Katy Keefe and Chris Niver at Green Gallery West

The two person show opening Friday May 15^th at The Green Gallery West will be featuring the work of Artists Katy Keefe, and Chris Niver.  The process rich work of both Keefe and Niver, explores the potential of a media, and its ability through form and abstraction to describe a place or emotion, to tell a narrative, or to translate personalities or characteristics. 

            The careful and delicate work of Chris Niver documents imagined places.  While the craft is inviting and impecable the subject matter feels ominous or anxious taking the viewer on a journey through a series of dominating unfamiliar landscapes.  “I can imagine a sailor .. stitching this linen. The sailor is preoccupied… with water and death. He is all too aware of the messiness and fragility of life because he is vulnerable to the enormous power of the sea… He deals with his anxieties by slowly and painstakingly rendering them, the repetition of stitches like a chant that quiets the voices of doubt” Niver says about his own process and work.

            Katy Keefe’s new body of work Eyes to the Unknown is an investigation in translation of human subjects and personality into imagery.  The paintings/ Drawings reveal layers of enveloping flora, geometric shapes and figures reading almost as a “visual diary” creating a bending landscape that describes much more than just space.  Keefe describes the work as emitting, “profound optimism and regeneration”.  She describes her new paintings “The work in this exhibition addresses themes of love and enlightenment using individuals as the vehicles for expression”.

            The work of Katy Keefe and Chris Niver will be on display from May 15^th through June 19^th.  There will be an opening reception for the artists on the 15^th from 8 – 11 pm at The Green Gallery West, located at 631 E. Center, Milwaukee, WI.  

for more info visit www.thegreengallery.biz

The Green Gallery East

The Green Gallery East presents:
Lovable Like Orphan Kitties and Bastard Children

Curated by Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster
Opening Reception: May 9th 4-10pm

On May 9th, 2009 Milwaukee will be given the opportunity to survey a sampling of the LA contemporary art scene. Seventy-eightpaintings, 11 x 11 inches and under, by seventy-eight different artists, will be brought from Los Angeles via bag check and carry-on by LA based artists Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster. The artists differ in their aesthetics, their styles, as well as, their stages of development and exposure but they will all be converging from May 9th until June 6th in Milwaukee's Green Gallery East.

Full list of artists click HERE

Gallery Night this Friday

This Friday, April 17 is Spring Gallery Night.  The following MIGA galleries will be open:

The Armoury Gallery

5:00 - 9:00 pm

"Night Work" 

With work by Sonja Thomsen, Nicholas Lampert, Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg and Nathaniel Stern & Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

Paper Boat 

7:00 - 10:00 pm  **last opening ever!**

"Bullies"

New work by Micaela O'Herlihy

Green Gallery East

4:00 - 8:00 pm

"Michelle Grabner, Silverpoint Drawings with Guest Mobile"

Green Gallery West

5:00 - 9:00 pm

New work by Frankie Martin

Portrait Society

5:00 - 9:00 pm

"Tender is the Line, An Exhibition of Drawing"

With work by Paul Caster, Sally Duback, Jean Roberts Guequierre, Steve Ohlrich, Steve Lubahn, Claire Stigliani and Dawn Turner.

Paper Boat last show!

Join us for our last show ever!

"Bullies"

New Work by Wisconsin artist Micaela O'Herlihy

April 17 - May 31st, 2009

Opening reception Gallery Night 7-10pm

Paper Boat closing

Below is a very sad announcement from Faythe and Kim at Paper Boat:

Dearest patrons of Paper Boat,

As of May 31st Paper Boat Boutique & Gallery will be closing its doors after 4 great years of being open. The current economic climate is the main reason that led us to this very difficult decision.

We really hope you can join us for our last Gallery reception featuring work by Wisconsin artist Micaela O'Herlihy on Gallery Night, April 17th from 7-10pm.

There will also be a closing sale for the month of May to help us reduce our inventory. It will be a great time to pick up those items you've always been meaning to get. Also, don't forget to spend your gift certificates if you have been holding onto one!

We thank you so very much for your support over the past 4 years. Even though the Boat is closing, we are excited to seek out new opportunities and projects. We also want to stress the importance of supporting the remaining small businesses and galleries in Milwaukee. Those spaces are vital to keeping our city and our community unique and enjoyable.

We hope to see all of you during the last couple of months of being open!

