A professor of art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and curator of contemporary art for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, Truman Lowe is one of the most respected sculptors working in the US today. He has exhibited at such venues as the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, Ontario, and the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College in Wisconsin. One of his large outdoor sculptures was included in an exhibit at the White House in 1998.

Growing up on the banks of Wisconsin's Black River, where his parents were skilled makers of splint-plait baskets and other crafts from their Ho-Chunk tradition, Truman’s connection to nature began at an early age. As a sculptor, his large abstract works in wood and metal are inspired by many elements of the natural world. As he says, “My work is an aesthetic examination of my immediate environment, and of earlier people who lived in this region and created objects and stories reflective of their time.”

Lowe’s work is characterized by its seemingly simple forms, materials and construction, a fact he acknowledges. “If I do anything, I simplify things. Maybe too much.” This exhibition which will feature two installations will, as he succinctly puts it, “to make visual all that is known, illuminate what is not obvious.”

For Untitled (The One from Wisconsin ), my primary material is recycled cardboard packaging, or ExpandOS. Marking a shift away from previous works with Styrofoam, this project continues to highlight my process: assembling and re-arranging elements to display a simultaneous state of being and evidence of doing. It shows my interest in the potential of everyday objects. I work with ordinary forms-often tens of thousands of them-then shape the accumulated fragments into immersive environments. Untitled (The One from Wisconsin ) uses approximately 10,750 individual forms. For Untitled (The One from Wisconsin ), I worked to have the forms mimic the natural world: a wasp, hornet or swallow nest, singular barnacles or collective hives. I worked to provide a place of contemplation and observation - to pull together the everything and the nothing; where nothing is hidden and everything revealed. The material, marketed as a "sustainably manufactured internal packaging system that creates a protective cocoon around each and every product shipped" (http://www.expandos.com), speaks also to the nature of protection, safety, and security. As such, the forms and their presentation reflect each other. Inspired by the tranquility of the Museum, I was curious of its sectioned off spaces and formal rooms. Using the architectural space as its borders, I worked to confine the work between the chair rail and its benches, to provide an intimate space for viewing and to give the body a space to sit and the mind a place to wander.

kathryn graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. In 2005 and 2007 respectively, she received a Master of Arts in InterMedia and a Master of Fine Arts in InterMedia both from UW-Milwaukee. Since 2004, kathryn has taught classes at UW-Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Long a celebrated and beloved fixture on the Milwaukee and Wisconsin art scenes, Ruth Grotenrath's work is characterized by a masterful use of color and her artistic responses to everyday scenes and the objects that surrounded her in the homes she shared with her husband Schomer Lichtner. This small exhibition of 14 works is an appetizer for a future larger show scheduled at the MWA and reveals the sheer delight Grotenrath took in color and subject matter - including her favorites: her husband Schomer in his studio, cows, flowers and animals; in other words the things that surrounded her in her eastside-Milwaukee home and at their farm near Holy Hill.

Bound by the common task of working on the enormous panorama paintings, over a dozen German artists arrived in Milwaukee in the 1880s, creating some of the most impressive works of art ever painted in the US. This exhibition features work by Biberstein, Heine, Fery, Lorenz, Schneider and Schroeter, directly related to either the panoramas or their subsequent careers within Wisconsin and beyond.