This exhibition features art made by the six students who currently work as gallery assistants in the Bush Art Center Galleries: Catherine Nelson, Jade Ruiz, Molly Wardius, Nikki Tranel, and Sydney Suchy.
Jackson Venski, Einstein. Oil on canvas.Molly Wardius, Delphinium. Poster design
Working in the gallery provides the opportunity to see things from the other side of the desk, so to speak. Gallery skills include learning a myriad of ways to install art, problem-solving complex installations, writing blog posts, answering visitor questions, and many, many other miscellaneous tasks. There’s much more to gallery work than meets the eye!
This year’s staff includes students studying Art Education, Studio Art, and Graphic Design.
Jade Ruiz, Playroom. Milk paint on wood
Work Study Make is on display from October 2 through December 1 in the Godschalx Gallery.
Sydney Suchy, Dessert. Acrylic on canvasNikki Tranel, Cardigan. YarnCatherine Nelson, Self Portrait 2021. Acrylic on canvas
To kick off the Imagining Human Rights series of events celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Aaron Hughes and Pablo Mendoza will deliver a virtual lecture on October 3rd at noon. Aaron Hughes & Pablo Mendoza are part of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts / Education Project (P+NAP). They will discuss their work with P+NAP and the Carving Out Rights project that engages prisoners with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and their efforts to create a culture of human rights from below.
Storied Lives: Select Works by David Graham & Terri Warpinski
Baer Gallery, August 28 – September 21
Reception: September 7, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
Storied Lives features portraits by David Graham from Land of the Free and selections from Death|s|trip by Terri Warpinski.
Land of the Free is photographer David Graham’s tribute to the American people in all their idiosyncratic splendor. A tireless traveler and a natural-born visual storyteller, Graham has photographed ordinary folks in their homes, at work, and at play across the nation to assemble a composite picture of America. Graham’s colorful portraits showcase the personalities who give America its character.
Death[s]trip is a story of human mortality written on the landscape. In looking at present day Berlin through the filter of history, these works combine contemporary photographs and text with archival elements to reveal some of the consequences of enforced political borders. From 1961-1989, 140 individuals died in failed attempts to flee over the Berlin Wall from Soviet occupied East Germany to freedom in West Berlin. Focusing on these victims, Death|s|trip probes the contingent properties of meaning, memory, and reflection in relation to both the landscape and the photographic image.
Each site was photographed on the date that coincides with the anniversary of the victim’s death, in the specific location where the event took place.
April Beiswenger: Grace Me No Grace
Godschalx Gallery, August 28 – September 21
Saturdays Are For Road Trips: Photographs by Frank Juárez and Pat Ryan
Baer Gallery, October 2-October 26
Exhibition Reception: October 19, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Saturdays became an excuse to get in the car to embark on random road trips throughout Wisconsin and neighboring states to explore, connect, and decompress from life’s stressors centered around covid. This photographic exhibition is a testament to their friendship, love for photography, and traveling. It highlights two distinct perspectives of turning the mundane to a thing of beauty and capturing life as it happens through the eye of the lens.
Frank Juárez is an award-winning art educator, publisher, art coach and former gallery director. His photographs are driven by daily observations and interactions. He aims to tell a story that connects viewers’ experience, emotions, and memory.
Pat Ryan is a photographer who attended Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) in the 1970’s. He started with film cameras then transitioned to digital. His photographs are inspired by shapes, textures, and symmetry that he encounters during his travels.
Work/Study/Make
Godschalx Gallery, October 2-December 1
This exhibition features art made by students who work in the St. Norbert College Art Galleries.
2023-24 Juried Student Art Exhibition
Baer Gallery, November 6 – December 1
Awards Reception: Thursday, Nov. 9, 5-6:30 p.m.
The Juried Student Art Exhibition features art made by current St. Norbert College students. The works in the show are selected by the St. Norbert College Art faculty and awards are judged by an arts professional. Entry forms will be available in the Bush Art Center at the beginning of the semester.
Sky Hopinka is a Native American visual artist, filmmaker, and member of the Ho-Chunk Nation who has developed new forms of cinema from the perspectives of Indigenous people. He is a MacArthur Fellow for his work offering new strategies of representation for expressing Indigenous worldviews. His work Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song will be on display in the Media Space Gallery from February 13 – March 31.
Jill Magid – Thursday, April 20th at Noon
Jill Magid explores emotional, philosophical, and legal tensions between individuals and institutions. She created the work Tender, evoking the connection between the human body and the body politic through the circulation of 120,000 newly minted 2020 edge-engraved pennies as a nearly invisible public artwork.
