Category: Special Projects

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Fall of Freedom at St. Norbert College

St. Norbert College is participating in the national Fall of Freedom initiative through a series of exhibitions and events that explore questions of democracy, freedom, human rights, citizenship, and collective action through art and creative practice.

Student-Curated Exhibitions

At the center of the program are three exhibitions created and curated by students in the Art & Creative Democracy course. Working with collections held by St. Norbert College, students have developed exhibitions that connect historical materials and contemporary artistic practices to questions about how freedom is understood, contested, and experienced.

Two student-curated exhibitions draw from materials in Mulva Library Special Collections. Works from the God Bless Graffiti Coalition Box Set (2018) and the Celebrate People’s History Box Set (2015) will be presented in the display cases on the second floor of the Mulva Library, outside the Special Collections area.

The God Bless Graffiti Coalition box set brings together artists and activists using graffiti and public art as forms of political and social expression, while Celebrate People’s History features posters that highlight histories of organizing, resistance, and movements for social change. Together, these collections provide students with an opportunity to consider how artists use visual culture to document history, communicate ideas, and participate in movements for social change.

A third student-curated exhibition will be presented in the New Acquisitions Gallery on the second floor of the Bush Art Center. Drawing from the Community Defense: Voces de la Frontera / Voces de los Artistas portfolio, the exhibition considers the role of art and graphic production in responding to questions of immigration, dignity, and community defense.

These exhibitions result from an arts-based research and curatorial process in which students worked directly with institutional collections to investigate how art can function as public research, historical documentation, and civic engagement.

Fall of Freedom Handwriting the Constitution: Drop-In Session

Handwriting the Constitution Art photographed by Tom Janssen in the Bush Art Center

As part of Fall of Freedom, the Bush Art Center will also host a drop-in session for Morgan O’Hara’s Handwriting the Constitution from 12:00–2:00 p.m.

Handwriting the Constitution is a social art project that artist Morgan O’Hara began in 2017. The project invites people to gather in public spaces and handwrite the United States Constitution or other documents created to protect human rights and freedoms. Through the physical act of writing, participants are encouraged to slow down and engage directly with foundational texts, considering the rights and responsibilities they articulate. The drop-in session offers students, faculty, staff, and community members an opportunity to participate in the project as part of the broader Fall of Freedom program.

Other Exhibitions on View in the Bush Art Center

The Fall of Freedom programming takes place alongside several other exhibitions currently on view in the St. Norbert College Art Galleries, creating opportunities to explore these questions from a range of historical and artistic perspectives.

Art Against the Odds, Baer Gallery

Art Against the Odds features work by artists who are currently or formerly incarcerated within Wisconsin’s justice system. The exhibition highlights the creativity, resilience, and diverse experiences of artists impacted by incarceration while inviting consideration of the intersections of art, justice, human dignity, and self-expression. The exhibition also marks the establishment of the Wisconsin Prison Art Research Collection at St. Norbert College. Generously donated by the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee, the collection will serve as a permanent resource for teaching, research, and public engagement, supporting continued inquiry into art within carceral systems and the broader social, cultural, and historical contexts of incarceration in Wisconsin.

Handwriting the Constitution, Godschalx Gallery

Morgan O’Hara’s Handwriting the Constitution is a participatory social art project centered on handwriting foundational documents. The project encourages participants to engage with the Constitution through focused, contemplative writing, creating space for reflection on the rights and freedoms the text articulates.

Just, Media Space Gallery

On view in the Media Space Gallery, Joon Soo Ha’s Just transforms the iconic American flag into a site of shifting meaning and interpretation. Through repeated reproduction and alteration using digital and analog processes, including video, printing, photocopying, scanning, and re-rendering, the work explores how context shapes the ways symbols are understood. 

Voices of Freedom, Permanent Collection Gallery

Voices of Freedom brings together works from the Carving Out Rights, Voices From Outside, and Voces de los Artistas: Community Defense portfolios. Featuring artists engaging with issues of human rights, incarceration, immigration, and community defense, the exhibition shows how printmaking and graphic art can address questions of rights, dignity, and social responsibility.

