![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1737606572/b0a94mbkwz9zvrrff0kt.jpg\")
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nationally acclaimed visual and performing arts complex located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. It is known worldwide for preserving and exhibiting artist-built environments—where artists transform their surroundings into exceptional, multifaceted works of art, and visitors experience art in a deeply personal way that speaks to them and also reflects our common humanity.
JMKAC’s mission is to generate a creative exchange between artists and the public. The Arts Center features rotating contemporary art exhibitions and hosts multidisciplinary artist residencies throughout the year. Onsite are eight gallery spaces, a performing arts theatre, and a family-friendly café serving fresh, seasonal fare. The museum gift shop features unique gifts and handmade artist creations. Classes and workshops are offered throughout the year for students of all ages. A hands-on art studio and award-winning, artist-designed washrooms round out the experience. During the summer months, JMKAC presents a free outdoor concert series and a popular arts festival. Admission and parking are always free. Winner of the 2023 Governor’s Tourism Award for Arts, Culture & Heritage.
Image: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2023. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
This exhibition will bring together for the first time the work of two artists who have dedicated their lives, through their multifaceted artistic processes, to healing.
After a life of rambling, Emery Blagdon (1907–1986) settled on his family’s homestead in Garfield Table, Nebraska. Many members of his family had been afflicted with cancer. Convinced of the healing potential of the unseen forces of the earth, Blagdon spent forty years constructing “The Healing Machine.” Using largely tin foil, masking tape, Christmas decorations, and wire, Blagdon sought to harness magnetism, electricity, and other energies to surround visitors with positive forces. JMKAC has owned “The Healing Machine” since 2004.
Guadalupe Maravilla migrated to the United States from El Salvador, unaccompanied, at age eight. At thirty-six, he was diagnosed with cancer, which he links to inherited trauma. During treatment, Maravilla connected with Indigenous healing practices, including sound baths—ceremonies that harness sonic vibrations from gongs, conch shells, and other instruments to restore calm and balance and release toxins in the body. He began making sculptures, paintings, performances, and large-scale installations that incorporate found objects related to his own migration story and various gongs and bowls, which he activates to conduct sound ceremonies. Blurring art, science, and medicine, he calls these activations “healing machines.”
At the Arts Center, central to the exhibition is Maravilla’s Mariposa Relámpago, a school bus that has been reimagined as a healing temple. Throughout the exhibition, the healing machines will be activated by Maravilla and various other healers, playing the sculptures to turn on and amplify the energy in the gallery—transforming the space into an immersive healing environment.
For the coinciding installation at the Art Preserve, Maravilla’s El Espíritu de Mariposa Relámpago Disease Thrower, a monumental bronze snake with a butterfly head, lightning bolt, and gong, serves as a central altar. Surrounded by Blagdon’s energy-focusing paintings and a selection of Maravilla’s retablos, this installation harnesses the energy held in the shed formerly occupied by Blagdon’s “The Healing Machine,” while it is on view at the Arts Center.
Since the 1980s, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center has built a remarkable collection of Asian textiles, including works from Bengali kantha, Hmong-Miao paj ntaub, and Japanese boro traditions. While these practices developed in different regions and cultures, they share common themes of resourcefulness, care, and storytelling through cloth.
When Threads Meet, They Speak brings these textile traditions into conversation for the first time, highlighting the connections and distinctions that emerge through their materials, techniques, and histories. Often created by women in rural communities, these works transform worn fabrics into objects of beauty and utility, carrying generations of creativity, resilience, and cultural knowledge within every stitch.
Called “Floating Flowers” by Thomas Haneman, these fantastical botanical paintings, richly toned and wildly inventive, could be specimens from outer space, underwater, or some sort of Eden. Positioned out-of-space and time, they joyously spring from his canvases, unfettered by nature or science. Many of them face away from the viewer, growing in the direction of an unseen source of light or energy. After emerging from a long and crippling depression, and inspired by his garden, Haneman’s subjects appear like synapses, the fresh sparks in his brain, brought on by his new-found happiness and excitement for life. They are the visual result of his healing, synaptic displays of joy. His paintings bear reference to seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and eighteenth-century botanical illustrations, while feeling atemporal and contemporary.
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Begun when he was a sophomore in high school, Blackstone built the work from found objects, electronics, harvested glass, toys, family videos, and personal mementos. Crystal City combines sound, light, movement, and living elements to create a miniature immersive urban landscape. First created and shown in Dayton, Ohio, this marks the first time the work will be exhibited outside that city. Originally conceived as an elegy for Blackstone’s grandmother, the project evolved into a reflection on social and economic injustice and a vision of a more unified, interconnected city.
The exhibition also features additional works by Blackstone drawn from the downtown Dayton bank building where he developed the project in its final years. Many of these sculptures attest to Blackstone’s interest in history, the passing of time, and the human condition.
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The John Michael Kohler Arts Center holds hundreds of key components from Tawney’s last studio environment, some of which are on display at the Art Preserve.
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\r\n\r\nMYTHOLOGIES: EUGENE VON BRUENCHENHEIN
\r\nLISA STONE
\r\nBRETT LITTMAN
\r\nMICHELLE GRABNER
\r\nCHRIS WILEY
\r\nKAREN PATTERSON
In 1984, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center launched its first exhibition of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's (1910–1983) work and currently cares for over 200 individual works by the Milwaukee artist. Von Bruenchenhein's work is garnering newfound attention and his work is included in exhibitions around the world.
\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"mythologies-eugene-von-bruenchenhein-lisa-stone-brett-littman-michelle-grabner-chris-wiley-and-karen-patterson","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:40:50.377365","updated_at":"2018-10-22 21:17:39.470373","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1910':53B '1983':54B '1984':37B '200':61B 'around':83B 'art':42B 'artist':67B 'attent':75B 'brett':7A,28B 'bruenchenhein':4A,25B,51B,69B 'care':58B 'center':43B 'chris':11A,32B 'current':57B 'eugen':2A,23B,49B 'exhibit':20B,47B,82B 'first':46B 'garner':73B 'grabner':10A,31B 'includ':80B 'individu':62B 'john':39B 'karen':14A,34B 'kohler':41B 'launch':44B 'less':18B 'lisa':5A,26B 'littman':8A,29B 'michael':40B 'michell':9A,30B 'milwauke':66B 'mytholog':1A,22B 'newfound':74B 'patterson':15A,35B 'road':17B 'seri':21B 'stone':6A,27B 'travel':19B 'von':3A,24B,50B,68B 'wiley':12A,33B 'work':55B,63B,71B,78B 'world':85B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668400/ucze3rne1mnn9o1vmhmv.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669466/event_ics_1721669466330.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":5163,"title":"Things Are What We Encounter: Dr. Charles Smith, Heather Hart","starts_at":"2017-09-10 03:00:00","ends_at":"2018-01-21 04:00:00","body":"THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED EXHIBITION SERIES
\r\n\r\nTHINGS ARE WHAT WE ENCOUNTER: DR. CHARLES SMITH
\r\nHEATHER HART
Dr. Charles Smith’s art environment, the African-American Heritage Museum + Black Veterans Archives, traces a national narrative of violence and racism from the Middle Passage to the present day. In the gallery, artist Heather Hart’s site-specific installation provides a literal and figural platform for Dr. Smith’s iconic sculptures.
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\r\n
PETER JODOCY
\r\n\r\nPeter Jodocy (1884–1971), a German-born Belgian, traveled the world looking for the ideal place to call home and eventually chose the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Jodocy and his wife homesteaded a farm in an area that today remains largely wilderness. He expressed his often-humorous reflections on American culture in his small but expertly crafted yard environment.
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\r\n\r\nJesse “Outlaw” Howard (1885–1983) lived most of his life in Fulton, Missouri, and was known for the large environment of painted signs he created there. His signs bear traces of his varied life experiences, including interpretations of biblical verse, commentary on local and national politicians, and his low opinion of vandals who stole his signs.
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\r\n\r\nA champion of under-recognized artists and art forms, Seymour Rosen was a pioneer in the effort to preserve artist-built environments. As a young man, the art environments that dotted the California landscape captivated him. He began photographing the sites and advocating for their preservation.
\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"in-celebration-of-ourselves-seymour-rosen-spaces-archive","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:41:49.034502","updated_at":"2018-10-22 20:41:49.034502","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'advoc':59B 'archiv':8A 'art':23B,44B 'artist':21B,36B 'artist-built':35B 'began':54B 'built':37B 'california':49B 'captiv':51B 'celebr':2A 'champion':16B 'dot':47B 'effort':32B 'environ':38B,45B 'exhibit':13B 'form':24B 'landscap':50B 'less':11B 'man':42B 'photograph':55B 'pioneer':29B 'preserv':34B,62B 'recogn':20B 'road':10B 'rosen':6A,26B 'seri':14B 'seymour':5A,25B 'site':57B 'space':7A 'travel':12B 'under-recogn':18B 'young':41B","thumbnail":null,"calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669466/event_ics_1721669466143.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":6627,"title":"Midsummer Festival of the Arts","starts_at":"2019-07-20 10:00:00","ends_at":"2019-07-21 17:00:00","body":"Saturday, July 20, 2019, 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
\r\n\r\nSunday, July 21, 2019, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
\r\n\r\nCome join us for two days of wonderful art, music, sunshine, and fun at the Midsummer Festival of the Arts, set amidst the gardens of this major innovative grassroots arts center, the largest multi-arts event in East-Central Wisconsin. This exciting family-friendly festival attracts tens of thousands of visitors who shop the 135 artists' booths and enjoy live music, art-making activities, free admission to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (where even the washrooms are works of art!), delicious local cuisine and food trucks, and much more. In booths set up along the tree-lined streets, festivalgoers can choose from an astounding variety of paintings, photographs, jewelry, sculpture, ceramics, art glass, fiber art, and much more.
