2018 Nohl winners include Rosemary Ollison
Five artists – including an architect interested in indigenous culture and a mom who says she hasn’t slept in four years – have been chosen from a field of 177 for southeastern Wisconsin’s prestigious prize for individual artists, the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship.
The Nohl fellowship gives two established artists $20,000 and three emerging artists $10,000, funds often used to create new work or to complete existing projects. As part of the fellowship, the artists will present their work at the Haggerty Museum of Art next year, and an exhibition catalog will be produced.
Winners in the established artist category:
Chris Cornelius is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and the founding principal of studio:in- digenous, which serves indigenous clients and works to make indigenous culture more visible. He is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Cornelius was a consultant and collaborator with Antoine Predock on the Indian Community School of Milwaukee.
Keith Nelson is a painter and sculptor who creates layered, minimalist sculptures from architectural waste, including porcelain toilet tank lids. There is a tongue-in-cheek element to to his work, a critique of consumer culture. In 2014, Nelson founded Usable Space, an artist-curated gallery in Bay View, and he more recently launched Real Tinsel, a gallery and studio space on Historic Mitchell Street.
Winners in the emerging artist category:
Nazlı Dinçel, an award-winning filmmaker and first-generation immigrant born in Ankara, Turkey, creates work that explores the experiences of disruption, displacement, the female body and sexuality. She uses language and sound in her work and manipulates film physically with her fingers. She’s made more than a dozen films since 2009.
Makeal Flammini describes herself as a mom who hasn’t slept in four years. She’s a painter who would prefer to be a writer, so her work is driven by words and narratives related to identity, motherhood and memory. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two small children.
Rosemary Ollison grew up on an Arkansas plantation, where her grandfather was a horse wrangler. She moved to Wisconsin when she was 16 and began making art in her 50s as a way to tell her own story about being a black woman in America and to find healing from a history of abuse. She describes her drawings and installations as a “therapeutic discussion with Jehovah God.” Not unlike Mary Louise Nohl, the namesake of the award, Ollison transformed the place she lives into an art environment. Her apartment is an affirmation, a vibrant, joyous space fashioned from fiber work, handmade rugs, drawings, duct tape sculptures, beaded works, jewelry, hog bone necklaces and clothing.
The Nohl award bears the name of the fiercely independent Mary Louise Nohl, whose Fox Point house, filled with sculpture and woodwork, was called the “witch’s house” by countless locals. She died in 2001 at the age of 87, leaving a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation.
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