The Kohler Arts Center’s studio space The ARTery is a “free drop in art making studio with exhibition-inspired projects”. It is open whenever the museum is open for self-guided explorations and also offers facilitated experiences two afternoon/evenings a week and on weekend days. It is a beautiful light filled space. One interesting note – the entire floor is covered with cardboard.
One table was set up for map making as part of the Map Sheboygan project.
The project involves collecting hand drawn maps of Sheboygan to “test the hypothesis that official representations of place do not always reflect the way we experience those places and to understand the scope of our unique perceptions of Sheboygan and which places we individually consider valuable enough to include on a map.”
Over 200 maps have been collected and include maps by both locals and visitors and by children and adults.
Unlike other museum art studios I have visited The ARTery seems to be for all ages – not just that adults who come in with children can make art too but that all museum visitors are welcome. In conjunction with the exhibit “Beauty Surplus: Serra Victoria Bothwell Fells” the studio is collecting a series of collaborative journals.
The book is filled with written reflections and sketches from people of all ages. I wrote about the sun shining through the leaves that we could see through the window during our excellent lunch at the museum!
The month’s facilitated workshops are also inspired by the exhibition. The ARTery Beauty Store asks guests to imagine products that can “shift the definition of beauty”. Products developed include “machines that change negative thoughts” and “glasses that help you see the world with new perspectives.”
I was looking forward to the “Dr. Charles Smith: Aurora” exhibit of 218 sculptures from Dr. Smith’s African-American Heritage Museum and Black Veteran’s Archive environment in Aurora and was interested to see what studio project it would inspire. It was to create a “secondary source shape poem” in response to the exhibit.
The studio tables also included several project kits.
This weaving area may be in response to the exhibitions centering around weaver Lenore Tawney.
And there’s a small book area.
The gift store was being remodeled and a corner of the studio was being used as a small gift store area so I am looking forward to seeing what will be there the next time we visit.
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!
The first sign of Fall was this Hello Fall printable. Unfortunately I can’t find the source. Then I switched out the tulips for the dried seed pods.
We brought the bins up from the storage unit and I created some vignettes.
On Monday we found the perfect Fall branch on the lake path and we decorated it and the little Halloween trees.
The Fall branch has some new additions. I found the perfect string of lights with little golden leaves at Target.
I needle felted a Day of the Dead skull.
We purchased a new wooden acorn at the Christkindlmarket last December.
And a Christmas present from my sister had this beautiful golden bat on top.
We bought another quite different bat at Hazel which seemed right for the Halloween trees.
Hello Fall and Happy Halloween!
When we headed to Wisconsin for the Sugar Maple Festival this July we knew we were going to end the weekend with a visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum but we didn’t know how our day in Madison would go. We drove to the area around the capital and found a place to eat lunch and were wondering what to do next when we saw a kiosk with posters for two exhibits at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) the first for Ray Yoshida (one of those Chicago Imagists I keep hearing about) and one for Jeffrey Gibson (who I hadn’t heard of but I loved the piece on the poster). The museum was free and in walking distance so we headed over – a great decision since it is a wonderful museum.
They didn’t have an art studio but they did have a MMoCAkids art guide and a MMoCAteens art guide with exploration activities and other information. They also had an interactive area in each gallery.
It was fun to walk into the Ray Yoshida exhibit and see the Lynda Barry book on drawing that Liz had recently lent to me. The “sketch book” includes 6 Drawing Challenges inspired by Ray Yoshida, Lynda Barry, aand Ivan Brunetti.
Jeffrey Gibson is of Choctow and Cherokee heritage and many of his pieces use beads and other traditional materials so they set up a touching station.
As well as a book and design area.
The Milwaukee Art Museum does have an art studio. The museum was having a James Nares exhibit and a lot of the pieces focused on movement so that was the inspiration for the art projects – marble paintings and drawing on a moving cylinder.
A series of still life animal environments were set up on other tables.
And there were some exploring tables and a book area.
We’ll definitely be visiting both museums again!
When I started volunteering at the Chicago Children’s Museum Art Studio my only previous museum art studio experience was visiting the art studio at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I’ve always loved the studio because it is so aesthetically appealing. But I know that when it first opened it did not seem child friendly to many parents. One of the things that rankled was that children were not allowed to draw on the paper that covered the table. When I mentioned that to Liz she said, “Well, our studio is an environment of yes!
I still wanted to share the space with Liz and other CCM colleagues so when I visited Northampton in May I was glad I had time to visit the museum and snap a few photos in the art studio.
The first thing I noticed was that the paper on the tables was black and I thought they had solved the writing on the paper problem.
But then I read an entry on their blog from an educator that had encouraged guests to draw their rough drafts on the black paper with chalk and thought well I guess things have changed!
Things that had not changed were the link to children’s book art and the ways the materials were presented. These tables were set up for children to create collages inspired by the exhibit “The Art of Eric Carle.”
Reverence for materials is obviously still an important value.
That “parliament of owls” you can see on the wall were created in conjunction with the exhibition, “Illustrated Owls: A Who’s Hoo from the Museum’s Vault”
This is the back half of the studio that I think is used for school aged children.
There is a toddler area in the front.
And a light table at the entrance.
Many things to be inspired by!