A Call to Halt is an installation and critical timeline of the Euromissiles Crisis, and the nuclear abolition movement in the United States from 1977-1987. The installation includes a reenactment of the 1982 Nuclear Freeze Referenda, in which Wisconsin was the first in the nation to put international nuclear disarmament policy to a popular vote.
Th exhibit includes a timeline of important events during the crisis as a series of archival images and captions superimposed with stenciled spray paint. Cultural, political and activist events are referenced, telling a story of collective public outcry and the power of ordinary people.
Visitors can use provided ballots and reenact Wisconsin’s nuclear disarmament referendum. The reenactment is both a reminder of the power of democracy and an opportunity for viewers to become active participants.
A Call to Halt will be on display from September 26 to October 27 in the Permanent Collection Gallery.
Baer Gallery: October 3 – October 27, 2022 Exhibition Reception – October 20
This exhibition brings together works by Aram Han Sifuentes that focus on democracy, citizenship, and political participation. The works in this exhibition manifest the notion of democracy as a contested space in which one can gain a political voice through citizenship, protest, or giving voice to those excluded politically. Sifuentes’s work investigates identity politics, immigration, citizenship and belonging, dissent and protest, and racial politics in the United States today.
A Call To Halt by Brandon Bauer
Permanent Collection Gallery: September 26 – October 27, 2022
A Call To Halt is an installation and critical timeline of the Euromissiles Crisis, and the nuclear abolition movement in the United States from 1977-1987. The installation includes a reenactment of the 1982 Nuclear Freeze Referenda, in which Wisconsin was the first in the nation to put international nuclear disarmament policy to a popular vote.
Angry Sandwich People or in Praise of Dialectics by Chto Delat?
Media Space Gallery: August 29 – October 27, 2022
In this piece, the Russian art collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?) imagines protest as a form of theatrical happening in urban space by bringing to life Bertolt Brecht’s poem “In Praise of Dialectics”. The action was carried out in close collaboration with two local activist groups, Worker’s Democracy and The Pyotr Alexeev Resistance Movement at Stachek Square, an important historic site where in 1905 striking workers marched on the Winter Palace.
Art & Society Lectures and Events
September 6 – Aram Han Sifuentes Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion, and protest. This lecture is associated with her exhibition in the Bush Art Center Galleries.
September 13 – Dmitry Vilensky Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Dmitry Vilensky is an artist, writer, and founding member of the Russian art collective Chto Delat? (What is to be done?), a platform initiated in 2003 by a collective of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism.
September 22 – U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Founded in 2013 The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is a “people-powered department” (not a federal agency) committed to supporting individuals and organizations in mobilizing creativity in the service of justice.
September 28 – Center for Artistic Activism lecture (BAC 130) 1:10 – 2:10 pm
The Center for Artistic Activism has helped to build, sustain, and develop the field of artistic activism since its inception in 2009 through innovative research and by providing free resources and training to artists and organizations around the world.
October 20 – Get Out The Vote Banner Making Workshopwith Moki Tantoco @ Noon in the Mulva Library First Floor Flex Space
This banner-making workshop is in association with the Aram Han Sifuentes Exhibition in the Bush Art Center Galleries. Moki Tantoco has collaborated with Aram Han Sifuentes and will lead this banner making workshop. Moki is an arts administrator, educator, and artist based in Illinois who encourages exploring socially engaged art practices through writing, performance, and installation.
November 15 – Oliver Ressler Zoom Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Oliver Ressler is an artist who lives and works in Vienna, Austria. He produces theme-specific exhibitions, projects in the public space, and videos on issues such as democracy, capitalism, and social alternatives to our existing political realities. His work blurs the boundaries between art and activism.
November 17 – Jonas Staal Zoom Virtual lecture (Zoom) @ Noon
Jonas Staal is a Dutch visual artist. His work deals with the relationship between art, democracy, and propaganda.
Special Thanks to The Norman Miller Center for Peace, Justice, & Public Understanding, The Sturzl Center for Community Service and Learning, The Honors Program, The Office of Student Inclusion and Belonging, The Mulva Library, the Bush Art Center Galleries, and the Art Department for support of this programming.
Be drawn into the Godschalx Gallery to experience a series of large-scale relief prints from last summer’s Really Big Prints! Organized by Berel Lutsky (UW – Manitowoc), Ben Rinehart (Lawrence University), and Katie Ries (St. Norbert College), this biennial event in Manitowoc, Wisconsin allows printmakers to stretch the limits of printmaking and produce work up to 4 by 6 feet in size. By carving into large panels, made out of birch plywood or medium density fiberboard (MDF), only the uncarved area can be covered with ink. When paper is pressed to this inked surface, the resulting image is known as a relief print. Prints on this scale are too large to be pressed with a traditional printing press, so a City of Manitowoc steamroller steps up to the task.
