Artist Bathrooms

I have wanted to go to the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin since I went to the Intuit Art Against the Flow summit and heard about all they were doing to preserve artist environments. But until we went there a few weeks ago I didn’t know about their artist bathrooms. They have 6 of what they refer to as washrooms. Here are a few shots of the men’s entrance washroom “The Social History of Architecture” by Matt Nolen.

And here is the East Wing “Sheboygan Men’s Room” by Ann Agee:

This one and the toilets in one of the women’s bathrooms really reminded me of the artist bathrooms at the Smith College Art Museum.

It turns out that neither are by the same artists but that they are all the result of an amazing collaboration between the Kohler Art Center and the Kohler Factory. The Arts/Industry residency program “provides artists a place to come and make their artwork in tandem with the skilled craftspeople who work for Kohler company” and use the company’s Pottery, iron and brass Foundry, and the Enamel Shop.

In addition to the toilet pictured above “Filling and Emptying” by Merrill Mason includes cast iron replicas of the items you might find in a woman’s dressing room.

“The Women’s Room” by Cynthia Consentino was my favorite.

I couldn’t help but notice that both of the women’s rooms depicted private intimate feminine spaces while the men’s rooms had location as a subject. This may have struck me as more significant than it usually would have because I had read an article the day before that quoted a teenage girl who was very upset about transgender girls being able to use the girl’s locker room at her high school. “Schools have a duty to protect the privacy, dignity and well being of all students” she said, “Girls should not be forced to change next to a boy even if he thinks he’s a girl…Boys don’t belong in the girl’s locker room and vice versa”. I had been pondering her words and the subject matter of these washrooms proved to be thought provoking as well.

“The Women’s Room” also had tiles of parts of women, animals, vases, and flowers put together in different ways.

They made me think of those books that are divided in thirds and that you can switch the heads, bodies, and feet of. But a guide from the museum compared them to Exquisite Corpse drawings (those Chicago Imagists again – I wrote about this in YAP VI post). I was excited to find a set of some of the tiles at the ARTspace gallery in Kohler. I purchased a small magnet white board and stand and have had fun arranging and rearranging my tiles and making my own Exquisite Corpses!