METAL ARTIST, FABRICATOR, ALL-AROUND METAL NERD

ALEX BRAUN

My artistic endeavors blend my skills in jewelry, ceramics, and manufacturing to create distinctive and highly refined works of wearable art.  My process involves several techniques, from tension-set glass and gems to a method I developed for setting stones between layers of steel.  Often utilizing remnants from my manufacturing work, my pieces are inspired by Art Deco, World War II diesel technology,  and clean industrial lines.  I use stainless steel, copper, and hardware to mix with the organic spirals of nature, prime numbers, and the artwork of my cohorts (the hand-blown glass marbles featured in my pieces are made by a neighbor, for instance) to create everything from small pendants to magnificent statement pieces.

FINE ARTIST & PUPPETEER

ANWAR FLLOYD-PRUITT

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt (he/him/his) is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on collage, puppetry, and community art. A recent graduate of UW-Madison (MFA ’20), Floyd-Pruitt also earned a BA in psychology from Harvard University ('99) and a BFA in sculpture from UW-Milwaukee ('16). Floyd-Pruitt produces and performs a family-friendly, hip-hop singalong called “Hip Hop Puppet Party” which was awarded a Madison Arts Commission Blink Grant. Anwar is the winner of the 2020 Russell and Paula Panczenko MFA Prize at the Chazen Museum of Art, where his solo exhibition, Supernova: Charlotte & Gene’s Radical Imagination Station, is on view until March.  Most recently, Floyd-Pruitt installed a temporary abstract sculptural wildflower garden outdoors, as part of Wormfarm Institute’s Fermentation Fest. 

Gravity

4-color Screenprint on Stained Birch Panel, 12"x36"

$180

Twin Extrapolation

3-color Screenprint on Stained Birch Panel, 12"x20"

$140

The Center of Things

5-color Screenprint on Stained Birch Panel, 20"x20"

$280

VISUAL ARTIST

BENJAMIN POLLOCK

Benjamin Pollock is a visual artist and former chemist. He is also the shop manager and co-founder of the screenprinting studio at House of RAD, Inklab MKE. His artwork is primarily screenprinted on various surfaces and combines geometric precision with organic forms from nature.

PRINTMAKER

BETH LEMERAND

Bio and Portrait Needed

UNFINISHED LEGACY

BREMA BREMA

The 27-year-old artist and designer is no stranger to facing adversity head-on. Born in war-torn Sudan, Brema and his family fled to a Kenyan refugee camp when he was five before ultimately settling in Milwaukee in 2010. He demonstrated his diligence, drive, and ambition early on, mastering his schoolwork and skateboarding with equal enthusiasm. He soon developed a passion for photography, filmmaking, and screen printing, often customizing his thrift-store finds with graphic fonts and evocative imagery. His upcycled wares attracted friends and a loyal social following, leading to the birth of Brema’s cult streetwear label, Unfinished Legacy.

Milwaukee Summers

Found wood with acrylic paint on canvas

Ashley

Acrylic and aerosol on wood

ARTIST

BRIAN HIBBARD

The Muse

Xylography (woodblock) print on fabric

$450

Inferno

Xylography (woodblock) print on fabric

$800

PRINTMAKER & ARTIST

CONHG LOPÉZ AUSENCIO

I express moments in time and culture through art to help others visualize. Art that goes beyond decoration.

SRH Sign

Aluminum and Wood

Celtic Stamps

Rubber Stamp with Laser (large format)

ARTIFICIERY

DANNY GRIMES

CNC, Laser, and 3D work for creatives and corporate folks.

PERSONAL HEALING GARDENS STUDIO

DENISE DEKEUSTER

Who doesn’t like playing in the mud as a kid?  I loved playing in my parent’s backyard gardens.  When I was 10, my mom took me to my first ceramic class.  I got my first lesson on a potter’s wheel at that time.  Sometime later my mom started teaching ceramics in the basement of our home.  While in my teens and early 20s, I was fortunate to have easy access to making ceramics any time I wanted.  

