Through her work, Emmy Lingscheit investigates the interdependencies and exchanges between the biological and the man-made, revealing a postnatural world in which the line between synthetic and organic beings, systems, and materials is increasingly blurry. Her work is informed by dystopian fiction, climate disruption, irony, hope, and the current alarming pace of species extinction planet-wide. As a visual artist working primarily in the medium of printmaking, she participates in a long tradition of dialogue between art, science, and cultural rhetoric, via the multiple.
Emmy is currently an assistant professor and coordinator of printmaking at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds a BFA in painting from St. Cloud State University in Minnesota, and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Emmy has held residencies at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis, MN, at Zygote Press in Cleveland, OH, at Ucross in Sheridan, WY, and recently at the Kohler plant in Kohler, WI. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including recently at Davidson Galleries in Seattle, WA, Nash Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, and The International Print Center in New York, NY.
Year 2 MAS Catalog and Workbook is now available for purchase. This publication features 8 amazing artists from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. They are Mellissa Redman (Grand Rapids, MI), Kate Robertson (Ann Arbor, MI), Jenniffer Omaitz (Kent, OH), Ellie Honl (Bloomington, IN), Jessica Anderson (Jackson, IL), Jason Ackman (Rushville, IL), Krista Svalbonas (Chicago, IL), and Emmy Lingscheit (Urbana, IL). These artists’ careers range from emerging to established working in mixed media, sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, performance, photography, and collage.
MAS publication is only $40.70 (includes shipping/handling).
(includes a catalog with artist interviews and studio shots. As well as a workbook containing lesson plans exposing, educating, and engaging students into various studio practices and media. In addition, to a series of artist videos, a gallery of images, and the opportunity to Skype the artists).
There is a limited quantity available.
I am happy to announce that this year’s publication is printed by NASCO arts & crafts in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. There is a beautiful ad inside this publication.
If you have purchased last year’s MAS publication I would LOVE to hear from you.
Thank you for your support. Frank Juarez
art educator & founder
Here is one of my recorded Skype sessions with MAS artist, Todd Mrozinski
Year 2 MAS publication would not be possible without these contributors.
Layout by Erika L. Block.
Photography by Pat Ryan (unless otherwise noted).
Curriculum development by Frank Juarez.
The Midwest Artist Studios Project is supported by a grant from the Kohler Foundation, Inc, and the Wisconsin Art Education Association.
I am extremely excited to be heading into Year 2 of the 3 year project, the Midwest Artist Studios™ (MAS) Project. I will be traveling from July 26 through August 1, 2015 to the following artists/cities/states – Mellissa Redman, Grand Rapids, Michigan; Kate Robertson, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Jenniffer Omaitz, Kent, Ohio; Ellie Honl, Bloomington, Indiana; Jessica Anderson, Jacksonville, Illinois; and Jason Ackman, Rushville, Illinois. In mid-August I will be visiting the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry to document Emmy Lingscheit, who is one of our featured 2015 MAS artists and a current artist in resident. In late September, I will finish our documentation/research by visiting Krista Svalbonas, Chicago, Illinois and Emmy Lingscheit, Urbana, Illinois.
The artists selected were based on their responses to an online survey focusing on Art Education, body of work, and a Skype interview.
Throughout our visits I will be introducing you to 8 amazing and talented artists from the Midwest working in printmaking to painting, sculpture to mixed media and collage to installation art.
Here are two of the questions asked on our survey and the artist’s response.
Please share one positive Art Education experience that you had in middle school, high school or college.
It is a challenge to narrow it down to just one! As the daughter of an art educator in Wisconsin, I know that I was privileged to attend public school at a time when art education was a valued and better-funded part of the curriculum. The first art education experience that I can remember had a profound affect on me, because it made me realize that my unique perspective was valued. When I was in kindergarten, my teacher showed us how to make a penguin from cutting and gluing together pieces of construction paper. Having just visited the Chicago zoo where I was mesmerized by the crazy “eyebrows” of rockhopper penguins, I used my leftover pieces of orange paper to create the unique feather plumage. When the teacher saw this addition, she showed my project to the class and I felt an overwhelming sense of pride and validation.