\r\n","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"midsummer-festival-of-the-arts","created_at":"2018-10-22 20:45:03.010304","updated_at":"2018-12-20 22:47:01.163721","excerpt":null,"is_timeless":false,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'00':11B,14B,21B,24B '10':10B,20B '135':83B '20':8B '2019':9B,19B '21':18B '4':23B '5':13B 'a.m':12B,22B 'activ':93B 'admiss':95B 'along':124B 'amidst':47B 'art':5A,34B,45B,55B,61B,91B,101B,110B,143B,146B 'art-mak':90B 'artist':84B 'astound':135B 'attract':74B 'booth':85B,121B 'center':56B,102B 'central':66B 'ceram':142B 'choos':132B 'come':26B 'cuisin':113B 'day':31B 'delici':111B 'east':65B 'east-centr':64B 'enjoy':87B 'even':104B 'event':62B 'excit':69B 'famili':71B 'family-friend':70B 'festiv':2A,42B,73B 'festivalgo':130B 'fiber':145B 'food':115B 'free':94B 'friend':72B 'fun':38B 'garden':49B 'glass':144B 'grassroot':54B 'innov':53B 'jewelri':140B 'john':98B 'join':27B 'juli':7B,17B 'kohler':100B 'largest':58B 'line':128B 'live':88B 'local':112B 'major':52B 'make':92B 'michael':99B 'midsumm':1A,41B 'much':118B,148B 'multi':60B 'multi-art':59B 'music':35B,89B 'p.m':15B,25B 'paint':138B 'photograph':139B 'saturday':6B 'sculptur':141B 'set':46B,122B 'shop':81B 'street':129B 'sunday':16B 'sunshin':36B 'ten':75B 'thousand':77B 'tree':127B 'tree-lin':126B 'truck':116B 'two':30B 'us':28B 'varieti':136B 'visitor':79B 'washroom':106B 'wisconsin':67B 'wonder':33B 'work':108B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668458/mbrtdoemh0ptrbvvpqfc.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669523/event_ics_1721669523341.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Art Fairs"},{"id":7641,"title":"High Touch","starts_at":"2021-03-21 12:00:00","ends_at":"2022-03-13 12:00:00","body":"Nearly forty years ago, futurist John Naisbitt coined the term “high touch” in his 1982 book, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. He defined it as humankind’s counterbalancing response to the impersonal nature of technology, or high tech.
Naisbitt claimed that the appropriate reaction to more technology is not to stop it, but to accommodate it, respond to it, and shape it. To look at it through a human lens.
High Touch brings together six artists who embrace technology as a medium and tool to research, ideate, and assemble their intensely handcrafted, resolutely analog artworks. Whether sourcing images from the internet’s endless scroll or using digital processes to fabricate components of their works, they create highly tangible objects that transform the virtual into the physical.
The array of works in the exhibition are also unified by their ability to elicit a haptic response in the viewer—a palpable, tactile sense of perception that engages senses beyond the optic. They elicit a range of visceral and psychological responses that are triggered by closeness and proximity, and provide the immediate experience of texture, scale, and mass that is possible only in person. High touch art invokes the body through spatial nearness, asserts its physicality, and evokes emotion. It invites us to recover and hone our senses—to see more, to hear more, to feel more.
In our hyper-mediated, screen-based existence, when true presence is often elusive, real-world encounters with artworks provide an antidote to the flattened experience of digital life. Situated where craft and technology intersect, where materials end and sensation begins, High Touch reminds us of the radical, transformative power of art, and of art’s ability to touch us.
View the Gallery Handout
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In collaboration with Green Bicycle Co. and the City of Sheboygan, the Arts Center embarked on a process of cultural asset mapping—a method of identifying the resources in an area that make it unique.
The project began several months ago, and it is still a work in progress. Here, we share what we heard from citizens of Sheboygan. It is clear that intangible assets are more important to people than tangible ones. Having a sense of belonging, feeling heard, holding connection to the community might be connected to physical places or organizations, but the physical location—the tangible asset—wasn’t the whole story. Our information and recommendations are organized into three categories for maximum short- and long-term impact: youth education, participation and engagement, and representation. All are intertwined, and we believe one leads to another. You can expect to see more: community conversations, surveys, presentations, and other engagement. We hope you join us for the journey.
Learn more at: jmkac.org/exhibition/communities-in-conversation-cultural-asset-mapping-in-sheboygan/
Image cutline: Preschoolers explore Our Town: Cultural Asset Mapping in Sheboygan with Keely Phippen at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2021.
Learn more at: jmkac.org/engage-events/midsummer-festival-of-the-arts
Saturday, July 17, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Sunday, July 18, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Free Admission
70+ Artist Booths • Music • Exhibitions • Demonstrations • Art Making • Food Trucks
Midsummer Festival of the Arts offers a unique, family friendly blend of fine art, handcrafted goods, music, food, and fun on the grounds of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Sheboygan’s City Green.
For more than five decades, this festival has been a Sheboygan tradition for family outings and for finding special works of art. Seventy-three artist booths lining the tree-lined streets will feature paintings, photographs, furniture, jewelry, wearables, wood carvings, ceramics, glass, leather goods, textiles, and more.
This year, the festival is dedicated to the late Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, who founded the annual event more than 50 years ago. Inside the Arts Center, a special exhibition titled Detours and Side Roads: A Tribute to Ruth DeYoung Kohler II explores Kohler’s life and legacy through objects and art from her personal collection. The show illustrates Kohler’s passion for and commitment to the Arts Center, visual and performing arts and artists, and the Sheboygan community.
Free Art Making
Three free art-making activities for all ages include Poetry is a “SNAP” on a Cap! Join Sheboygan’s poet laureate Lisa Vihos in creating a collaborative poem using Snapple caps and honoring Ruth Kohler’s love of words and her favorite beverage, a peach Snapple!
Festivalgoers can also make a one-of-a-kind fabric canvas painting inspired by artwork in the Arts Center’s High Touch exhibition and design a plaster medallion mold using clay, texture tools, colored sand, and more.
Free Concerts
From 1 to 4 p.m. each day, stroll over to the City Green stage to enjoy free performances by local and regional bands. These concerts are part of the Return to the Real Music Series, which continues into September.
Artist Demonstrations
Watch artists Pat Robison, Karen Robison, Patty Aker, and plein-aire painters demonstrate their techniques. Demonstrations will take place Saturday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., and Sunday between noon and 2 p.m.
Food and Drink
A variety of delicious foods, water, and soft drinks will be available for purchase from the Arts Center’s own Culinary Art Car, Gyros, Asia’s Finest, Flecks, and Nutman. A bar area will offer canned beer and beverages.
Free Exhibitions
Inside the Arts Center, exhibitions of contemporary art explore the theme of Return to the Real. On view in the series are a group exhibition titled High Touch, a solo exhibition of works by artist Annabeth Marks titled Extender, and Flavia D’Urso’s multichannel video installation Who Do You Think I Am?!
Additional exhibitions in the JMKAC galleries include Bernard Langlais: Live and Let Live, presenting works spanning the artist’s thirty-year career, and SPACES Spotlight: Gregg Blasdel + Clarence Schmidt, featuring Blasdel’s photographs of the art environment Clarence Schmidt created in Woodstock, NY; and Communities in Conversation, an Arts Center collaboration with Green Bicycle Co. and the City of Sheboygan to map the cultural assets that make Sheboygan, Sheboygan.
Image: Midsummer Festival of the Arts, July 15, 2017. Photo courtesy of John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
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Her practice relies heavily on balance and tension to explore the structural contingencies of where, and how, elements meet. These formal explorations shape Wade’s singular, idiosyncratic visual language, one that investigates the play between two and three dimensions and the connection between spatial and social relationships.
Wade’s process, which she likens to syntax, is closely allied with language and writing. Using a grammatical approach to making, she creates highly edited sculptural works that function as words, sentences, paragraphs, and stanzas arranged in physical space. Intended to be read as a stylistically compelling turn of phrase, where each sculpture is stylistically related to the others yet remains self-sufficient, Wade’s installation appraises the relationship between individual and group, part and whole.
Allison Wade earned a BA in English literature from Stanford University and an MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wade’s work has been exhibited at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Ditch Projects, Eugene, Oregon; Chicago Cultural Center; Riverside Arts Center, Riverside, Illinois; Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, Nebraska; Loyola University Chicago; and Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnati. She is a lecturer in the Department of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Devening Projects, Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.
View the Gallery Handout
Allison Wade, Hypotheticals, 2021; walnut, steel, paint, ceramic, and fabric. Courtesy of the artist.
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Jennifer Levonian’s cut-paper animations blend documentary and fictional elements to create situations in which the absurd, surreal, heartbreaking, and hilarious are perpetually in play. Explorations of the ambivalence and monotony of daily life, her stop-motion paintings transform things that commonly go unnoticed into bizarre and uncanny events.
