Nohl Fellows
Artists probe transracial adoption, visual perception in Haggerty Museum show
Where you stand affects what you can see. The work by this year’s Nohl Fellows on display at the Haggerty Museum of Art explores perceptions both inward and outward. Each year The Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund grants no-strings-attached monetary awards to two established and three emerging artists. The annual Nohl Fellowship show exhibits work from recipients of that year’s prestigious awards to emerging and established artists. The exhibition is on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art on the Marquette University campus through Sept. 17.
Deeply personal works by Brooke Thiele and Rose Curley are autobiographical, both chronicling their transracial adoptions. Their works of varying media offer emotional reflections on understanding their own identities.
Curley is finishing a graphic novel about her transracial adoption and race in America. She shares excerpts of text and images from her book along with her research and personal mementos.
A screenplay-type written outline for the book is tacked along the wall, illuminating the significance of photos and notes on view in glass display cases.
A photograph of two women and a newborn sticks out. One of the women, with long flowing hair, is propped up in a hospital bed. The other woman sits next to her holding the baby. From reading the pages hung on the walls, we find out the two women are Curley’s birth and adoptive mothers. She’s the child.
Curley had seen a cropped version of the image of her as a baby with her adoptive mother before. It wasn’t until she found the photograph’s negative that she saw the full image.
Curley started creating the book four years ago while in graduate school and is on a slow, steady pace toward completing it. She teased the completed story in the exhibition catalog, writing that her story is about “becoming aware of what it means to be Black in America, the invisibility of whiteness, the absurd nature of perception versus reality, and the inevitable need to search for truth in a sea of lies.”
Thiele, in “The Fall to a Sea Called Home,” expresses her complex emotions about growing up as a Korean child in Green Bay with white parents by blending Korean and American cultural elements.
Stepping behind the curtain into her multimedia installation allows viewers inside her life, even if just for a few moments. On view is a traditional Hanbok dress Thiele sewed out of denim. Viewers listen to Thiele singing in Pansori style but speak her adoption story in English. By fusing these two facets of her identity together, Thiele shows how she never felt fully Korean and never fully American.
Thiele will perform Pansori excerpts from “The Fall to a Sea Called Home” at 6 p.m. July 20 at the Haggerty.
Works from the other three Nohl winners, Joseph Mougel, Robin Jebavy and Jesse McLean, test our perspective in visual ways.
Mougel, a photographer, challenges what it means to know a place using images taken from Google Earth. He juxtaposed the digital images with historic, composed images of the American West.
Jebavy’s paintings feel like looking through a kaleidoscope. At first, there’s a wonderful wash of shapes and color. With further study the glassware pieces – cups, bowls, plates – that constitute the image emerge. She wrote in the catalog that her art is”a reference to our fragile and often precarious human condition – to ask questions about our intimate relationship with the external world.”
The mediated experience and how it influences our perceptions are at the core of McLean’s work. Spam emails read aloud are paired with collaged video sequences in “Wherever You Go, There We Are.” In “Climbing” a cursor ascends an insurmountable mountain.