Warm regards,
The ladies of the Boat-Faythe Levine & Kim Kisiolek

Frankie Martin @ Greeen Gallery West

Frankie Martin @ Green Gallery West
April 3rd - May 3rd 2009

Opening Reception Friday April 3rd 8 - 11 pm

Frankie Martin will have work in the main gallery, the John Riepenhoff Experience and Club Nutz.
http://www.frankiefeverforever.com/

Erica Somogyi will be showing an animation in the Video Arcade
http://www.throughthetrees.net/

Frankie will be showing new video works as well as some painting, and stills. Who Died? is a 5 part, two channel, non-linear narrative video that reinterprets popular representations of death and the transcendence of the human body.
Frankie will also present part of her series Left Behind which features paintings and mobiles based on the idea of what gets left behind. To do this she stretches her drop cloths as paintings, and gathers things from her neighborhood, or from her own garbage can. The idea is that these 'things' become non-things, then become re-contextualized as 'things' again.
In the John Reipenhoff Experience, Frankie will exhibit Born Again, a video in which Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is reborn into the format of video. The video is a 3 minute loop in which Venus is born again and again. This piece speaks to the recycling of ideas with in art history and the merging of painting and video.
Freakout, her live act which has morphed from comedic dance to dark comedy will be performed in Club Nutz.

www.thegreengallery.tk
www.thegreengallery.biz

Night Work @ the Armoury Gallery

Night Work

Opening reception:

Friday March 27, 6:00 - 10:00 pm

Show runs: March 27 - May 2

Featuring:

Nathaniel Stern

Jessica Meuninck Ganger
Nicolas Lampert
Shana McCaw & Brent Budsberg
Sonja Thomsen

The Armoury Gallery is pleased to announce its 8th exhibition: NightWork. Focusing specifically on professional artists working as artprofessors and instructors in Milwaukee, Night Work is an exciting crosssection of some of Milwaukee's most talented and recognized artists;three of whom are featured in the Current Tendencies exhibition at theHaggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University. Night work includes twocollaborative teams, Nathaniel Stern & Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and ShanaMcCaw & Brent Budsberg, as well as new 2D work by Nicolas Lampert andrecent photographs by Sonja Thomsen.

Along with teaching at UW-Milwaukee, Nicolas Lampert is a curator, aco-editor of a book on anti-war illustrations and an artist who works ina variety of media and has exhibited his work extensively across the country and abroad. Lampert co-curated a traveling political art show that toured 33 cities in Canada and the US during a five year run. He has work in the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork and Milwaukee's own Art Museum. Lampert is also part of theJustseeds Radical Artist's Cooperative that is currently exhibiting an installation at UWM's Union Art Gallery.

Taking over the installation room will be a collaboration by Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg. In seven years of collaboration, McCaw andBudsberg's work has evolved from playful performances about human interaction and rites of passage toward miniature architectural installations investigating transition, space and the passage of time.For Night Work, McCaw and Budsberg will exhibit two new companion sculptures. Incorporating a mysterious wind and subdued atmospheric effects, both pieces create a perception of space beyond the gallery wall, while also suggesting an indirect narrative. McCaw teaches at theMilwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch and Budsberg is a MIAD 3-d lab supervisor. As a collaborative team, they won a 2008Mary Nohl Fellowship in the Established Artist category.

First time collaborative duo Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern will present a new series of works. Playfully called "Distill Life,"this series incorporates technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking – including Japanese woodblock and engraving circa the1800s, present-day etching, stone lithography, photogravure etc –with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, in order to create new forms. Hailing from South Africa, and currently studying for his PhD throughTrinity College in Dublin, Ireland, Nathaniel Stern joined the Milwaukee arts community in 2008 for his position with the Peck School of the Arts at UW Milwaukee. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has a host of awards, residencies and fellowships to his credit. Jessica Meuninck-Ganger earned her MFA at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and currently teaches at the Peck School of the Arts, also having a host of honors, residencies and exhibitions to her credit.

Earning her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, SonjaThomsen will present a series of new works from her time spent in 2008 at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, Florida. Most recently featured in the aforementioned Current Tendencies exhibition at Marquette's Haggerty Museum of Art, Sonja has exhibited her work nationally and her photographs are included in the permanent collectionat the Milwaukee Art Museum. Thomsen currently teaches photography classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and was a founding member of the Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA), serving as president until June of 2008.