Crossman Gallery

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Fall 2008 visual art preview from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Posted: Sept. 13, 2008

Mary Louise Schumacher Art and Architecture Critic E-MAIL

It seems the visual art scene has been on the verge of fulfilling its potential for years.

A year ago, I wrote about the citywide search for new leadership at the most important art institutions and the shifts in leadership at the art schools, among other things.

Since then, new leaders have been installed, others lost and a crop of still untested venues have sprung up. With all of this in mind, here are some of the exhibits, changes, ideas and people to keep an eye on in the coming year.

• The greatest change is happening at the city’s premier art institution: the Milwaukee Art Museum. Dan Keegan, a Green Bay native with a Silicon Valley sensibility, replaced David Gordon as director.

The museum is experimenting actively online, creating Web sites for each exhibit, including blogs, podcasts, online galleries, audio tours for cell phones and videos. The video series featuring chief educator Barbara Brown Lee (she claps her hands and the lights and wings go up!) puts Sister Wendy seriously to shame.

Chief curator Joe Ketner left the museum at the end of August after three years, leaving the museum without a specialist in modern and contemporary art. This also means MAM’s artistic identity may continue to drift, something the museum has struggled with since it opened its new wing.

Ketner was instrumental in reorganizing swaths of the permanent collection, and he facilitated some good acquisitions, including works by Michelle Grabner, James Siena, Erwin Redl, Sarah Walker and Mary Lucier. But Ketner, who arrived with big ideas and plans for important shows, can be credited with only one show. And that show of Bruce Nauman’s neon works in 2006 was developed long before he arrived.

Decorative arts shows are increasingly part of the program at MAM, with strong involvement from the Chipstone Foundation. This includes a show of Charles Rohlfs furniture in the feature space next summer, which seems an odd choice. These shows are notoriously a hard sell for museum audiences.

Last winter, Laurie Winters, curator of earlier European art, attended the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a sort of boot camp for would-be museum directors, which begs the question: Will she leave, too?

Selfishly, I’d prefer to see Winters keep curating. She was responsible for the Da Vinci exhibit in 2002, one of the museum’s all-time best, by many standards. She also was a curator for the Biedermeier show, which went to the Louvre in October - a first for MAM.

Looking ahead, a show of work by the 17th-century painter Jan Lievens opens in February. For the show, Winters worked with one of the most respected scholars of that period, Arthur K. Wheelock, of the National Gallery of Art. This unveiling of a little-known Dutch master just may be the show of the year.

“Act/React,” which opens next month, is billed as the first-of-its-kind exhibit of interactive, installation artworks, which strikes me as overreaching hype. This kind of work has been around for quite a while. It will be the first truly contemporary exhibit organized by MAM for the Calatrava exhibition space since “Cut/ Film as Found Object” in 2005.

“Unmasked & Anonymous,” a just opened exhibit of work by John Shimon and Julie Lindemann, is yet another example of a conceptually focused, smart photography show organized by Lisa Hostetler, who does one good show after another.

• Over at Milwaukee’s “other” art museum, the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette, Wally Mason has replaced Curtis Carter, who had been director since the museum opened in 1984.

Mason, who was director of the University of Maine Museum of Art, believes that university art museums can take risks and be agile.

The most drastic change? The former “Blue Room,” where Old Masters were hung salon style, is history, and exhibition spaces are being broken into smaller “chambers.”

A collection of rare books and manuscripts is currently on display. In October, a sampling of new video works will be on view.

Next spring, the Haggerty plans to showcase some of the most relevant art being made in Wisconsin, including works by Jennifer Angus, Peter Bardy, Anne Kingsbury, Colin Matthes, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg (as a team), T. L. Solien, Sonja Thomsen, George Williams Jr., and Xiaohong Zhang. Mason says the show may become a regular event, which raises a question: Will it provide some healthy competition for the annual Mary L. Nohl Fellowship show at Inova?

• Speaking of Inova, the once internationally recognized contemporary art institution has hired a permanent curator after five years. Artist and curator Nicholas Frank was hired after serving on an interim basis for two years.

This means Frank, who has been creating shows for 15 years and formerly ran the Hermetic Gallery, can plan beyond the current year. This is considered a must by most institutions for planning and funding purposes.

Having lost its original space on Downer Ave., Inova will now do all of its programming in the Kenilworth Square space on the east side. The space will present a physical challenge for the Nohl show, a showcase of local art, essentially a collection of seven solo shows.

Also on the Inova schedule are artists Jefferson Pinder, who draws on hip-hop culture and African-American identity, Dennis Balk, who incorporates images of subatomic particles into cultural scenes, and Xylor Jane, who creates abstract languages from personal facts.

• Galleries come and go, but I don’t remember a time when so many small labors of love emerged on the scene at once.

Empowered by one another’s existence, several fledgling galleries have banded together to form the Milwaukee Independent Gallery Association, or MIGA. They pool resources to promote what they do.

The galleries include: The Armoury Gallery, Borg Ward Collective, Fasten Collective, Green Gallery, j.w. lawson Fine Art, Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery, Portrait Society, Spackle Gallery and the White Whale Collective.

Another gallery in this category worth paying attention to, but not part of MIGA, is the brand new Jazz Gallery in Riverwest. Watch for the Rudy Rotter show at the Portrait Society and the Annie Killelea show at the Green Gallery.

These sorts of galleries haven’t possessed this much potential in years, but it’s hard to say if they’ll have the staying power of, say, a KM Art or a Hotcakes, now defunct spaces that were well regarded and had a good, long run. (The ever controversial but ultimately vital Mike Brenner threatened to close Hotcakes if the bronze Fonz became a reality, and did just that a few months ago.)It’d be nice to see some of the faces who only frequent the larger institutions discover these tucked-away treasures - and support them.

• At Milwaukee’s more established galleries, look for the retrospective of Fauve painter Kees Van Dongen at the David Barnett Gallery, the Joan Backes and Jon Schueler shows at the Dean Jensen Gallery, the “Return of the Men” and “Reflected Visions” shows at the Peltz Gallery, and the Mark Mulhern, Clare Malloy and Jason Rohlf shows at the Tory Folliard Gallery.

• Other shows to look out for include the psychological work of Ramiro Rodriguez at Latino Arts, a show of contemporary art from Latin America at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, the group show of Chicago artists and the juried show of the Coalition of Photographic Arts at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, “Configurations” show of conceptual photography and collage at Woodland Pattern and “The Veil,” an exploration of the garment by nearly 30 artists, at UWM’s Union Art Gallery.

• For something beyond Milwaukee, consider the George Segal show at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Amy Arnston and Wisconsin Visual Artists shows at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center and the contemporary ceramics show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.

• Finally, let’s not forget public art. In:Site will unveil its most ambitious series of temporary public art installations later this month, including “Public Heat,” a (literally) warming storefront by German artist-architects Stephanie Davidson and Georg Rafailidis. Also, Janet Zweig’s long-awaited concept for a Wisconsin Ave. artwork will be unveiled in the coming months. And keep an eye peeled on election day for “My Vote Performs,” nonpartisan, public art performances at a dozen polling locations.

Mary Louise Schumacher covers art and architecture for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. E-mail her at mschumacher@journalsentinel.com.