Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists Exhibition at the Haggerty Museum

This year’s Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund exhibition, at the Haggerty Museum of Art through August 4, sets out on an immersive, inhabitable and personalized path from the outset. Established fellow Janelle VanderKelen’s intensely colored videos throw light across the dimly lit spaces of the Haggerty’s west galleries, onto a porch that turns out to be an installation by emerging fellow Fatima Laster entitled Interruption, Cash for Home. Guests are invited to three private screens with headphones below. And from there they descend into each of Vanderkelen’s hallucinatory digital mediations on the interaction of man and nature … with some Blue Velvet cinematic moments mixed in. 

Each is a technicolor portrait of connection with nature from a third perspective that is decidedly outside of nature. We see human feet and hands, but no heads or bodies, caressing and luxuriating in an unkept floral wild. The trippy, hyper-resolute visuals and crisp, amplified, almost-but-not-even-close-to-diegetic-soundtracking, takes one deep into an artificial ecosystem before returning them abruptly back into the gallery. The spatial transition with its cold moral implications against a sensual backdrop is almost Wonka-like, and considers, too, how happily-ever-after we might live. VanderKelen’s nature happens to function as the front lawn of Laster’s dreamy recreation of her maternal grandmother’s home, down to a screen door, lawn chairs, and porch railing. 

Details like in-process homework, dish soap, half-consumed glasses of juice, and countless pieces of ephemera feel nostalgic, but also create an uneasy sense of voyeurism. Yet, even as the viewer feels uncomfortably deep in a private past, they are interrupted by a hand-made comment box presenting three questions: 1. Has this installation been informative on the impact of gentrification? 2. How does the installation make you feel? 3. Given this experience what is your response to gentrification? Fatima’s intervention immediately delivers us from a private space to the conceptual, and perhaps equally unsettling, space of public discourse about gentrification. 

Nesting Points of View

In the main gallery, also in the light of another of Venderkelen’s video pieces, this one washing the entire wall, Alayna N. Pernell’s photo installation “for the record” shows gridded arrays of photographs of the artist’s hands repairing torn photographs of herself. Like other works in the show, Pernell’s art works by nesting points of view: the work is an arrangement … of arrangements, of photos, of actions, of actions performed on original photos. Where the core of the nesting set is the person. The relationship between the crude irregular tears in the originals and the telescoping layers leading to the clean and measured space of the gallery poetically addresses the messy relationship between our emotional interiors and increasingly manicured and assembled exteriors.  

Siara Berry’s work nearby might take those who lived through it back to a golden age of conceptual sculpture. No Zoomer will remember a world when being merely a painter was stigmatized, but in the late ‘90s and early aughts wonderful spatial creatures like Berry’s Beware of Dog roamed free and wild. Her double-hung window with a grid of stained glass reading “BEWARE OF DOG” is been flipped to trick us into reading GOD. The stained-glass work lives ambiguously between Frank Lloyd Wright and Chartres cathedral, and is concerned with everything from language to spiritual modernism, to domestic mundanity, to barriers, to organized religion. And of course, it invokes structural comedy too. Barry’s work is always playful and funny in an age when self-analysis and trauma has taken precedence over thinking about language and laughing about its absurdity. I feel a tide coming in. 

And speaking of forces of nature, Mikal Floyd Pruitt, the other established fellow, is one. He and his work are often difficult to separate. A video of him engaging a group of young African American children at an outdoor classroom event entitled SpaceTime perfectly captures the energy and activity of his entire cross-disciplinary practice. He is a storyteller, a painter, a musician, a gifter, a performer, a teacher, and an all-around agent of change and progress. The scattered installation of materials and media in the Nohl exhibition reads like the artifacts collected alongside the life of a prophet. The message and the purpose may be the ultimate destination, but physical things and the creative process are what deliver us to it. 

Again, the distinction between the work, the artist, and life itself is obscure here. We’ve seen this in the art world before of course, but the last time art and life were to be one, it was for the sake the definition of art itself. And it was weirder than it was personal. If the Nohl exhibition is any indication of what artists are thinking in 2024, and it probably is, we’re in a world where the artist and the art are closer than ever. I thought of Manet’s Folies Bergère as I took a last look at Laster’s Interrupted, Cash for Home and saw 150 years of history compressed into a thought in my head. The interiority in Folies is theatrical when compared to the granular and personalized reality of much of the work in this show. Still, I kept wondering if we get any closer to reality by going deeper into any one version, or if the best worst reflection of “the Real” is a reflection of a fleeting collective interpretation. I don’t have an answer, but I’m glad the art world is one of the last places that generates the question.

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Event Listings: June 16–June 22, 2024

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Artmaking
• Sunday, June 16, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Lakefront Festival of Art
• Sunday, June 16, 10 a.m.–5 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tours: Celebrating Father’s Day
• Saturday, June 16, 2–3 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• Reel-to-Real Screening
• Tuesday, June 18, 5:30–8 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• Content Creation for Artists
• Tuesday, June 18, 12–1:30 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Group Therapy (Men): Black Space at MAM
• Wednesday, June 19, 5:30–7 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “Arresting Beauty: Julia Margaret Cameron”
• Thursday, June 20, 12–1 p.m.

MARN ART+CULTURE Hub

• Milwaukee Fashion Network – Sustainability
• Thursday, June 20, 6–8 p.m.

Lynden Sculpture Garden

• HOME 2024: World Refugee Day at City Hall
• Thursday, June 20, 2024 – 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.

Lynden Sculpture Garden

• Summer Solstice Sound Bath & Candle-Lit Labyrinth Walk
• Thursday, June 20, 7–8:30 p.m.

Latino Arts

• Opening Reception: “The Big Ideas XI: The Future is Now”
• Friday, June 21, 5–7 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “Idris Khan: Repeat After Me”
• Friday, June 21, 12–1 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Art Making: Kohl’s Art Studio
• Saturday, June 22, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Story Time in the Galleries
• Saturday, June 22, 10:30–11 a.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Gallery Talk: “50 Paintings”
• Saturday, June 22, 1–2 p.m.

Milwaukee Art Museum

• Drop-In Tours: Music + Art
• Saturday, June 22, 2–3 p.m.

Saint Kate — the Arts Hotel

• AIR Time, Art & Studio Tour with AIR Anwar Floyd-Pruitt
• Saturday, June 15, 6:30 p.m.