In Cinnamon, Thunderstorm, her newest animation, Levonian investigates the space between cozy domesticity and unbridled wildness. After reading a magazine article titled “Six Tips for When You’re Dying Inside,” a woman holed up in her apartment follows the directive to “create a tranquil corner” in her home by lighting scented candles. The different smells combine and magically bestow her with the power to shoot flames out of her eyes and shapeshift into a wolf.
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Not unlike the alchemists of the past, who tried to transform lead into gold, the Arts/Industry artists-in-residence at Kohler Co. begin with similarly commonplace materials such as iron, sand, and porcelain clay. Through seemingly magical processes such as firing and casting, these materials are transmuted into works of art such as those included in this exhibition.
The Alchemists exhibits the breadth of work produced by resident artists, as well as the long standing nature of this world renowned residency. The show also demonstrates the variety of artistic practices exercised during Arts/Industry residencies.
Included in the exhibition are works by artists Christina Antemann (in residence 2004, Pottery), Sharif Bey (in residence 2014, Pottery), Carol Emmons (in residence 2012, Pottery), Dan Engelke (in residence 1985, Pottery), Jens Gussek (in residence 2006, Pottery), Beth Katleman (in residence 1995, Foundry), Beth Lipman (in residence 2003 and 2015, Foundry), Jon Rappleye (in residence 2006, Pottery), Chris Stanley (in residence 1999, Pottery), and S. Judson Wilcox (in residence 1984, Pottery).
Arts/Industry is administered by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and generously hosted and funded by Kohler Co.
Image: Jon Rappleye, Guardian, 2007; vitreous china and paint; 17 ¾ x 20 x 12 in. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gift of the artist.
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For Hope Omens, he will present an entirely new body of work.
Many of the sculptures were produced using molds that Othello created during his Arts/Industry Pottery residency at the Kohler Co. factory in early 2020. While he was in residence, the world outside the factory began to shift with the beginning of the pandemic. The residency was cut short by several weeks and forced Othello to bring home some of the molds to continue his work. Othello draws on African Nkisii, or objects that are believed to be invested with spiritual protection and energy. Breath and breathing are ideas often expressed in Othello’s vessel-like forms covered in mouths. These concepts, and the power to deprive people of their breath and their ability to breathe, are now more highly charged. In addition, many of his new works feature both ears and mouths, offering meditations on listening, hearing, and being present.
A new sound piece by Oakland, California musician Cheflee will accompany Othello’s sculptures. Made in response to the work in the exhibition, the ambient composition is designed to subtly guide the viewer through the space, creating an immersive environment. Some of the vessels will emanate sound from within, as if imbued with a spirit.
Image: Woody De Othello, Freeflow, 2021; ceramic and glaze. Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: John Wilson White.
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Presented in connection with Bernard Langlais: Live and Let Live On, this exhibition explores traditional and contemporary practices of working in wood.
Ingrained in Wisconsin will feature a tool wall and Zine Library by Taylor Wright Rushing as well as an interactive art piece by Matthew Gramling. A portion of the gallery will highlight work selected from an open call for objects made from wood by regional makers.
Utilizing a common natural resource, woodworkers produce both utilitarian and decorative objects—sometimes within the same piece. The artists featured in this gallery use historical techniques or push the boundaries of what wood can do. This exhibition asks visitors to consider the wonders of a material that is all around us.
Image: Taylor Rushing, Worlds First Zine Library, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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October 17, 2021–March 2022
Can we truly extend the life of an artist-built environment? In the absence of their creators, how do we responsibly care for and maintain these environments? Don’t our established processes and tools for doing so—inventory and documentation, conservation and preservation, evocation and curation—disrupt the “delicate ecology” of these dynamic, private worlds?
From the untimely death of Bernard Langlais in 1977 to the inauguration of the Langlais Sculpture Preserve in 2017, his lively art environment—an eight-acre “farm” in Cushing, Maine, comprising more than one hundred monumental wood sculptures, a spirited cadre of real livestock, an orchard, ponds, barns, and a small farmhouse—evolved dramatically. The harsh climate of the coastal locale affected much of this change, ravaging the artworks and often bringing the artist’s own interest in weather as a tool to its full conclusion. Naturally, the interests, resources, and practical realities of those who became responsible for the site have also played a significant role in its transformation. The most notable of these stewards is the artist’s widow, Helen Friend Langlais, who worked tirelessly for more than three decades to preserve Langlais’s art and legacy before her own passing in 2010.
Presenting artworks, artistic remnants, audio-visual documentation, and first-person accounts, Bernard Langlais: Live and Let Live On explores the recent history of Langlais’s farm, and the acts and activities of stewardship that have shaped the site. Newly commissioned film footage of the Langlais Preserve by Melanie Essex, an artist and Cushing resident who spent time at the farm as a child during Langlais’s lifetime, provides a personal view of the site as it stands today.
The exhibition is a companion to the first posthumous survey exhibition of Bernard Langlais’s art outside of Maine, which is on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center from April 4 through October 3, 2021.
Image: Bernard Langlais in Cushing, Maine, 1976. Photo David Hiser.
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Eva Papamargariti’s video Factitious Imprints takes viewers on a journey through a posthuman, postnatural landscape that blurs boundaries between virtual and physical environments and ecosystems.
The video presents a hybrid, dystopic dreamscape of digitally rendered scenes and images of real places culled from Google Maps, drones, and handheld recording devices. Its overlapping surfaces—from nonbiodegradable waste to simulations of animals and plants to the artist’s own skin—shift and change form as we move through it.
A reflection on the idea of “constructed” nature, one defined and documented through the palimpsest of imprints on the earth resulting from human interaction and natural processes, it considers the complicated relationship between humans, nature, and technology and the fuzzy boundaries between our past, present, and future realities.
Eva Papamargariti: Factitious Imprints is part of the Arts Center’s Ways of Being theme. The featured visual and performing artists recontextualize our past, reorient our present, and project new, viable futures. Collectively, they ask, what if?
Image: Eva Papamargariti, Factitious Imprints, 2016; video still. Courtesy of the artist.
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“Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when we realize that we have a common future, that our fates are linked.” She goes on to suggest, “Real kinship comes when you live it. It’s not a noun, but a verb, it’s not a thing, it’s what you do.”
The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.
Artists in the exhibition include Juan William Chávez, David Freid, Lindsey French, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Nina Katchadourian, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, William Wegman, and Dyani White Hawk.
Image: Sharing the Same Breath installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2023. Dyani White Hawk in collaboration with photographer Tom Jones, I Am Your Relative, 2020; pigment prints on aluminum composite; 70 1/2 x 38 1/2 in. each. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
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HMong Indigeneity lives in textiles: vibrant, breathing pieces of cloth shaped by HMong hands to illustrate ancestral landmarks and homelands. Here, lines converge to form patterns and an aesthetic of kin that replace teb chaws—land, country, and place—as pathways for Indigeneity to reside.
Belonging to people who are known as being without teb or chaws, HMong Indigeneity is repeatedly questioned and hides in their displacement.
Centering the voices of three HMong-American artists, Cloth as Land investigates a place for HMong Indigeneity within contemporary HMong art. Remnants of land are unveiled in thirty textiles from JMKAC’s collection, foregrounding newly commissioned works by artists Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj, Pao Houa Her, and Tshab Her, which retain these symbols, motifs, and stories. Engaging with memory and embodied knowledge, narratives of belonging are reconfigured to persist amid invisibility, sorrow, and erasure. Through each artists’ individual encounters, HMong aesthetics become reimagined, disrupting traditional expectations and uncovering new sites for HMong Indigeneity to be claimed.
Curated by Pachia Lucy Vang, Cloth as Land unfolds in separate installations over time, from November 2023 through June 2024 at the Arts Center, the Art Preserve, and the Hmong Mutual Assistance Association of Sheboygan.
* HMong is written with a capital H and M to be inclusive of White Hmong and Green Mong dialects. Speakers of the White dialect pronounce “Hmong” with a silent “H,” indicating a nasal aspiration or puff of air out of the nose. Speakers of the Green dialect pronounce “Mong” without.
Image: Cloth as Land: HMong Indigeneity installation view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 2023. Foreground: Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj, I sat closely and watched it crumble and unraveled and crumbled and unraveled and..., 2023; metal and embroidery thread. Background: Tshab Her, on agency and following my gut, 2023; embroidery floss, cotton, and wood. Courtesy of the artists.
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In John Green’s essay “Teddy Bears,” he writes, “Home is a teddy bear, but only a certain teddy bear at a certain time.” Inspired by the essay, JMKAC members and Wisconsin residents living within 125 miles of the Arts Center were invited to submit objects and stories that, at one time or currently, feel like home.
This exhibition shares all submissions fitting the parameters of the call, which included size restrictions, maximum word count, and fulfilling the prompt of how the chosen object connected to their idea of home.