It was almost 30 years before I started doing ceramics again.  I went to a shamanic session.  Upon leaving I noticed a large pile of bagged clay.  The shaman, seeing I was interested in the clay, gave me a bag.  Not knowing what to do with the clay, I went to the gym to try to give it to my spin instructor, Tony Macias, knowing he was a potter.  After Tony found out I received the clay from a shaman (who he knew), he insisted that I keep it.  I asked if he gave ceramic lessons and he said yes. Who would have thought that I would find myself playing in the mud again? Today my ceramics are influenced by my degrees in geology and horticulture.  I found my love for plants and stones in my pottery.

I started some years ago by creating personal healing gardens (PHG) to help my family and friends with health issues or their search for love or abundance.  Each PHG pot is created from natural materials: moss, perlite, and cement (clay and limestone).  Mix it up with water and you get a muddy mixture!  I then add stones and crystals to the pot, each having specific metaphysical properties.  I would also add a plant symbolizing health, love, or prosperity.  All this energy gives each piece I create its special vibration.  

Today, I love creating pottery on the wheel and by hand.  I also love adding stones, crystals, and other natural materials to each piece.  I believe all-natural material generates energy.  I now create my pottery with the same intent, to help revitalize your energy.  And that’s how the name Personal Healing Gardens Studio originated.  

Sharing the energy….  Denise

Specialized Headshot

Portrait Session

Session in and out of the studio

$450-$1200

Specialized Headshot

Portrait Session

Session in and out of the studio

$450-$1200

PHOTOGRAPHER & VIDEO PRODUCER

ERIC PURDUE

Magpie

Screenprints, graphite, and walnut ink

$2,475 ($275, ea)

Hustler

Screenprints, vintage mirror and stool, steel rod and hardware

$3,000

Pond to Pulp

Graphite and walnut ink on BKK Rives

$400

PRINTMAKER

JESSICA MEUNICK-GANGER

Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books, and large-scale hybrid media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries regionally, nationally, and internationally. Her art is included in several private and public collections, including the Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Ripon College, Weisman Museum of Art, Saint Kate Arts Hotel, Northwestern Mutual, Target Corporation, and in contemporary publications, such as Andrea Ferber’s, Sustenance: Contemporary Printmaking Now, Richard Noyce’s, Printmaking Beyond the Edge, and Nathaniel Stern’s, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Art Education from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is currently the Area Head of Printmaking and Book Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an Executive Board Member of Anchor Press, Paper and Print.

ARTIST & PRINTMAKER

GREGORY MARTENS

Gregory Martens (b. 1959 Milwaukee WI, USA) grew up in the rural lake town of Muskego WI. His father was a salesman, bus driver, and avid Fundamentalist Christian. His mother was a factory worker, gardener, and craftswoman.

“My work in grad school was about the Apocalypse,  trauma narratives, and surviving cancer. We filled an entire gallery room with cancer-related art and it brought several people to tears.

Lately, I reach back to my teenage years when I would turn up the 8-track stereo and draw pictures all night just for the fun of it. I began again to draw hot rods, devils, skeletons, monsters, and other low-brow, blue-collar stuff, and now the artwork tends to make people smile.”

Martens has had several solo art exhibitions and has been in group shows across the country as well as international shows in Harbin, China, and Valencia, Spain. His work is in museums and private collections in the USA, Lima, Cuzco, and Puerto Moldonado Peru, and Beijing and Harbin, China. He authorizes two books: The Sketchbook of Gregory Martens, Waterhouse Press, Milwaukee 2017, and No Time Like the Present: The Art of Gregory Martens, UWM Press 2014.

