The Kohler Art Preserve
“Sheboygan, Wis., punches far above its weight in the visual art world,” said Brian Hieggelke in New City Art. Already home to a Kohlerfunded complex that regularly draws large crowds to ambitious contemporary exhibits, the lakeside city of 50,000 now also harbors the only museum in the country that focuses on artists known as “environment builders.” The new Art Preserve at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is, beyond that, “a stunning work of sculptural architecture.” A small forest of 50-foot-tall timber pillars guards the structure’s entrance, while inside everything about the building “feels connected to the natural world and disconnected from other art spaces.”
“The Art Preserve’s mission is based on a paradox,” said Debra Brehmer in Hyperallergic.com. “How does one take art that has been removed from the life force of its original site and reconstitute its magic in an institutional setting?” During the years that she headed the Kohler arts center, the late Ruth DeYoung Kohler II, who was the driving force behind the Preserve’s creation, took dramatic measures to rescue a type of work that’s typically lost to time. The plumbing-manufacturing heiress was 26 in 1967, when she first saw the scores of towering concrete sculptures that artist Fred Smith had built outside his tavern in Phillips, Wis. A decade later, she led the effort to purchase the property, resulting in the creation of a popular visitor attraction. Later, the Kohler Foundation dismantled and moved Loy Bowlin’s entire glitter-encrusted home from Mississippi to Sheboygan. The Preserve now holds more than 35 such artist-created environments, and it greets visitors with a re-creation of Smith’s dive bar. Past that is the floor of the museum devoted to regional artists such as Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, known for his paintings, photographs, ceramics, and chicken-bone thrones. The two-dimensional work is often held in flat files or hung in sliding vertical racks, allowing visitors to see multitudes of images from each artist.
“If the first floor of the Art Preserve lays a foundation for what environment builders do,” said Mary Louise Schumacher in The New
York Times, “the second upends misconceptions that these artists tend to be untrained or from rural places.” One section re-creates the apartment walls of Ray Yoshida, an Art Institute of Chicago teacher who had a knack for juxtaposition. Another resurrects the New York City studio of acclaimed textile artist Lenore Tawney. The sunlit top floor, meanwhile, is “home to some of the more intact environments,” including a collection of concrete figures by Charles Smith, an 80-year-old AfricanAmerican artist who will have a hand in deciding how the pieces are displayed.
“What you’re doing,” he says, “is opening up a book that’s 80 years old that can talk.”