You can add your expressions of connection and belonging to collaborative projects in the Social STUDIO, located near the main entrance.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"home-is-a-teddy-bear","created_at":"2024-03-01 17:06:54.931803","updated_at":"2024-03-01 17:06:54.94081","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'125':97B 'add':154B 'art':9B,101B 'ask':15B 'bear':5A,68B,75B,81B 'belong':61B,160B 'call':129B 'center':10B,102B 'certain':79B,84B 'chosen':144B 'collabor':162B 'connect':22B,32B,59B,146B,158B 'consid':12B 'count':136B 'creat':36B 'current':115B 'entranc':172B 'essay':66B,89B 'exhibit':120B 'express':156B 'feel':39B,57B,116B 'fit':124B 'foundat':34B 'fulfil':138B 'green':64B 'hold':55B 'home':1A,41B,71B,118B,151B 'human':45B 'idea':149B 'includ':131B 'inspir':86B 'invit':104B 'jmkac':90B 'john':63B 'kin':13B 'lifetim':44B 'like':117B 'live':95B 'locat':168B 'look':46B 'main':171B 'maximum':134B 'member':91B 'mile':98B 'movi':51B 'natur':26B 'near':169B 'object':48B,107B,145B 'often':30B 'one':112B 'paramet':126B 'peopl':21B 'photograph':53B 'place':37B 'project':163B 'prompt':140B 'reflect':18B 'resid':94B 'restrict':133B 'share':121B 'size':132B 'social':166B 'song':49B 'speci':29B 'stori':50B,109B 'studio':167B 'submiss':123B 'submit':106B 'teddi':4A,67B,74B,80B 'theme':14B 'throughout':42B 'time':85B,113B 'visitor':16B 'wisconsin':93B 'within':96B 'word':135B 'write':70B 'year':7B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668755/eja1ofetw5yueuj2rxlb.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669746/event_ics_1721669745817.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":12374,"title":"Joyce Kozloff: How We Know What We Know","starts_at":"2024-02-03 12:00:00","ends_at":"2024-06-30 12:00:00","body":"Joyce Kozloff came to the Arts/Industry program in 1986, with the express purpose of producing ceramic tiles for a commission at Detroit’s Financial Center People Mover Station. Prior to that, she had been executing commissions such as these in her home studio. As an Arts/Industry resident, she had access to the Kohler Co. materials and production facilities to create the components for this installation working in a studio on the factory floor.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kozloff and other artists became committed to a serious investigation of ornamentation. The resultant group, now known as the Pattern and Decoration Movement (or P&D) looked to decorative traditions across the world, such as textiles and embroideries, wallpapers, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, glassware, and architectural embellishments. This embrace of what was traditionally considered “inessential” was directly oppositional to the masculine and sexist world of modern art.
In the 1990s, Kozloff turned to cartography, in a myriad of forms. Across paintings, frescoes, installations, and sculpture, Kozloff uses maps to reveal the limits and possibilities of knowledge production and the varied relationships that govern systems of power.
As part of the Arts Center’s celebration of Arts/Industry’s fiftieth anniversary, the museum’s galleries in the historic John Michael Kohler home will be dedicated to solo presentations of work by two of the residency program’s alumnae. Through these exhibitions, the Arts Center will re-engage with the artists and their evolving practices. The ways in which Arts/Industry afforded the residents career opportunities and expanded their thinking about unfamiliar materials will be spotlighted. The artists will also share their lasting impressions of the program.
Joyce Kozloff: How We Know What We Know considers a twenty-year span of Kozloff’s career, beginning with her Arts/Industry residency. Through a presentation of work from five of her series (among them are Voyages, Knowledge, and Targets) from 1986–2006, it traces her transition into cartography. The exhibition also features a sound composition by Carolyn Yarnell.
Image: Joyce Kozloff, Targets, 2000; acrylic on canvas with wood frame; 108 in. diameter. Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York. Photo: John and Anne Abbott.
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Clayton Hill, a Kohler Co. associate who worked alongside many artists in the early years of Arts/Industry, described this method as the “secret” of “muddy water.” It was an approach to working with clay that could have been acquired only in Wisconsin, where industry required this mixture to produce large-scale products such as sinks.
The residency’s location also became a seed of inspiration for many artists in the following years. Some artworks produced during residencies focused on the history of nearby neighborhoods, a semi-rural lifestyle, and regional delicacies such as sausage and dairy foods.
The Secret of Muddy Water celebrates the essence of Wisconsin, the industries rooted in the state, and what makes Arts/Industry’s location a source of delight and wonder for artists who temporarily relocate for the experience.
Image: Work by Arts/Industry artist-in-residence Rebecca Morgan, 2018. Photo: Kohler Co.
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Mad Dash: 50 Years of Arts/Industry is a chronological installation of artworks, letters, photographs, and promotional materials dating from 1974 to the present. It reveals the origin and history of Arts/Industry through the artists themselves. Key moments, such as the first artist to work in the foundry and a notable performance on the Kohler Co. campus, display a range of concepts and material explorations that artists have pursued over the program’s five decades.
Every artist donates an object made during their residency to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s collection. Mad Dash presents artworks from this collection to encapsulate the experience of art making within Kohler Co. and highlight various stages of the artists’ careers. These works, along with the ephemera, evoke the substantial impact Arts/Industry has had on participants from all over the world.
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Artists Billy Dufala (Arts/Industry alumnus) and John Greig designed the floorplan of Workplace to reference the artists-in-residence studios in the Kohler Co. factory. In this context, the space becomes a hybrid gallery/studio, where creative practices are enacted and the outcomes shown.
Throughout the year, artists will use aspects of their practice to investigate the problem-solving, experimentation, and production that characterize both their work and that of other creative fields. They will pose questions about mold making, an integral part of the Arts/Industry residency, and how that process shows up in other areas of creation. In other cases, the artists will investigate the act of growing our own food and what the experience might teach us about creativity. Through skill sharing and responding to a prescribed set of constraints, bakers, designers, gardeners, printers, and fabricators will demonstrate a common language with artists, factory associates, and Arts Center visitors.
Inspired by a series of workshops in the 1970s, when Kohler Co. associates and ceramic artists shared industrial and artistic techniques in a red-and-white striped tent, Workplace reveals the ad-hoc and exploratory spirit that fuels interdisciplinary collaborations and offers future possibilities for the Arts/Industry model.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"workplace","created_at":"2024-09-11 03:23:37.198691","updated_at":"2024-09-11 03:23:37.214181","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1970s':210B 'act':157B 'ad':235B 'ad-hoc':234B 'alumnus':54B 'area':146B 'art':14B,199B 'artist':46B,50B,67B,97B,153B,195B,217B,221B 'artists-in-resid':66B 'arts/industry':20B,53B,136B,250B 'aspect':100B 'associ':197B,214B 'baker':183B 'becom':81B 'billi':51B 'case':151B 'center':200B 'ceram':216B 'character':114B 'co':74B,213B 'collabor':243B 'common':192B 'connect':37B 'constraint':182B 'context':78B 'creation':148B 'creativ':86B,122B,171B 'cue':8B 'defin':18B 'demonstr':25B,190B 'design':58B,184B 'detail':2B 'dufala':52B 'enact':89B 'experi':166B 'experiment':110B 'exploratori':238B 'fabric':188B 'factori':75B,196B 'field':123B 'floorplan':60B 'food':162B 'fuel':241B 'futur':246B 'galleri':24B 'gallery/studio':84B 'garden':185B 'greig':57B 'grow':159B 'hand':28B 'hands-on':27B 'hoc':236B 'hybrid':83B 'implement':44B 'industri':16B,48B,219B 'innov':11B 'inspir':202B 'integr':132B 'interact':4B 'interdisciplinari':242B 'investig':105B,155B 'john':56B 'kohler':73B,212B 'languag':193B 'lectur':26B 'make':130B 'might':167B 'model':251B 'mold':129B 'offer':245B 'opportun':35B 'outcom':92B 'pair':12B 'part':133B 'pose':126B 'possibl':247B 'practic':87B,103B 'prescrib':179B 'printer':186B 'problem':108B 'problem-solv':107B 'process':41B,141B 'product':112B 'question':127B 'red':226B 'red-and-whit':225B 'refer':64B 'resid':21B,69B,137B 'respond':176B 'reveal':232B 'seri':205B 'set':180B 'share':34B,174B,218B 'show':142B 'shown':93B 'skill':33B,173B 'skill-shar':32B 'solv':109B 'space':5B,80B 'spirit':239B 'stripe':229B 'studio':70B 'take':6B 'teach':168B 'techniqu':43B,222B 'tent':230B 'throughout':94B 'us':169B 'use':99B 'visitor':38B,201B 'white':228B 'work':117B 'worker':49B 'workplac':1A,62B,231B 'workshop':30B,207B 'year':96B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1731088732/pdke3cfdysjy7ow5bjui.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":14439,"title":"Clocking In: 2024 Arts/Industry Residents","starts_at":"2024-03-16 12:00:00","ends_at":"2025-03-02 12:00:00","body":"
As part of the Arts Center’s celebration of Arts/Industry’s fiftieth anniversary, the twelve artists in residence at the Kohler Co. factory during 2024 will exhibit their work in a yearlong group exhibition, Clocking In: 2024 Arts/Industry Residents.
Since 1974, over five hundred artists have participated in the Arts Center’s Arts/Industry residency. The program, operated in collaboration with Kohler Co., offers artists the time and space to focus on the creation of new work in the company’s pottery and foundry studios, encouraging experimental art making on the factory floor and engagement with Kohler Co. associates.
