Past Exhibitions

Lisa Marie Barber's ceramic assemblages and textiles encompass her imagined, decorative conceptions of home, gardens, peacefulness, playfulness, and celebration.

Mary Burns' hand-woven jacquard portraits celebrate and honor water, as well as the women who work with it, protect it and advocate for it.

Featuring textile works by Heidi Parkes and sculpture by Glenn Williams, Siara Berry, Sylvie Rosenthal, and Jaymee Harvey Willms, artists whose work touches on diverse aspects of mending and repair.

Alison Gates' textile and paper pieces pose questions about communication, tradition, surface design, feminism, and climate change.

Richard Moninski's recent work explores several themes: the systemization of nature, the decorative impulse, the choices between representation and abstraction, and the history and culture of speci

Dakota Mace weaves her understanding of the symbolic abstractions in the Diné creation story into her artwork. 

Trained in woodworking, Andrew Redington uses deconstructed vintage furniture to make his sculpture and prints.

An installation by social artist Borealis, paired with solo exhibitions by Lois Bielefeld and Comfort Wasikhongo.

A solo exhibition by photographer Lois Bielefeld, paired with painter Comfort Wasikhongo's solo show and an installation by social artist Borealis.

A solo exhibit of work by Emily Arthur, whose art practice is informed by a concern for the environment, displacement, exile, and return. 

A retrospective exhibit of the work of Jack Damer: master printmaker, brilliant draftsman, and influential teacher. 

An exhibition that recreates the natural history and archaeological collections gathered by early Wisconsin Academy members.

Madison artists Helen Hawley and Gabriel Pionkowski work across several media. Hawley's show encompasses books, sculpture, and painting, while Pionkowski's is focused on deconstructed and rewoven canvases and a series of floor pieces made with found objects. 

Seven Wisconsin artists create work focused on plants threatened by climate change in our state.

Solo exhibitions by sculptor and installation artist Maggie Sasso and multimedia artist Nathaniel Stern, both from Milwaukee.

Two sculptors with a wicked sense of the absurd.

For Future Possible: Imagining Madison, we invited a group of artists, architects, and designers who know and love the city to envision it 75 years from now.  

How do we remember and respond to the wisdom of our ancestors? What events from our history should we honor with a monument?

Side-by-side solo shows by two artists who draw on myth and folk tales. 

Leslie Iwai’s installation for the James Watrous Gallery, Daughter Cells: Inheritance, Separation and Survival, is an investigation of family relationships at both the cellular and emotional level: what we inherit, how we separate, and what we choose to retain and pass on. 

John Craig's prints explore perception, history and narrative. Valerie Mangion's paintings explore the nocturnal life of animals.

Tom Berenz's current paintings combine recognizable bits and pieces from ordinary life with swaths of color and pattern. Shane McAdams introduces jarringly synthetic elements in to classic landscape scenes.

LOGJAM features sculpture and prints by​ three artists for whom wood--from saplings and underbrush to massive old-growth stumps--is a primary material.

Wasted Days and Wasted Nights features several large-scale drawings and two larger-than-life mixed media sculptures that evoke objects of devotion from the Ghent Altarpiece but also allegorically portray Mexican-American culture in Wisconsin.

Waterways features three Wisconsin artists--Sarah FitzSimons (Madison), Marsha McDonald (Milwaukee), and John Miller (Madison)--whose work investigates the essential nature of water.

Randall Berndt's drawings and paintings are inspired by the lives of famous artists and other art, the mysteries of our place in nature, and historical events filtered through literature and mythology. Christine Styles' Stories of the Heart series are woodcuts that reflect on the roles our hearts play: physically, symbolically, spiritually, metaphorically, personally, and inventively.

Graham Yeager's sculptures in steel and wood are finished with a palette of strong, vibrant color. Tyler Robbins's photomontages are a fresh offshoot of his photographic series focused on the suburbs' landscapes, rituals, and citizenry.

Solo exhibitions by photographers Ida Wyman and Kevin Miyazaki.

Trained as metalsmiths, Lisa Gralnick and Venetia Dale use ceramics to produce hybridized objects that merge sculpture, design, and craft sensibilities.

Systems for Abstraction features the work of three artists who use abstraction to organize and present their understanding of the world.

Vital Skills builds on the current interest in community resilience and "re-skilling" by bringing together the work of people who are preserving traditional hand skills in Wisconsin.

Noted for their extraordinary detail and rich, atmospheric quality, Conniff's prints reflect a sensibility closely attuned to the large-format work of nineteenth-century photographers in the American West.

Rendered in Kodachrome's gently grayed hues, Patikne's images evoke the texture of her modest yet stylish domestic life, tinged with playfulness, bravado, and a lingering melancholy.

Photographer Tom Jones's Encountering Cultures series captures the Rendezvous, historical reenactments of the French fur trade in North America.

JoAnna Poehlmann's drawings, collages, and artists' books combine superb draftsmanship, meticulous observation, humor and a deep appreciation for nature.

Mark Klassen of Milwaukee and Lewis Koch of Madison both create artworks steeped in the politics and uncertainties of life after 9/11.

In 2007, the Wisconsin Arts Board's Percent for Art program commissioned six photographers to create portraits of contemporary Wisconsin workers.

Working collaboratively, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg create miniature architectural forms-telephone poles, farm buildings-and insert them into unexpected contexts, like the back of a sofa or the middle of a gallery wall.

Carl Corey isolates parts of the built environment such as expressway underpasses, swimming pools, and suburban backyards that have become so mundane that we no longer pause to examine them closely.

An exploration of landscape through the painstaking and richly textured medium of fabric and embroidery, guest curated by Jody Clowes.

The Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration will present the work of several of Wisconsin’s most accomplished illustrators of children’s books.

In Knight's paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects, components of his expressive language shift mediums in a visual game of search and find.

The 2008 Wisconsin Arts Board Visual Arts Fellows were Jennifer Angus, Beth Lipman, Steven Lubahn, Charles Munch, Jim Rose, Natalie Settles, and Fred Stonehouse.

Huggett and Hutchison both work by playing color against shape. Huggett applies oil paint to canvas stretched over embroidery hoops and cutout geomentric wood shapes.

Feren's glass sculptures depict intricate landscapes of stark trees and scenes of human industry.

This is the first exhibition devoted to work by artists honored with the Wisconsin Visual Arts Lifetime Achievement Award.

Kim Cridler (Mazomanie) builds monumental grid-like steel sculptures that often reference iconic vessel forms.

Milwaukee artist Jeremy Wolf fills the gallery with an installation of both moving and static sculptures depicting animals interacting with man-made objects such as cars and submarines.

Doug Fath’s black and white oil paintings record images from a cross country road trip.

Several works by each of the seven winners of the 2006 Wisconsin Arts Board Visual Arts Fellowships.

Cedarburg painter Jean Roberts Guequierre and Madison fiber artist Diane Sheehan find inspiration in medieval and Renaissance artworks and technological processes.

Laurel Lueders uses photography, projections, and video combined with handmade printed textiles and other materials to create virtual environments.

This exhibition connects ideas grounded in the sciences as well as in the visual arts, and presents ways in which technology influences art in its material production, with traditional methods of printmaking being altered and augmented in this digital age.

Two Milwaukee artists who produce exquisitely crafted objects with great sensitivity to materials and form.

Prints and paintings by Dorota Biczel Nelson and paintings by Douglas Holst.

This second of a series of side-by-side solo exhibitions features Madison artist Scott Espeseth and Milwaukee artist Paula Schulze.

Work by the seven winners of Visual Arts Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board in 2004.