The following article was written by Diana Bolander, the Assistant Director/Curator at the Rahr-West Art Museum as a part of its Art Forward series.
The most recent exhibit installed at the Rahr-West Art Museum is Road Trip, featuring the work of members of the League of Milwaukee Artists. Saturday, June 18, the museum celebrated the exhibit at an opening reception where we talked about road trips with the juror, Riley Niemack, and artists featured in the show.
Juror Riley Niemack grew up in small town Kansas and is intimately familiar with long distance road trips. Niemack fondly remembers a short daytrip she took with a friend in their early 20s. They went to Lucas, Kansas, a small quirky arts community. Niemack recalled the peace of listening to music in the car, exploring a new place, and the general liberating feeling the trip evoked.
The works Niemack selected for the exhibit evoke the transience, transformative, and ephemeral landscape of a road trip rather than focusing on the destination. Each work captures a passing moment potentially glimpsed from a car window or alludes to travel or a pathway.
Treasure Trail #2, Barbara Schaefer, oil and alkydon on linen
Artist Barbara Rae Schaefer’s most memorable road trip was her honeymoon where she and her husband drove from New York City to Vancouver, Canada, camping the whole way. She fondly remembers the six weeks eating over a fire and visiting national parks. The time influenced her art, as she is influenced by skies, mountains, trees, and flowers.
The paintings in the show were done after moving to Milwaukee from Brooklyn at the beginning of the shut down for the pandemic. She would walk the vacant streets to get art supplies and work in her studio near the clock tower where she was inspired by the forms in the water.
Cherie Burbach, This Way to Hope, mixed media
Cherie Burbach, a painter from Oostburg, always tries to leave viewers of her work with a sense of hope. Her bright and whimsical work takes us on a journey through her imagination.
Burbach remembers a great trip to a wedding in Tennessee she went to last year. Her own artistic journey is about experimentation and the process, which she finds quite cleansing. She fondly recalls art being a safe space for her growing up. Her advice to other artists would be: “don’t care about the finished work, enjoy the process.”
Nick Schroeder, Landscapes of the Mind: Last Chance Gas, Ceramic
Nick Schroeder is a ceramicist living in Milwaukee who has been hand-building for only about five years. His two works in the show are from his Landscapes of the Mind series showing small scenes. This series show began as teapots he was making from slabs of clay. As he cut out the parts of the teapot, he became enamored with the leftover pieces and how they could be used to create interesting sculptures. These soon turned into landscapes and led to his Landscapes of the Mind Series.
Like his process, Nick’s artistic journey has been circuitous. After college he worked in color photography and exhibited around Madison until he moved to Milwaukee. Without access to a photography lab, his interest in photography faded. He worked as a graphic designer for 30 years and became devoted to ceramics in his retirement as he joined Cream City Clay. His ideas branch off from one another and he finds joy in exploring rabbit holes and tangents.
Nick fondly remembered his adventures hitchhiking in the 1970s. After graduating college in Madison, Nick hitchhiked to spend 10 days with a friend in Denver, Colorado. Later he hitchhiked from Huntsville, Pennsylvania, where he was in VISTA (an earlier version of AmeriCorps), to New Orleans. He recalls being very aware of being a “yankee” in the south and feeling like he was traveling through a different county.
Road Trip will be on exhibit in the Ruth West gallery of the Rahr-West Art Museum through August 28, 2022. Get more information on visiting at rahrwestartmuseum.org and more information about the League of Milwaukee Artists at milwaukeeartists.org.