The exhibition will present four residents’ work at a time, in rotations of approximately four months each. Connections between the artists and their work will surface as the exhibition evolves, similar to the experience of a residency. Artists will show a range of work—some previously created, some newly commissioned for the exhibition, and some made during their residency.
Artists featured in the exhibition include first-time residents Shae Bishop, Justin Favela, Cathy Hsiao, Sahar Khoury, Lauren Mabry, and Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj. Returning Arts/Industry alumni artists Sharif Bey, Mary Anne Kluth, Harold Mendez, Martha Poggioli, Lee Emma Running, and Edra Soto will also present work in the exhibition.
Image: Arts/Industry artist-in-residence John Toki in the Kohler Co. Foundry, 1979.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"clocking-in-2024-arts-industry-residents","created_at":"2024-09-11 03:31:33.064954","updated_at":"2024-09-11 03:31:33.071273","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1974':46B '1979':227B '2024':3A,30B,42B 'also':208B 'alumni':190B 'ann':195B 'anniversari':18B 'approxim':117B 'art':10B,55B,92B 'artist':21B,50B,69B,124B,141B,163B,191B,217B 'artist-in-resid':216B 'arts/industry':4A,15B,43B,58B,189B,215B 'associ':103B 'bey':193B 'bishop':174B 'cathi':177B 'celebr':13B 'center':11B,56B 'clock':1A,40B 'co':27B,67B,102B,225B 'collabor':64B 'commiss':153B 'compani':84B 'connect':121B 'creat':150B 'creation':78B 'edra':205B 'emma':202B 'encourag':90B 'engag':99B 'evolv':133B 'exhibit':32B,39B,105B,132B,156B,167B,213B 'experi':137B 'experiment':91B 'factori':28B,96B 'favela':176B 'featur':164B 'fiftieth':17B 'first':170B 'first-tim':169B 'five':48B 'floor':97B 'focus':75B 'foundri':88B,226B 'four':108B,118B 'ger':184B 'group':38B 'harold':197B 'hsiao':178B 'hundr':49B 'imag':214B 'includ':168B 'john':220B 'justin':175B 'khouri':180B 'kluth':196B 'kohler':26B,66B,101B,224B 'lauren':181B 'lee':201B 'mabri':182B 'made':159B 'make':93B 'mari':194B 'martha':199B 'mendez':198B 'month':119B 'new':80B 'newli':152B 'ntxawg':186B 'offer':68B 'oper':62B 'part':7B 'particip':52B 'poggioli':200B 'potteri':86B 'present':107B,209B 'previous':149B 'program':61B 'rang':145B 'resid':5A,23B,44B,59B,109B,140B,162B,172B,219B 'return':188B 'rotat':115B 'run':203B 'sahar':179B 'shae':173B 'sharif':192B 'show':143B 'similar':134B 'sinc':45B 'soto':206B 'space':73B 'studio':89B 'surfac':129B 'time':71B,113B,171B 'toki':221B 'twelv':20B 'work':34B,81B,110B,127B,147B,210B 'xiong':185B 'xyooj':187B 'yearlong':37B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1731088732/fqkwxzfndenstd7lkrfx.png","calendar":null,"carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":12627,"title":"No Grout","starts_at":"2024-06-01 12:00:00","ends_at":"2024-10-06 12:00:00","body":"No Grout showcases tiles created by Arts/Industry artists-in-residence at the Kohler Co. factory. The pieces span all five decades of the residency program, reflecting individual artistic expression and material play, as well as technological and skill-set progressions inherent in factory culture.
In 1974, artists began entering Kohler Co. to create ceramic works on the factory floor using tools and methods most of them had never had access to before. Regardless of their technical experience and knowledge of the medium, the artists-in-residence face a substantial learning curve to become acquainted with factory schedules, equipment, and processes. The Kohler associates and Arts/Industry studio technicians assist the artists in meeting these challenges.
The simplicity of the tile form has been an excellent entry point for approaching mold construction and surface experimentation. No Grout illustrates the range of technologies available in the factory and the artists’ innovative uses of glazes, slip application, and mold making.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"no-grout","created_at":"2024-04-10 14:49:20.230528","updated_at":"2024-09-11 03:16:17.932778","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":true,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1974':50B 'access':74B 'acquaint':99B 'applic':158B 'approach':133B 'artist':11B,31B,51B,89B,115B,152B 'artists-in-resid':10B,88B 'arts/industry':9B,110B 'assist':113B 'associ':108B 'avail':146B 'becom':98B 'began':52B 'ceram':58B 'challeng':119B 'co':17B,55B 'construct':135B 'creat':7B,57B 'cultur':48B 'curv':96B 'decad':24B 'enter':53B 'entri':130B 'equip':103B 'excel':129B 'experi':81B 'experiment':138B 'express':32B 'face':92B 'factori':18B,47B,62B,101B,149B 'five':23B 'floor':63B 'form':125B 'glaze':156B 'grout':2A,4B,140B 'illustr':141B 'individu':30B 'inher':45B 'innov':153B 'knowledg':83B 'kohler':16B,54B,107B 'learn':95B 'make':161B 'materi':34B 'medium':86B 'meet':117B 'method':67B 'mold':134B,160B 'never':72B 'piec':20B 'play':35B 'point':131B 'process':105B 'program':28B 'progress':44B 'rang':143B 'reflect':29B 'regardless':77B 'resid':13B,27B,91B 'schedul':102B 'set':43B 'showcas':5B 'simplic':121B 'skill':42B 'skill-set':41B 'slip':157B 'span':21B 'studio':111B 'substanti':94B 'surfac':137B 'technic':80B 'technician':112B 'technolog':39B,145B 'tile':6B,124B 'tool':65B 'use':64B,154B 'well':37B 'work':59B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1731088685/htaxaeh6jhupzh6ikvas.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":14436,"title":"Lunch Break: Arts/Industry in Between","starts_at":"2024-06-29 12:00:00","ends_at":"2025-05-04 12:00:00","body":"For fifty years, the Arts/Industry residency program has given space for meaningful connections between the arts and industry. At the core of those moments are the Kohler Co. factory associates—mechanics, engineers, technicians, mold makers, and many more. They work side-by-side with the artists, giving time, sharing skills and knowledge, and often opening their homes and personal lives.
Lunch Break: Arts/Industry in Between celebrates that powerful exchange between artist and associate through artwork made in the factory. It brings forward the conversations and relationships that happen as a result of making art.
This exhibition focuses on artwork made by residency artists that celebrates the associates or that exemplifies the cooperative learning that takes place at the factory. The works on view are drawn primarily from the Arts/Industry collections of JMKAC and Kohler Co. Each artist gifts one work to each organization at the end of their residency,
Art objects made by associates while on break from their duties or after hours are also shown. In addition, a selection of artist gifts to associates will be on display. It is not uncommon for artists to thank associates by giving them small works of art created during the residencies.
The art made in the factory over the half century of the Arts/Industry program is special—but the kinship between artists and associates is what makes this residency extraordinary.
Artists featured include Ann Agee, Michelle Grabner, Patrick Earl Hammie, Sarah Khan, Tom LaDousa, Jack Earl, Beth Lipman, Karen Massaro, Richard Notkin, Risa Puno, Nirmal Raja, David Ross Harper, Laurel Roth Hope, and Timea Tihanyi, among others.
Image: Joe DiStefano, (from left) Saturday: It's Your Turn To Do The Dishes Ralph. Sure, Nadine, 1976; vitreous china, metal, and glaze; 20 5/8 x 25 1/4 x 15 1/8 in., Friday: Is That Lipstick On Your Collar, Ralph?, 1976; vitreous china, metal, and glaze; 20 5/8 x 25 1/4 x 15 1/8 in. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gift of the artist.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"lunch-break-arts-industry-in-between","created_at":"2024-09-11 03:18:29.362259","updated_at":"2024-09-11 03:18:29.398404","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'1/4':297B,320B '1/8':300B,323B '15':299B,322B '1976':287B,310B '20':293B,316B '25':296B,319B '5/8':294B,317B 'addit':172B 'age':237B 'also':169B 'among':268B 'ann':236B 'art':19B,98B,154B,199B,205B,328B 'artist':50B,75B,107B,141B,176B,189B,224B,233B,334B 'arts/industry':3A,8B,67B,133B,216B 'artwork':79B,103B 'associ':33B,77B,111B,158B,179B,192B,226B 'beth':249B 'break':2A,66B,161B 'bring':85B 'celebr':70B,109B 'center':329B 'centuri':213B 'china':289B,312B 'co':31B,139B 'collar':308B 'collect':134B,330B 'connect':16B 'convers':88B 'cooper':116B 'core':24B 'creat':200B 'david':259B 'dish':283B 'display':183B 'distefano':272B 'drawn':129B 'duti':164B 'earl':241B,248B 'end':150B 'engin':35B 'exchang':73B 'exemplifi':114B 'exhibit':100B 'extraordinari':232B 'factori':32B,83B,123B,209B 'featur':234B 'fifti':5B 'focus':101B 'forward':86B 'friday':302B 'gift':142B,177B,331B 'give':51B,194B 'given':12B 'glaze':292B,315B 'grabner':239B 'half':212B 'hammi':242B 'happen':92B 'harper':261B 'home':61B 'hope':264B 'hour':167B 'imag':270B 'includ':235B 'industri':21B 'jack':247B 'jmkac':136B 'joe':271B 'john':325B 'karen':251B 'khan':244B 'kinship':222B 'knowledg':56B 'kohler':30B,138B,327B 'ladousa':246B 'laurel':262B 'learn':117B 'left':274B 'lipman':250B 'lipstick':305B 'live':64B 'lunch':1A,65B 'made':80B,104B,156B,206B 'make':97B,229B 'maker':38B 'mani':40B 'massaro':252B 'meaning':15B 'mechan':34B 'metal':290B,313B 'michael':326B 'michell':238B 'mold':37B 'moment':27B 'nadin':286B 'nirmal':257B 'notkin':254B 'object':155B 'often':58B 'one':143B 'open':59B 'organ':147B 'other':269B 'patrick':240B 'person':63B 'place':120B 'power':72B 'primarili':130B 'program':10B,217B 'puno':256B 'raja':258B 'ralph':284B,309B 'relationship':90B 'resid':9B,106B,153B,203B,231B 'result':95B 'richard':253B 'risa':255B 'ross':260B 'roth':263B 'sarah':243B 'saturday':275B 'select':174B 'share':53B 'shown':170B 'side':45B,47B 'side-by-sid':44B 'skill':54B 'small':196B 'space':13B 'special':219B 'sure':285B 'take':119B 'technician':36B 'thank':191B 'tihanyi':267B 'time':52B 'timea':266B 'tom':245B 'turn':279B 'uncommon':187B 'view':127B 'vitreous':288B,311B 'work':43B,125B,144B,197B 'x':295B,298B,318B,321B 'year':6B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1731088732/wvnfsjzrm3covmuisxcg.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":14441,"title":"Willie Cole: Home Assembly","starts_at":"2024-07-13 12:00:00","ends_at":"2025-04-27 12:00:00","body":"This solo exhibition of work by Willie Cole, who was an Arts/Industry resident in the Kohler Co. Pottery in 2000, features newly commissioned sculptures alongside a selection of works spanning over three decades.