One of the best parts of going on vacation is checking out the stores and finding new items for our collections. While we were on vacation this summer in Saugatuck, MI we ventured over to the town of Douglas and checked out the stores there. In one that was going out of business we found a mermaid I couldn’t resist even though we haven’t found room in our new place for all the ones we already had! I loved the miniature weather vane but also artist Katie McConnell’s tagline “It’s okay to be a little vane.” Some of the vanes had jewels hanging from the bottom but the mermaid just had a place for one so I used wire to wrap a shell we found on the beach and created a souvenir as well as a new mermaid for the collection. It’s a little ironic, I guess, that she actually comes from Cape Cod. I hadn’t hung anything on the bottom curve of the mermaid shelf here so I had the perfect place for her.
In Saugatuck we went to Amazwi a store we had missed last year. This “contemporary art” store was filled with art from around the world including a decorated gourd that I think is probably from Africa or maybe South America since those look like coffee beans on top.
It found a home with one of the lizards and other pieces on the sideboard.
My favorite project this year was June and July’s chandelier sculptures. Inspired by hanging art especially the Healing Machines of artist Emery Blagdon and utilizing a wooden mobile that had been used for another hanging collaboration at the museum before, Liz conceived a light/sun chandelier to combat the long Chicago winter.
The middle top photo is one of Emery Blagdon’s Healing Machines
Pipe cleaners, yellow “post its”, and plastic milk bottle rings were the consistent materials. Other materials we introduced throughout the project were beads, buttons, ribbons, yarn, fabric, tinfoil, feathers, flowers, sequins, popsicle sticks, old jewelry, and tissue paper. What I loved about the project was how differently guests used the same materials. Also that many families made seperate pieces and then combined them – a collaboration for the collaboration. The wooden mobile frame was attached to the pulley system and lowered each day.
Here are some closeups:
Probably the most valuable thing I learned from Liz this year was what an amazing sculptural material tinfoil can be!
Artist and community activist Diotzinantzin Rios-Sierra came to the art studio this Spring. The Children’s Museum was one of the sites that made mosiac butterflies to be installed along Armitage Avenue as part of a “Here to Stay” Logan Square Neighborhood Association initiative. Before they began to work on the butterflies, guests participated in a discussion with the artist about mosaics and migration and butterflies as a symbol for immigration.
The installed butterflies can be viewed at: www.instagram.com/p/B0ZKElahIni/
I wasn’t volunteering the day schoolchildren came to create drawings on silk for the Ship of Tolerance sails. The Ship of Tolerance is a multi site conceptual art project launched by the Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Foundation that has been installed in 16 cities around the globe since 2005. New sails are created at each site and before the drawing begins questions for discussion are posed like: “What problems do you expect to see in the future and what could you do to solve them?”
The 50 foot tall ship is installed at Navy Pier in Polk Brothers Park. While it’s not in a lake like it was in the promo photo taken in Switzerland, it pretty impressive with the city buildings in the background.
Tattoo artist Ricki Proper and artist Josh Seals who is a Chicago Children’s Museum Lead Play and Learning Facilitator came to the studio for a week of Drawing Lab and introduced some drawing techniques that visitors used to create drawings of monsters that are currently being featured in the museum display case.
Techniques included creating monsters by using different types of lines and by picking three descriptive adjectives out of baskets. Imagine starting with a jagged line. Is that the top of the head or a set of teeth? For the second technique imagine drawing a short, spiky, shy monster or a large, furry, angry one.
Using the children’s suggestions, Ricki demonstrates how to draw a line monster
Josh and a visitor are drawing monsters suggested by descriptive words
Another technique I was excited to see in action was a technique the Chicago Imagists called “exquisite corpses”. I had not heard of the Chicago Imagists before I moved to Chicago but there was a big focus on these artists of the late 60’s this year so I’ve been learning a lot about them and seeing a lot of their work. The “exquisite corpse” technique involves collaborative drawing on a piece of paper folded so an artist can’t see what the previous artist has drawn. At the museum pieces of long paper were divided in thirds for this technique. On the day I volunteered I tried to get some children to do it suggesting that one draw a head and then passing it to the next child to draw the torso and to the third to draw the legs. Two children tried to do it with one drawing the head and legs and one drawing the torso but when it was passed back to the first child he erased what the other child had done and drew his own torso and legs. When I tried it with my nephew and his 6 year old son when I visited them in May my grandnephew looked at the result, said no, and turned the piece of paper over and drew a monster all by himself in the three spaces. Looks like a few people used the technique, though:
More monsters:
And Ricki and Josh’s artist statements:
At the beginning of June we went to the 57th Street Art Fair and found a great new piece for our gallery wall. Artist Kim Caisse calls these pieces walnut ink doodles and she does them on old Reader’s Digest condensed book covers.
We made room for it on our wall but of course that made another space to fill. We kept an eye out through the summer when we went to other art fairs or art stores but didn’t find the right piece. After awhile I hung one of the colorful suns from our Northampton downstairs bathroom there as a placeholder and I had started to think it might have to become permanent. But then this weekend we went to the Lakeview East Festival of Arts and found the perfect piece!
Artist James Lee makes “art from beer- related things.” In addition to amazing large mosaic pieces created with bottle caps he makes portraits of cats and dogs using beer bottle labels and bottle caps. But he also had the skull made from two New Belguim Spiced Imperial Dark Ale labels. He glues an intact label on the back.
The bicycle cap eyes are from the same bottles. I love how he used the arches and dots of the label to create the eyes and the “Lips of Faith” portion to create the mouth.
It fit the open space perfectly. We could even use the same nail we had used for the sun placeholder.
One of the things I appreciated about both of these artists was that while they also have pieces that sell for much more they also bring some affordable (to me) pieces to the art fairs.
Both artists are on instagram:
Kim Caisse @kimcaisseart
James Lee @DrinkBeerMakeArt
Collections and Other Stuff I Like 