September 25 – May 30, 2021

Online format, on the Haggerty Museum of Art's Google Arts & Culture Site

Established artists: Cecelia Condit and Ras 'Ammar Nsoroma

Emerging artists: Vaughan Larsen, LaNia Sproles, and Natasha Woods

The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists program annually awards unrestricted funds to emerging and established local artists to support the creation of new work, or to complete work in progress. Now in its seventeenth cycle, the program makes a significant investment in the greater Milwaukee arts community, encouraging artists to live and make work here. The Fellowships also create—through the jurying process, the culminating exhibition, and the catalogue—an opportunity to promote local artistic production to a national audience.

This cycle of the program features Established Artists Cecelia Condit, a video artist who creates “feminist fairy tales” that explore the dichotomies of beauty and the grotesque, innocence and cruelty, strength and fragility and Ras 'Ammar Nsoroma, a muralist, portraitist, and mixed media painter whose work centers around the spiritual, cultural, and political consciousness of the African Diaspora. The Emerging Artists include: Vaughan Larsen, a photographer whose practice explores issues of identity and relationships at the intersection of queer culture; LaNia Sproles, whose prints, drawings, paintings and layered cut-outs seek to redefine the male gaze by reclaiming the power of the Black femme body; and Natasha Woods, a filmmaker who investigates microhistories – in this case, the history of chuckwagon racing– through manipulation of artifacts and archives. 

This year’s exhibition has moved to an online platform – The Haggerty Museum of Art’s recently launched Google Arts & Culture site. Individual galleries will feature the work of the five fellows, and will be accompanied by the interpretive materials traditionally offered at the Museum--including artist statements, biographies, and catalogue essays. Additional multi-media content--including artist interviews, studio visits and online public programs--will be added to the virtual exhibition throughout the course of the exhibition period, offering increased access to the artists themselves and providing additional insights into their working processes. 

This exhibition includes work by the 2019 fellows, who were chosen from a field of 159 applicants by jurors Dean Daderko, Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Janet Dees, Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University; and Jessica S. Hong, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.