There’s a museum inside UW-Milwaukee’s Inova museum, temporarily. The “Milwaukee, Milwaukie Museum” celebrates both the largest city in Wisconsin and a suburb of Portland, Oregon, which share similar names. The space, organized by the photographic collective Milwaukee Comma, achieved mini-fame even before the main exhibition opened, with Mayor Tom Barrett issuing a proclamation marking June 26 as “Milwaukee, Milwaukie Museum Day.”
On Saturday, April 18, Prospect Avenue’s Kenilworth Building will open its doors to the public for its annual family friendly, interactive show-and-tell event, Kenilworth Open Studios (KOS). From 11 a.m.-2 p.m., all six floors will be teeming with 100-plus of UW-Milwaukee’s best and brightest eager to share the ways they are changing the world with art and technology.
Built by the Ford Motor Company in 1914, the Kenilworth Building passed into Uncle Sam’s hands during World War II to function as a munitions factory. Later, after a stint as General Motors’ Spark Plug Division, the building was acquired by UWM and served primarily as a storage warehouse until being refurbished and repurposed in 2006: half to be used as dorms and half to house faculty and graduate students studying art and design, theater, dance, film and music.
INOVA is pleased to present a new body of work by Mateo Tannatt, including video, painting, sculpture, and architectural intervention. The exhibition centers on a video shot in a construction site for future artists’ studios. A menagerie of farm animals and a lone protagonist wander the space in a strange state of limbo. Accompanying paintings and sculptures flesh out a project that weaves an absurdist parable of labor and play, minimalism and digital post-production, avatars and zombies.
The Greater Milwaukee Foundation Mary L. Nohl Fellowships for Individual Artists exhibition is currently on display at INOVA. Of the seven fellowship recipients, the Peck School is well represented - with four alumni including Eddie Villanueva (BFA Art & Design), Andrew Swant (BFA Film), Cris Siqueira (MFA Film), Josh Weissbach (MFA Film), and Associate Lecturer in Art & Design Ray Chi. Learn more about the exhibition here.
Artist Leo Saul Berk suggests that you can go home again. In fact, doing so may prompt a rich body of work as seen in his exhibition “The Uncertainty of Enclosure,”currently on view at Inova. In the 1980s, his family relocated to the United States from England. Berk was about 6 years old and his parents’ hunt for a new residence in Aurora, Ill., was not going well. At the last moment, they found a most unlikely new abode: a futuristic house designed by visionary architect Bruce Goff in 1948. The main living space, with its ribbed dome, looks like an umbrella or pumpkin, and the materials used in construction include Quonset hut supports, linear acres of hemp rope and cannel coal.
Berk has come to realize how deeply he was affected by the inventive forms of his childhood home and how the architecture suggested possibilities in his own creative work. Several years ago he went back to the house and took a chance by knocking on the door. The current owner, an architectural historian and preservationist, not only invited him in but arranged for him to stay a few days with the intention of making art.
f I weren't going to the PianoArts Competition Final tonight (Wednesday), I would be at the Third Coast Percussion concert at UWM's Inova Gallery, in the Kenilworth Building on Kenilworth at Prospect.
TCP played smashingly on a Present Music program back in October. In case you missed it, check this out:
Cool, no? Well it gets better: I have five pairs of tickets to give to you sophisticated Tom Strini Writes readers. To claim a pair, call the UWM Peck School of the Arts box office, 414 229-4308, and say the magic words: TOM STRINI WRITES. First come, first served, when they're gone, they're gone. So act quickly, before you have to pay $10 to get in like everyone else. Box office hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The percussion concert -- a collaboration between UWM's Peck School and Present Music -- relates to Leo Saul Berk's Inova show, The Uncertainty of Enclosure. Berk here considers the idiosyncratic architecture of Bruce Goff, specifically Goff's remarkable Ford House, in Aurora, Ill. Goff was also a composer, and Third Coast will perform arrangements of music Goff made for piano rolls.
June 10, 2014 PrairieMod: The Art of Living in the Modern World
The Uncertainty Of Enclosure
Kelly L. wanted to let PrairieMod readers know that there is a new exhibition at INOVA in Milwaukee. Titled "The Uncertainty of Enclosure: Leo Saul Berk," it features the work of Berk, who grew up in Bruce Goff's Ford House in Aurora, IL. The sculpture in the exhibit is inspired by living in the wondrously creative house.
Today on the show, we learn of some of the warning signs for head and neck cancers. Then, an artist finds inspiration in the unique home he lived in as a child, and after three years, sees all of the work together for the first time at INOVA. We meet one of the jurors for this year’s Piano Arts competition, and join our Good Fermentations contributor Jeannette Hurt at a cheese dinner.