Cole visualizes the reality that domestic spaces are often tangled with histories of enslaved labor. He uses the visual vocabulary of the domestic sphere—shoes, tools, furniture, for example—to bring forward the grief and intimacy that linger within private spaces.
By using craft and household objects in his artworks, Cole spreads awareness of women’s and enslaved peoples’ labor that has been ignored or under recognized and is integral to the history of the United States. These reflective works are Cole’s initiative to complicate labor histories and lack of visual representations in the art canon.
Home Assembly highlights Cole’s refiguring of familiar and frequently discarded objects to confront and demand attention from his audience. His assemblages and prints convey intricate histories and messages, demonstrating the complexities and the commonalities shared in the cultivation of homes and the lives they shelter. Cole frequently uses the iron —burn marks, the ironing board, and the iron itself—as parts of human figures, as protective shields, as the shape of ships that transported enslaved Africans to the Americas, and to commemorate the work of women.
The chandelier sculptures on view allude to the community investment involved in constructing a home. When creating these, Cole often works with specific neighborhoods to collect discarded plastic bottles, resulting in community connections and cleaner streets.
Home Assembly honors Cole’s impact on the fields of labor and methodical craft, which are at the core of the Arts/ Industry program.
Image: Willie Cole, The Royal Roost I, 2024; saxophones, vintage suitcase, leather, and wood. Courtesy of the artist.
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Process Pro Forma features work that foregrounds various processes that are part of the industrial production at the Kohler factory. Many of the works highlight one step in the typical sequence of fabrication, often a step that is not apparent in the final product.
By revealing hidden parts of art making, the works on view provide insight into the Kohler Co. factory and the system in which artists find themselves. This interaction between artists and the factory is an essential component of the unexpected outcomes of the Arts/Industry residency.
Process Pro Forma presents works created during Arts/Industry residencies and gifted to the Arts Center. It is part of the yearlong Work in Progress theme celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Arts/Industry program.
Image: Arts/Industry artist-in-residence Steven Bradford in the Kohler Co. Foundry, 1994. Photo: Kohler Co.
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The sweaters are both aspirational and nostalgic. Like postcards, they are a way for Barsky to connect with places he enjoys, or those he wants to visit. Once worn, they hold memories of his time there. They also act as a point of connection–a way for Barsky to build a community, to share his experiences of travel and invite others to share theirs.
In this vein, Barsky will knit a sweater featuring the Arts Center for the exhibition. Visitors will be able to borrow this sweater and photograph themselves wearing it, a la Barsky’s internet practice. See JMKAC website for upcoming dates.
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The artworks evidence Bhat’s technical skill and intuitive approach to diverse materials and techniques, including cast bronze, hand-built ceramics, video works, and an artist-led collaborative community installation. All works on view are part of Assembling California, the artist’s ongoing project of place and self. The series concentrates on natural phenomena including post-fire forests, climate change, large-scale forces, mapping, and relationships.
As an immigrant from southern India, Bhat works to find a sense of belonging and self in her home in California. She does this through walking, hiking, and spending time with local ecologists. Bhat’s past is infused into the present and imaginings of possible futures. She weaves time and experience through her sculptures by naming a body of her works depicting California flora after nature spirits, or Yakshis, entities that are part of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious practices.
Bhat firmly roots her practice in recognizing humankind’s interconnectedness with all living beings and places—through contact, communion, and witnessing. She creates sculptures to share moments of her journey—of seeking self within her ecologies and invites viewers to relate to their environments by building relationships and spending time with other beings, human and nonhuman alike.
Image: Ashwini Bhat. Photo: John Janca, courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery.
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The JMKAC Gala is an outta-sight celebration of how far we’ve come since the 1960s and our 1967 grand opening. There’ll be dinner from The American Club, a fabulous auction featuring one-of-a-kind items and far-out treasures, an open bar, valet parking, and more. It’ll be a gas!
Saturday, February 22, 2025
5:00–11:00 p.m.
Park and Hitch a Ride from City Lot 13
(Corner of Center Ave. & 7th Street)
Downtown Sheboygan
All proceeds support the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s mission.
Purchase Tickets
Get on the Bus for a Happenin’ Night.
Groovy watering holes to vibe and mingle
Cosmic cocktails to transport you to another dimension
Road performances to elevate the spirit
On-the-go munchies to fuel your kaleidoscopic odyssey
Our Final Stop: Crashing the Gala!
We’ll end the night with an epic dance party and an open bar.
Hop On the Bus!
Grab Your Tickets Before they Split.
$60 per rider
Must be age 21+
Purchase Tickets
RSVP by February 10. Register at the link above or call 920-694-4560.
Pao Houa Her uses her camera to explore the longing and desire of a community culturally defined by an elsewhere. Rooted in the experience of her HMong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her takes a formally rigorous approach to photography to explore the complex intertwining of artifice and desire bound up in dreams of homeland.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is the first survey of Her’s practice, covering nearly twenty years of work, with selections from six major series to date, as well as new work made in the jungles of Laos.
Co-organized by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) in California, the exhibition embraces the diverse U.S. contexts in which HMong communities have adapted and fabricated homelands. Though specific to Her’s own HMong-American experience, The Imaginative Landscape is a meditation on the construction of homeland that resonates across a variety of diasporic experiences.
In both Sheboygan and San Jose, the exhibition will exceed the institutional space with lightboxes in local restaurants and community gathering places, wheat pasted images in public locations, and billboard displays. A complete list of sites will be announced closer to the exhibition opening.
* HMong is written with a capital H and M to be inclusive of White Hmong and Green Mong dialects. Speakers of the White dialect pronounce “Hmong” with a silent “H,” indicating a nasal aspiration or puff of air out of the nose. Speakers of the Green dialect pronounce “Mong” without.
This exhibition is co-organized by Jodi Throckmorton, JMKAC chief curator, and Lauren Schell Dickens, SJMA chief curator.
SJMA’s exhibition will be on view July 15, 2025, into early 2026.
Image: Pao Houa Her, untitled (real opium behind opium backdrop), 2020, lightbox, 52 x 65 in. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.
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In 2006, at age 76, he constructed a wooden model of the East Wiota Lutheran Church—the church he attended as a child. He then completed ten more Wisconsin church models, in addition to a model of the farmhouse he grew up in and the parsonage of the East Wiota church. Each was made to-scale, done through a process of “foot-pacing” (measuring the building’s size with his feet). The models are constructed of repurposed and found materials, including wood, gift wrapping paper, photographs, and paint.
Now in the collection of the Arts Center, this exhibition represents the first public showing of these works.
ImageL Donald Pfister, Gospel Hall; Brodhead, Wisconsin, 1872 (detail), 2006–24; wood, paint, paper, and plastic; 9 3/4 x 9 x 11 1/2 in. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Collection, gift of the artist's children.
Childhood memories of home are reconstructed in the form of textiles and fibers by artists Hangama Amiri, Keith Jackson, Yvette Mayorga, Tressa Prisbrey, and Dalila Sanabria. Each artist presents interior settings such as a bedroom inspired by fantasies, a living room of communal gatherings, or a storage space that marked the passage of time. Each of these sites memorialize social and environmental influences that shaped the future of an individual.
The use of or reference to textiles and fibers, such as clothing, blankets, boxes, carpet, or upholstery, imbues memories and feelings with a tactile quality found in the rooms re-created by each artist. Importantly, they do not depict themselves or others in these scenes. This anonymity encourages imagined conversations, interactions, sounds, or scents of homeland to emerge from a variety of perspectives.