Together, these exhibitions and events offer multiple ways to consider the meaning of freedom, not as a single idea or historical condition, but as an ongoing subject of artistic inquiry, civic participation, and public conversation.

Join us for Fall of Freedom Friday, October 2nd!

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Masking Tape Recovered

Bill Bohne’ Masking Tape (Early 1970s, Date Unknown)
Single Channel Video transferred from ¾” UMATIC Tape B/W, Silent, 11:50


Bill Bohne’s video Masking Tape was created in the vein of early conceptual video art, specifically within the mode often described as “performance for camera.” Emerging in the late 1960s alongside the growing accessibility of portable video technologies, this approach was adopted by many artists exploring the possibilities of this experimental medium. These artists used the camera as the primary site of the work itself. Typically employing fixed framing, minimal editing, and durational actions. Such works foreground the body, repetition, and constraint while stripping away narrative and spectacle in favor of conceptual procedure.

Masking Tape adheres closely to these conceptual strategies. The camera remains static, focused on a head-and-shoulders composition as Bohne methodically places disposable dust masks over his face, one after another, throughout the tape. The action is simple, repetitive, and task-based, aligning the work with conceptual art’s emphasis on systems and instructions. At the same time, the accumulating masks gradually become sculpturally absurd and begin to impede the mask’s function, introducing a subtle tension between safety and suffocation.

Originally recorded on 3/4″ U-MATIC tape, the video was rediscovered in a storage area of the Bush Art Center and later transferred to digital format by Archival Works in St. Paul, Minnesota. This material history reinforces the work’s origin in an early moment of video experimentation, when artists worked with emerging, often fragile recording technologies that have since required preservation to prevent deterioration.

Viewed today, Masking Tape accrues new layers of meaning. The act of placing mask upon mask, once read primarily through the lens of conceptual procedure or performance endurance, now inevitably recalls the lived experience of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. What may have originally functioned as an abstract or absurd gesture takes on renewed resonance as an image of protection, anxiety, and the social politics of masking. The work’s repetitive accumulation mirrors the psychological weight of prolonged crisis. In this way, Bohne’s video not only participates in the historical discourse of early video art but also demonstrates how such works can be reactivated by contemporary conditions, generating meanings beyond their original intention and context.


– Brandon Bauer, Associate Professor of Art (2026)

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Third Coast Prints: A selection of work from Really Big Prints 2021

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!

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The Mystical Arts of Tibet – Mandala Sand Painting

In Tibetan Buddhist practice, a mandala is a sacred cosmogram used as an object of meditation and contemplation. It represents both the enlightened nature of reality and a symbolic map of the path toward wisdom and compassion. The creation of a sand mandala is a ritual practice through which practitioners cultivate mindfulness, concentration, and an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. By carefully constructing the mandala, practitioners seek to align themselves with these qualities and bring the principles of harmony, balance, and awakened awareness into their lives.

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New Posts in the Photography and Video Exchange!

Screenshot From the Photography and Video Exchange Site

St. Norbert College students have participated in the Photography and Video Exchange Blog for several years. It is a great project started by Adriane Little (Western Michigan University) in collaboration with Tom Jones (University of Wisconsin–Madison). The blog features student photography and video projects accompanied by brief statements about the work. St. Norbert students have contributed both photography and video, with new work scheduled to be posted this fall!

The exchange includes contributions from a wide range of institutions, including several University of Wisconsin campuses, Binghamton University, Mississippi State University, the University of Kentucky, other liberal arts institutions, art schools such as the Maryland Institute College of Art, international institutions including Otterbein University and the University of Toronto, as well as community colleges and technical colleges. It provides a valuable cross-section of contemporary student work and offers a great view into the current state of photography education.

You can search by school to see what students are doing at each participating campus. Check it out! Here is the link to the SNC posts!

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Monumental Sculpture Depicts Conversion of Norbert

The “Conversion of St. Norbert,” a sculpture by Colorado-based, internationally-renowned artist Jim Agius depicts the young man Norbert at the most pivotal moment in his life. Agius personally supervised the installation of the new work on campus. The sculpture, which overlooks Reid and Third Streets, was commissioned by Jim and Miriam Mulva.

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