With new gallery, Frank Juarez extends role as artistic advocate
Inaugural exhibit on view through May 6
With stalwart vision and dauntless optimism, Frank Juarez has returned to the Third Ward. The Frank Juarez Gallery opened recently in a modest space on the top floor of the Marshall Building. It gives Juarez, once again, a voice of artistic advocacy in Milwaukee.
Some might remember Juarez from another, even more modest, space in the basement of the same building. The Barrow and Juarez Gallery opened in 2006 with an ambitious agenda, but made a quiet exit, closing about a year later. Juarez acknowledged that the project was a risk but that he learned many things from the experience. He has since launched a more focused career in the arts based on closer relationships with artists and a positive message of outreach. His rise to the top floor seems auspicious.
In a multifaceted career, Juarez has worked to bring art to communities that lack it, to teach, and to support artists with exhibitions and exposure. He has been a high school art teacher since 2001, currently at Sheboygan North. In this area of his life he has distinguished himself by teaching holistic approaches, bringing in arts professionals as residents and lecturers, and garnering state and national recognition as an arts educator. Juarez wryly stated that he has raised his voice in class just once.
Living and teaching in Sheboygan, Juarez saw a lack of opportunity for artists to encounter each other and exhibit. There was no scene, so Juarez promptly created one. He founded the Sheboygan Visual Artists Association in 2007 and it continues to flourish. In 2010, Juarez also began an exhibit series titled “Indiana Green,” named after some favorite haunts in Sheboygan where he and artist friends would congregate. The goal of this series was to recognize artists that had supported him and to acknowledge their work. The list of artists in this ongoing project is extensive. Reginald Baylor, Lynn Tomaszewski, Tom Berenz (and myself), among many others, have participated.
Juarez has also published extensively, creating an online compendium titled “365 Artists/365 Days” in collaboration with Greymatter Gallery. “Artdose,” a print and digital guide of exhibits around the state that also profiles individual artists, is another project Juarez oversees.
Still, Juarez felt he needed a home for exhibits in a dedicated setting. In 2011, he entered again into the role of gallery owner, opening Frank Juarez Gallery in a converted church and later in a storefront in downtown Sheboygan. On Jan. 1, the gallery moved to its new home in Milwaukee’s creative hub, the Third Ward.
Juarez has begun his latest reinvention with five artists: Melissa Dorn Richards, Rob Neilson, Dale Knaak, Sara Willadsen and Tony Conrad.
Neilson is a nationally exhibited sculptor with many public works under his belt. He presented a torqued, multiplied visage of Vladimir Putin called “Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin” in MDF, an industrial, pulped wood product. It was incendiary. Melissa Dorn Richards continues to unearth the formal and conceptual mileage that a simple, domestic tool like a mop can offer in her highly textured, restrained paintings. Knaak’s quiet but crystalline paintings of cigarette packs seem poised to enter into deeply felt psychological territory, but haven’t quite found their way. A pack of Lucky Strikes and a wedding cake bride stood out prominently.
Painters Sara Willadsen and Tony Conrad round out the current roster. Geometric abstractions by Conrad evoke multicolored mandalas and textiles, while Willadsen splits and tears her visions of landscapes into broken forms and wonderfully unnatural surfaces.
This inaugural exhibition is on view through May 6 at Frank Juarez Gallery, 207 E. Buffalo St. For more information visit fjgmke .com.
Rafael Francisco Salas is an artist, an associate professor of art at Ripon College and a regular Art City contributor.