By relying on textures—both literally and figuratively—the exhibition provides context for domestic spaces where an origin story is found, and a familiar emotional weight is recognized. Together, the works celebrate the right to choose from narratives of the past and how these stories inform and enrich the fiber of one’s being.
Image: Yvette Mayorga, Bedroom After 15th (detail), 2022; acrylic piping on Disney TV, purses, shoes, lotion, wooden shelves, lamp, ceramic, bookbag, sneakers, Hello Kitty bubble blower, clock, faux books, mirrors, wood, pillows, wall paintings, nightstand, acrylic piping on bike, acrylic piping on canvas, and video; 9 x 9 x 10 ft. Courtesy of the artist.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"familiar-texture-the-fibers-of-childhood-and-home","created_at":"2025-05-13 16:05:32.817","updated_at":"2025-05-13 16:05:32.817","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":324,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'10':247B '15th':203B '2022':205B '9':243B,245B 'acryl':206B,233B,237B 'amiri':26B 'anonym':127B 'artist':24B,37B,114B,252B 'bedroom':44B,201B 'bike':236B 'blanket':92B 'blower':223B 'book':226B 'bookbag':218B 'box':93B 'bubbl':222B 'canva':240B 'carpet':94B 'celebr':175B 'ceram':217B 'childhood':6A,10B 'choos':179B 'clock':224B 'cloth':91B 'communal':52B 'context':155B 'convers':130B 'courtesi':249B 'creat':111B 'dalila':34B 'depict':119B 'detail':9B,204B 'disney':209B 'domest':157B 'emerg':138B 'emot':168B 'encourag':128B 'enrich':191B 'environment':71B 'exhibit':153B 'familiar':1A,167B 'fantasi':47B 'faux':225B 'feel':100B 'fiber':4A,22B,88B,193B 'figur':151B 'form':18B 'found':105B,164B 'ft':248B 'futur':76B 'gather':53B 'hangama':25B 'hello':220B 'home':8A,13B 'homeland':136B 'imag':198B 'imagin':129B 'imbu':97B 'import':115B 'individu':79B 'influenc':72B 'inform':189B 'inspir':45B 'interact':131B 'interior':39B 'jackson':28B 'keith':27B 'kitti':221B 'lamp':216B 'liter':149B 'live':49B 'lotion':213B 'mark':59B 'mayorga':30B,200B 'memori':11B,68B,98B 'mirror':227B 'narrat':181B 'nightstand':232B 'one':195B 'origin':161B 'other':122B 'paint':231B 'passag':61B 'past':184B 'perspect':143B 'pillow':229B 'pipe':207B,234B,238B 'present':38B 'prisbrey':32B 'provid':154B 'purs':211B 'qualiti':104B 're':110B 're-creat':109B 'recogn':171B 'reconstruct':15B 'refer':84B 'reli':145B 'right':177B 'room':50B,108B 'sanabria':35B 'scene':125B 'scent':134B 'set':40B 'shape':74B 'shelv':215B 'shoe':212B 'site':67B 'sneaker':219B 'social':69B 'sound':132B 'space':57B,158B 'storag':56B 'stori':162B,188B 'tactil':103B 'textil':20B,86B 'textur':2A,147B 'time':63B 'togeth':172B 'tressa':31B 'tv':210B 'upholsteri':96B 'use':81B 'varieti':141B 'video':242B 'wall':230B 'weight':169B 'wood':228B 'wooden':214B 'work':174B 'x':244B,246B 'yvett':29B,199B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1737602096/mktrm4i0n0skhyhd9a0i.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":20542,"title":"Meet Artist Sam Barsky","starts_at":"2025-05-15 17:00:00","ends_at":"2025-05-15 19:30:00","body":"Member Hour
Member Exclusive Event
Thu., May 15, 5:00–6:00 p.m.
FREE, JMKAC members
JMKAC members are invited to meet the artist and stitch, snack, and chat with fellow members. Learn more.
Artist Talk
Thu., May 15, 6:00–7:30 p.m.
JMKAC Theatre
FREE, all ages
Hear from Barsky about the inspiration and process behind his creations.
Matter of Mind: My Alzheimer’s by Anna Moot-Levin, Laura Green, David Alvarado, and Jason Sussberg
Alzheimer’s disease transforms the lives of three families who confront the challenges of becoming primary caregivers in this documentary film screening.
JMKAC Theatre
FREE, all ages
A Beautiful Experience: The Midwest Grotto Tradition takes its title from a slogan found on years of brochures, maps, and swag from the Dickeyville Grotto in Wisconsin. It is one of several grottoes found throughout the region. These sites began to inspire pilgrimage, tourism, reflection, and community gathering during the 1910s. This exhibition looks at their continuing influence on artists and visitors alike.
Materially, midwestern grottoes often reflect local industries, decorative trends, and an area’s geological makeup. Grotto architecture mainly comprises concrete embellished with objects including shells, marbles, colored glass, toys, figurines, fossils, and geodes. This accumulation, as well as the objects incorporated, creates a documentation of the maker’s life, faith, and home.
Madeline Buol is one of the few known women grotto builders. The materials she utilized include figurines and stones gathered during her travels. She had a special affinity for shells of all shapes and sizes.
The exhibition is the first public showing of Buol’s monumental thirteen-piece grotto since it was saved from the artist’s yard in 2011 by the Kohler Foundation, Inc. It was then gifted to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
In addition to Buol’s grotto, A Beautiful Experience includes objects related to the Midwest grottoes that directly inspired her, such as the Dickeyville Grotto, Jacob Baker’s “dream houses,” the Rudolph Grotto, and the Wegner Grotto. The exhibition illustrates the material histories of these grottoes and strategies for their conservation. Visitors are offered opportunities to learn about the legacy and care of Midwest grotto sites.
A Beautiful Experience also includes new work by Stephanie Shih and E. Saffronia Downing, each responding to the grotto tradition. Shih presents a work inspired by Jacob Baker and Chinese immigration in the U.S. Downing shares her explorations of clay and material foraging throughout the Midwest, providing insight into material studies for the concrete and construction materials often invented and improvised upon by grotto builders.
Image: Madeline Buol, Buol Grotto and Sculptures (site view, n.d.), Dubuque, IA, 1946–c. 1960. Photo courtesy of Pam Mendenhall.
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Developed alongside Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Seeds of History grew from the artist’s vision to photograph HMong Americans from the Sheboygan area posed in a field of poppies. Created in the summer of 2025, the black-and-white series includes more than a dozen portraits, thirteen of which were acquired by JMKAC. Each image depicts a member of Sheboygan’s local HMong American community.
More than a historical record, Seeds of History honors the enduring presence and vitality of the HMong diaspora in Sheboygan more than fifty years after HMong refugees first arrived in the region. By naming each individual portrayed, the series centers dignity, care, and connection—affirming that history is shaped by real people and relationships, not anonymous figures or statistics.
* HMong is written with a capital H and M to be inclusive of White HMong and Green Mong dialects. Speakers of the White dialect pronounce “HMong” with a silent “H,” indicating a nasal aspiration or puff of air out of the nose. Speakers of the Green dialect pronounce “Mong” without.
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Opening January 31, 2026, at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis: Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) is a large-scale installation by artist-collaborators Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. Inviting viewers into an encounter with deep geological time, human perception, and our impulse to order the natural world, the work consists of a carefully selected sequence of stones arranged in a perfect line, gradually diminishing in size. This deceptively simple gesture becomes a profound meditation on material, meaning, and scale, prompting visitors to consider how aesthetic experience is shaped not only by material form, but also by embodied perception and collective engagement.
“Rock Fade takes something deeply familiar, a stone, and asks us to encounter it in a new light. As the sequence shifts from boulder to sand, the work reveals how perception, movement, and shared experience shape what we understand as art,” states Jodi Throckmorton, Chief Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “Relocating the installation across phases challenges us to reflect on our own role in ordering, witnessing, and ultimately returning these materials to the world.”
On view through August 16, Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) references local and global rituals of marking time and space with stones, through collection, spirituality, and boundary setting. The work engages a deep human tradition to collect, order, control, and define the natural world against the backdrop of the slow transformation of rocks across ancient seas, volcanic flows, and glacial drifts; always in motion, even in their stillness. This juxtaposition highlights the tension between the human impulse to order and the inevitable processes of erosion and transformation that characterize geological time, revealing the work’s core inquiry: that the act of arranging the stones is both fleeting and monumental. Over time, the artwork will erode, scatter, and reintegrate with the earth, resulting not in failure, but in fulfillment.
Rock Fade (~45 Billion Years) builds on the conceptual framework of an earlier gesture of stone placement found in the artist environment of pioneer fiber artist Lenore G. Tawney (1907-2007) at JMKAC’s Art Preserve, in which Tawney arranged a subtle gradient of rocks from large to small. The work becomes a form of intergenerational dialogue—artists speaking to one another across time not by replicating but by amplifying, through matter, order, and attention. Clayton and Lewis will be Lenore G. Tawney Fellows at JMKAC in 2026, a fellowship that fosters new engagement with Tawney’s art environment, made possible with support from the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation. Candidates are encouraged to apply with projects that study overlooked aspects of works and movements related to Tawney or discuss previously unexplored connections between those works and art from other disciplines.