Why is Art Education important today?
Art education is important today, because art teaches students valuable skills that most other subjects don’t. Because art never has one right answer, it empowers students to think for themselves and to consider all possibilities. Art nurtures creative problem solving, curiosity and flexibility, and encourages students to take risks and to embrace ambiguity. Art is a reflection of the culture in which it was created, so studying art has the potential to teach students about history, society, and the makers’ unique point of view. It also has the ability to teach students about themselves and how to express things that cannot be said with words alone. With a fast changing global economy, being able to find creative solutions to new problems will be very important. People that possess creative literacy, will have the skill set to find innovative solutions. Beyond the job market, learning how to create and appreciate visual aesthetics creates a better quality of life and improves society as a whole.
Ellie’s artwork is about the human desire to find stability in an unsteady present and unpredictable future. Through her artwork, she tries to understand why things are the way they are and strive to find logic in the random. She works intuitively allowing herself to experiment with unpredictable processes to discover new marks and imagery. Many times these initial investigations look chaotic and they provide a problem for her to resolve. She imposes order through geometric forms and color, while making connections through lines, written explanations, and collage elements. These acts of resolution are based on research into theories of geometry, psychology, space, and her own history. Through a multidisciplinary approach, she creates prints, objects, and moving images that oscillate between rational and irrational, organized and disordered. Printmaking’s unique ability to retain the original image helps her create variables that grow organically and allows her to combine and alter visual elements using a wide variety of media. This layering, warping, and re-presenting information reflects her research in how people make sense of the world around them.
Bio Ellie Honl is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN. Combining printmaking, time-based media, and alternative photographic processes, her artwork has been widely exhibited across the United States and is included in many national collections. She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and the Kala Art Institute, and has been a visiting artist at numerous universities and art centers. She has previously taught at Arizona State University, the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She received her MA and MFA in Printmaking with a minor in Intermedia from the University of Iowa where she graduated with honors, and received a BA in studio art from St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN. Ellie is from Stevens Point, Wisconsin where her mother is an art teacher in the public school system.
On Friday, October 24th, Frank Juarez, founder of the Midwest Artist Studios ™ Project, and two of our featured MAS artists, Todd Mrozinskiand Josie Osborne presented at the 2014 Wisconsin Art Education Association Fall Conference at the Bruce Guadalupe Community School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The MAS Project is moving at a steady pace while gaining momentum in the art education field.
The presentation touched upon the following:
Increasing Literacy within the Art Room.
Lack of Text-based Resources Addressing Literacy in Art Education.
Reflecting on Current Teaching Trends.
Research: a survey which was shared prior to further planning of the MAS Project. One question on the survey addressed, “do you use local artists in your curriculum?”. Here is the overall consensus as to why they do not. 1) Lack of funding to recruit artists in the classroom, 2) grants are too competitive. Same pool of money for all, 3) new to teaching, 4) lack of time, 5) too many things on the teacher’s plate, and 6) do not know any artists in my community or region.
Purpose of the MAS Project, which focuses on 6-12 art education and curriculum integration. As well as to embrace contemporary art locally and regionally whilst bringing it into the classroom resulting in the design of unit plans concentrating on such as but not limited to: varied art processes, narratives, collaboration, and technology and infuse interaction with the MAS artists into the classroom.
Implementation of artist-inspired unit plans to be part of a teacher workbook to accompany the Midwest Artist Studio ™Catalog, which will consist of such as but not limited to: photographs, interviews, artist statements, artist website(s). Unit plans will focus on such as but not limited to: the use of the Elements and Principles of Design, National Visual Arts Standards, Literacy, differentiated instruction and assessments.
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.
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 