Today we visit the studios of Josie Osborne from Milwaukee and Paula Schulze from Shorewood. Josie is an assemblage artist and Paula is a printmaker.
Josie Osborne
Solace and quiet contemplation provide an antidote to our busy daily lives. We must seek out a balance between our fast-paced exterior lives and maintaining that rich interior life that brings together memory, imagination and a more poetic understanding of our daily experiences.
In Osborne’s assemblage boxes and print collages the elements used and the organization or treatment of space references dreams, poetry, memory, architecture, and a neo-modernist language of color, simplicity, process, materials and mark-making. The works bring together various aspects of my experience (both internal and external) and reflect a pondering of the relationships of those two realities as they place the necessary openness to intangible experiences in parallel to that which we physically and more directly experience in the world.
About
Josie Osborne is an artist and director of the First Year Program in Art and Design at UW-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts where she has taught for 6 years. She served for 12 years on the City of Milwaukee Arts Board and has received Mary Nohl Suitcase Fund support for an international studio residency and exhibitions of her work. She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Quiet at Walkers Point Center for the Arts, Miller and Shellabarger: Hiding in the Light at Inova Gallery and many others. For ten years, while serving as Director of Community Outreach at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, she co-founded and oversaw various award winning programs including the Creative Educators institute, Future Designers and the MOST Pre-College program. Osborne received her Master of Fine Arts in Graphics (printmaking) from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and her BFA in Painting and Drawing from UW-Milwaukee.
She has exhibited her work regionally and nationally. Select exhibitions include: Texture at Fredericksburg Art Center (VA), Fabulous Women Show and Top Drawer Prints (at Peltz Gallery in Milwaukee), In the Balance, (Walkers Point Center for the Arts), Thread (invitational at UNC-Charlotte); 5IVE (traveling exhibition: Walkers Point Center for the Arts, Milwaukee and Flagler College Carrera Gallery, Florida); Art Chicago (Hotcakes Gallery); Art Basel Miami (Hotcakes Gallery); Things Avian and Architectural (solo exhibition at Sharon Lynn Wilson Center for the Arts); Proscenium (solo exhibition at Wisconsin Academy of Science, Letters and the Arts), Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors Biennial, A Decade of Wisconsin Art (invitational, James Wattrous Gallery, Madison Overture Center), Diabolique (curated by Fred Stonehouse); UWM and MIAD Faculty Exhibitions. Osborne’s work has also been reproduced in literary journals and professional magazines, including The Cream City Review and the Madison Review.
Paula Schulze
Schulze explores notions of space and order in my work. She works in a reductive manner, drawing in charcoal or utilizing the printmaking technique of mezzotint. Over the past several years her work has moved from explorations of architectural space towards abstraction and flattened space, with an interest in maps and in pattern, geometry, ornament, and economy of form. She has been inspired by pre- and early-Renaissance art, with its ornamental detail and its elegant use of geometry as a backdrop to a larger narrative or devotional setting, and by traditional Islamic principles of geometry and design. In all of her work, through isolation and examination, she investigates formal elements and their ways of ordering space.
About
Paula Schulze is a Milwaukee-area artist and printmaker. She has a BA in anthropology and Ibero-American studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a MFA in printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has participated in artist residencies at Anchor Graphics in Chicago; Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy; and Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain. She has also collaborated on temporary public art projects with the organization IN:SITE in Milwaukee. Images of these projects and her drawings and mezzotint prints are available online at http://www.paulaschulze.com.
All images copyright of the artist and used with their permission.
MIDWEST ARTIST STUDIOS ™ PROJECT 