“Rock Fade engages with the tradition of artist-built environments and the Arts Center’s work to preserve them while embracing the processes that shape them, offering a rare opportunity to witness an artwork that lives, changes, and integrates back into the environment over time. We’re proud to collaborate with Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis as this project unfolds with our community,” adds Amy Horst, Executive Director of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Rock Fade is designed to shift the audience’s relationship to material, scale, and time as it unfolds through multiple phases starting with the exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (January 31-August 16, 2026). The linear installation in a white-cube space depicts the stones removed from their natural setting, placed in a controlled environment that invites close-looking and contemplation.
On September 19, 2026, a community procession will follow, inviting participants of all ages and ability to help transport the stones from the gallery to an outdoor site. The procession is logistical and symbolic: an act of communal labor, care, and transformation that becomes a form of glaciation and procession through movement, merging geologic time with collective human effort. The procession will conclude at the Art Preserve where Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis will utilize the rocks for a long-term outdoor installation. The procession will be documented in a film to extend its impact and reach.
For its final phase, Rock Fade will come to rest where, for years to come, environmental forces will erode and reshape the installation. Visitors will encounter the work embedded in the land, part as sculpture, part as earthwork, with accessibility top of mind to ensure a wide range of bodies are able to experience the piece.
The project, through all the stages, reminds visitors to slow down, notice matter, and share responsibility for how they move through time and space, particularly potent during a global moment of political and climate crisis and shortened attention spans.
About Lenka Clayton
Lenka Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. Clayton is the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents.
Recent exhibitions include Rising Sun (2023) at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Day Jobs (2023) at the Blanton Museum of Art, The Museum Collects Itself (2023) at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, and To Begin Again (2022) at ICA Boston. Clayton’s work has been supported by The Warhol Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. She has received an Art Matters Award, a Carol R. Brown Award for Creative Achievement, and a Creative Development Grant from Heinz/Pittsburgh Foundation. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, PA and Headlands Center for the Arts, CA and was a Sabrina Merage Fellow with Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum.
Clayton’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, SFMoMA in California, Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in Massachusetts, and The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and The Philadelphia Art Museum in Pennsylvania. Permanent public artworks include Darkhouse Lighthouse, and Historic Site, both made with collaborator Phillip Andrew Lewis.
About Phillip Andrew Lewis
Phillip Andrew Lewis is a Philadelphia-based artist who works in a variety of media including photography, video, objects, and sound. His creative research often responds to historical events, psychology, and phenomenology. This work consistently examines duration, perceptual limits, and attentive observation. Lewis is actively involved in collaboration with artists and various groups.
Phillip has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. He received a 2012 Creative Capital Grant in Visual Art for his ongoing long-term project entitled SYNONYM. He has also received generous support for his research from Black Cube, Headlands Center for the Arts, Culture and Animals Foundation, Center for Creative Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York, Fathomers, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Midway Contemporary Arts Fund, Tennessee Arts Commission, University of Tennessee, UrbanArt Commission, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Sabrina Merage Foundation. In collaboration with his wife, Lenka Clayton, he runs a project space in Pittsburgh called Gallery Closed, which is open 24/7 via two street-facing windows.
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The John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) will debut Emily Endo: Estuary, a new exhibition by artist Emily Endo (they/them), on view from February 7 through August 16, 2026.
Endo’s largest exhibition to date, Estuary marks JMKAC’s first scent-focused exhibition, inviting visitors into a multisensory experience that explores the body and perception. Endo is known for intricate glass sculptures that reference vascular systems, organic structures, and the porous boundaries between bodies and environment. In Estuary, they expand this practice by integrating scentwith sculptural forms, engaging visitors through both sight and smell. The exhibition challenges conventional modes of looking, encouraging audiences to experience art through embodied and sensory awareness. “Emily Endo’s work asks us to reconsider how meaning is formed through the senses,” said Chava.
Krivchenia, Assistant Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “By aligning scent alongside sculpture, Estuary creates intuitive ways of engaging with art.”
Smell plays a central role in the exhibition. Closely tied to memory and emotion, scent has the power to transport, influence mood, and reshape perception. Rather than functioning as an accessory, curated fragrances throughout the gallery act as an extension of the sculptural works themselves. Drawn from minerals, seawater, metal, glass, and organic compounds, these scents reference both natural environments and industrial processes, serving as connective tissue between material, memory, and the body. Estuary also considers how perception differs across species. While humans tend to prioritize vision, many animals rely on smell or sound to navigate the world. Featured works incorporate a turtle shell, highlighting the overlapping and divergent ways animal and human bodies experience their environments. Through this lens, the exhibition invites reflection on the boundaries—both physical and perceptual—that shape how we understand and navigate the world.
In addition to their artistic practice, Endo is an educator whose teaching background in glass, scent, and sculpture informs their approach to making. Their studio practice is grounded in curiosity, experimentation, and care, viewing the studio as a site of discovery and learning.
Endo will also serve as the first 2026 artist-in-residence for ExAir, JMKAC’s residency program. Their time on- site will support deeper community engagement through public events and offer visitors insight into their evolving creative process.
About Emily Endo
Emily Endo works across sculpture, scent, and installation, pursuing a research-driven practice grounded in material experimentation and sensory experience. They hold an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2010) and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2006). Endo’s work has been exhibited at Somerset House (London); Massey Klein (New York); Marta, Harkawik, and the Neutra VDL House (Los Angeles); LVL3 (Chicago); and Bullseye Projects (Portland). Recent press includes: The New York Times Style Magazine, Wallpaper, and Architectural Digest. Endo lives and works in Joshua Tree, California. Emily Endo. Photo courtesy of the artist.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Founded in 1967, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nonprofit creative hub that supports the work of contemporary artists through original exhibitions, commissions, residencies, publications, and community programming across visual and performing arts. The only institution in the world that collects artist- built and artist home-based environments, JMKAC is a leading center for the research, preservation, and presentation of artists with wide-ranging practices and backgrounds from academically trained to self-taught and folk traditions, championing long-term relationships with artists and elevating work that has often been overlooked or under-recognized. JMKAC is a vital cultural resource that responds to the needs of its local and regional communities, preserving artistic heritage by uplifting contemporary voices and empowering future generations.
Hours
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Image: Emily Endo, Orphic Diadem, 2024; glass, stainless steel, and fragrance; 22 x 22 x 10 in. Photo: Margeaux Walter.
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Rest.Rise.Move.Nourish.Heal, choreographed by Vershawn Sanders-Ward, is a site-responsive dance ritual and embodied journey of reclamation, healing, and spiritual return. Drawing from Black/African-Indigenous traditions and ancestral technologies of nourishment, the work confronts the legacies of food apartheid and racial inequity while envisioning a decolonized practice of collective care and agency. The program offers audiences an evening of resilience, memory, and transformation.
Run time: 65-minute performance followed by post-performance discussion.
How do you throw a brick through the window… is inspired by artist and activist Johanna Hedva, who poses the question, “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Hedva’s statement questions the rights and opportunities of individuals with disabilities as they navigate forms of protest.
Through new commissions and recent works, artists Yani aviles, Chloe P. Crawford, Nat Decker, Jeff Kasper, Carly Mandel, Jeffrey Meris, and Libby Paloma look toward Hedva’s work to prioritize modes of dissent that influence personal, political, and social systems. Each artist uses strategies of movement, communication, interruptions in time and space, or moments of play to achieve such transformation. As Hedva suggests in her question, the most meaningful strategies for challenging cultural systems and governing bodies are actions that take place beyond the streets. By circulating these artists’ processes of resistance, this exhibition makes enacting a revolution become more approachable and possible on both individual and communal scales.
How do you throw a brick through the window… is co-organized by Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) with the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC).
Italian immigrant Silvio Barile spent decades converting his pizzeria into a museum to honor his heritage. The Italian American Historic Artistic Museum in Redford Charter Township, Michigan, was once enormous. The interior walls of the restaurant were covered with murals, photos, and postcards of iconic Italian imagery such as statues of Julius Caesar, Roman ruins, Renaissance-era paintings, olive trees, and Italian and American pop culture figures. In addition to two-dimensional adornments, Barile fabricated large-scale concrete statues depicting events and characters renowned in Italian and American history. His sculptures filled the pizzeria, then the patio behind it, then the acre of woodland behind the patio. Even after the restaurant closed in 2002, the museum remained and continued to grow.
After Barile’s death in February 2019, increasing costs and pressure from the community resulted in the destruction of the site in 2020. In May 2021, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center acquired three large painted concrete works by Barile that were believed to be the last remaining components of the museum. In the early months of 2022, a grouping of eight additional works was found and acquired by the Arts Center. This is the first time these works are being shown outside of the Michigan site.
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This free, two-day event brings together more than 100 juried artists from across the country, live music through the Levitt AMP Sheboygan Music Series, artist demonstrations, hands-on artmaking activities, family-friendly programming, food vendors, and community partners. The festival annually attracts thousands of visitors and celebrates creativity, community, and artistic excellence.
Highlights this year include:
• More than 100 juried artists representing a wide range of artistic disciplines
• Live music and performances throughout the weekend
• An Emerging Artist area featuring five regional artists
• Community partner organizations including RCS Empowers, Project Onward, and Impressions Fine Art Gallery
• Interactive artmaking experiences inspired by current Arts Center exhibitions
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