A steamroller press in action. Underneath the steamroller is board and a thick foam mat, protecting the paper and the carved, inked block from shifting.
Woodblock prints on this intimidating scale can take hundreds of hours to carve and create, months before any steamrollers are involved. On the day of, each artist’s printing process depends on a whole team of “clean hands” and other assistants. After the event, artists wheat-paste one of their prints in an alley in Manitowoc, Wi on Washington Street, across from the courthouse. Though those prints have come down, each artist also contributes a print to the Really Big Prints Archive, to be shared in future exhibitions.
Wheatpasting Really Big Prints in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
The selection of prints from the 2021 event currently on display include work by a St. Norbert art professor, Katie Ries, as well as illustrator Rebecca Jabs, who exhibited in SNC’s Baer Gallery last year. These immersive paper-and ink worlds can initiate reflections on a sense of self and place, the role of stewardship, and the meaning of the natural world. Take an opportunity to surround yourself with these incredible prints before the exhibit closes on March 31!
As a part of the ART 205: Art, Technology, & Society course at St. Norbert College, Associate Professor Brandon Bauer is hosting a lecture series that was supported by the Faculty Mini-Grant Program through the Norman Miller Center for Peace, Justice, and Public Understanding.
The schedule is as follows:
Thursday, February 24th at noon – Kite (aka Suzanne Kite) Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer, a PhD candidate at Concordia University, Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, a 2019 Trudeau Scholar, and a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Website: http://kitekitekitekite.com/
Thursday, March 10th at noon – Paolo Cirio Paolo Cirio is an Italian conceptual artist, hacktivist, and cultural critic currently living in New York. Cirio’s work embodies hacker ethics, such as open access, privacy policies, and the critique of economic, legal, and political models. He shows his research and intervention-based works through artifacts, photos, installations, videos, and public art. He exhibits internationally and has won several prestigious awards, grants, commissions, and fellowships. Website: https://www.paolocirio.net/
As a part of the ART 285: Art in a Democratic Society course at St. Norbert College, Associate Professor Brandon Bauer is hosting a lecture series that was supported by the Faculty Mini-Grant Program through the Norman Miller Center for Peace, Justice, and Public Understanding.
The schedule is as follows:
Tuesday, September 13th – Aram Han Sifuentes
Aram Han Sifuentes is a fiber and social practice artist who works to claim spaces for immigrant and disenfranchised communities. Her work often revolves around skill sharing, specifically sewing techniques, to create multiethnic and intergenerational sewing circles, which become a place for empowerment, subversion and protest.
Tuesday, October 5th – U.S. Department of Arts and Culture
Founded in 2013 The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) is a “people-powered department” (not a federal agency) committed to supporting individuals and organizations in mobilizing creativity in the service of justice. While social issues may be grounded in politics and economics, the USDAC believes that to change the world we need to change the story. Images, language, and attitudes affect our ability to understand and act on the challenges we face as a society.
Tuesday, November 16th – Valeria Mogilevich
Valeria is a designer and educator working at the intersection of education, design, and community engagement. She specializes in demystifying policy, authentic engagement strategies, collaboration, experiential education, and working with immigrant communities. Valeria has collaborated on visual “explainers”, curricula, community engagement strategies, and public artworks with grassroots organizations, government agencies, and cultural institutions.
Tuesday, November 23rd – Matthijs de Bruijne
Matthijs de Bruijne’s practice is a result of direct political involvement. In recent years it has taken the form of collaboration with trade unions and other labor organizations. In 2010 he was invited by the Dutch Union of Cleaners to work as an artist helping this worker’s led organization to visualize their messages in a clear manner and by creating a recognizable identity for this union in the Netherlands. Since 2020 he has been creating the archive of this union which will be gifted to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
Join us for an artist talk with cartoonist and illustrator Aaron Renier. The talk will be via zoom. See the information at the bottom of this post to join the call.
Aaron Renier is the author of three graphic novels for younger readers; Spiral-Bound, Walker Bean, and Walker Bean and the Knights of the Waxing Moon. He is the recipient of the Eisner award in 2006 for talent deserving of wider recognition, and was an inaugural resident for the Sendak Fellowship in 2010. He also illustrates children’s books, most notably for the authors Dave Eggers (The Lifters, 2018) and Daniel Pinkwater (Vampires of Blinsh, and Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, both 2020).
You must have an @snc.edu email address to join this talk.