The peninsula of land that comprises Door County has always offered artists an enticing and inspiring mix of land, sea and air throughout the four seasons. Cool springs with fresh colors transition to glorious warm summer days. Fall then brings magnificent russet colors to serve as a contrast to the cooling blues of the water and sky. Winter brings another kind of cool - snow and ice - which freeze this icicle-shaped peninsula for several months until the seasonal cycle begins anew.

Realist landscape painting has traditionally been a strong favorite in Door County. This exhibition, drawn from the permanent collection of the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, will include some of their best examples of the four seasons in that style. The Miller Art Museum's permanent collection began in 1975 when Gerhard CF Miller donated his painting Pioneer Farm to the nascent art museum. Subsequent donations meant that the collection was large enough to be displayed permanently in 1983 and it now contains over 600 works. Artists featured in the collection are from throughout the Midwest, but with an emphasis on Wisconsin, and this is why the MWA has mounted this exhibition; not only are many of the artists from Wisconsin but their work focuses on a very specific part of the state which, for many, is one of the its most defining areas.

Thirty-four works are in the exhibition, featuring such artists as Wendell Arneson, Phil Austin, Isabel Baudoin, Roger Bechtold, Gibson Byrd, Jessie K. Chase, Austin Fraser, Emmett Johns, Gerhard C.F. Miller, F. Victor Poole, Ken Schneider, Francesco Spicuzza, Tom Uttech, and Johnathon Wilde.

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.