.

Peter Barrickman

Barrickman, a recent UWM graduate, makes paintings and sculptures inspired by "nature and the accomplishments and personalities of men and women. I'm keeping track of fading artifacts, loudly noticing the ignored." He will use the fellowship to produce "a series of new works that combine painting and sculpture." Barrickman has exhibited in Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Chicago, and his work will be included in two upcoming group exhibitions in Chicago and New York. He received a fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was co-recipient of the "Wisconsin's Own" Award for best narrative feature film, The Foreigners, which he co-directed with Brent Goodsell, Didier Leplae, and Xavier Leplae at the 2001 Wisconsin Film Festival.

Mark Escribano

Filmmaker Mark Escribano was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Florida, where he received his BA from the University of South Florida with a concentration in film and photography. He moved to Milwaukee six years ago, and brings his outsider's perspective to his documentary film work on the ecology of the city's arts scene and particularly the "self-created local celebrities" in the Riverwest neighborhood. For Escribano, Milwaukee is simultaneously nurturing and confining for artists: "It has been the artistic atmosphere of Milwaukee that has aided my frequent exhibition, publication and, finally, international showing of one of my films at the Pompidou Center in Paris. However, people who eventually graduate from the confines of the local scene often become the area's most aggressive critics." Escribano's shorter films are primarily abstract, metaphor-based works. During the fellowship period, Escribano will complete the filming and post-production work on Lo-Fi Nobility, a film about three brothers central to the Riverwest arts scene.

Liz Smith

Painter Liz Smith creates "idealized environments of emotion, using color and line to build my own visual vocabulary." Her work often explores elements of nature and fashion and the ways they harmonize or contradict each other. For Smith, "The fellowship would give me the gift of unrestricted resources to create a new series of paintings based on my interest in fashion, nature, and contemporary media." Smith received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Milwaukee, Madison, Bellingham, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Baltimore and Kansas City.

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