Almost Spring

Welded and soldered steel, sewn fabrics coated with acrylic medium, painted pigments on wood base, 48"H x 34"W x 13"D, 2020

White Rabbit

Suspended Sculpture- Welded steel rod, Sewn acrylic coated fabrics, Acrylics, Metal Effects Paint. 8'L x 38"W x 5'H. Commissioned by Farmboy International Art Advisory, BC Canada. Created for Simeone Deary Design Group, BD|NY Trade Fair and exhibited at the Javits Convention Center, New York, NY, Nov. 2023.

MIX MEDIA SCULPTURE & PUBLIC ART

JILL KING

Jill King holds a Master of Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University. After completing her graduate studies in Milwaukee, she returned to her birthplace, Chicago, where she established herself as a professional artist. After over three decades in the Chicagoland area, love brought her back to Milwaukee. King's illustrious career features exhibitions and commissions at notable venues such as Chicago's Lincoln Park Conservatory, The Lorraine Morton Civic Center in Evanston, IL, and the Javits Convention Center, NY. Her art is featured in significant private and public collections, highlighting her substantial contributions to the art world. King believes in the transformative power of art, viewing it as a means to imbue spaces with meaning and enhance human experiences. Her creations reflect a deep integration of cultural, communal, and architectural elements, ensuring that her work is visually captivating and emotionally impactful. King's art showcases her diverse creative skills, combining quilting, painting, drawing, and welding. This blend of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary artistry is evident in her use of materials, juxtaposing sewn fabrics with steel to create textured and layered pieces. Her sculptures often symbolize life's journey and the passage of time, using motifs like a blooming rose, a cosmic nebula, or natural forces such as a hurricane over water. These elements evoke nostalgia, romance, and the transient nature of life, inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences.

PRINTMAKER & ILLUSTRATOR

JULIA SCHECKLE

Julia Scheckel is a printmaker and illustrator based in Milwaukee, WI. In college, she fell in love with printmaking due to its blend of illustration and her passion for working in the photographic darkroom. She obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Art with a concentration in Print and Narrative Forms from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2020. She is the Shop Manager for Anchor Press, Paper & Print. This non-profit is dedicated to running a community printmaking studio in Milwaukee, WI. Scheckel's most recent solo exhibition was held at Gallery 224 in Port Washington, WI to show the work that she completed during her year-long residency with the ARTservency program. Her first Solo exhibition was held in the summer of 2022 at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse, WI. It showed woodcuts and screenprints from the previous two years that explored how she connects friendships to a walk in the woods.

INSTALLATION

LILY ALICE LUFT

The past can be a complicated thing for anyone, and our ideas of it are held close to our chest. For trans people, the past has the potential to be quite troubling. Fragile Reconciliation engages my past through objects that alter and recontextualize old family photos I left behind when I transitioned. Each piece in the series reconnects with a specific aspect of my past and physically renegotiates that relationship. Like looking back at a photo album, the objects reshape my present, casting the past against it like a shadow.

This installation engages the viewer in the conscious reshaping of my past through careful process, material, and formal decisions. In some objects, such as Missed Chances, I cast pine rosin replicas of forms from my relationships with family members to create objects that warp with time and pressure. These metamorphic objects use the aesthetic and visual qualities of the amberlike rosin, in conjunction with photographs, to communicate the ways that these relationships have warped and been preserved. Other objects utilize mother of pearl to alter the visual quality of the photographs. Halcyon’s Carrion, a paired necklace and framed photo, uses paper-thin mother of pearl to both cast the faces of my family in a softer light, and create a sense of distance from them, as if they are behind a veil of smoke. Every object in the body of work is illuminated from below by a halo of soft light. This light alters and activates portions of each object, in some obscuring and in others revealing information that is only present when looked through, rather than at. As an installation it embodies how the past looms over my present, touching every part of it, and encourages viewers to question their relationship with their past.

Sea Drifters

Acrylic on Canvas 57x59

$3,500

Bottom Feeders

Acrylic on Canvas 54.5x46.25

$3,000

VISUAL ARTIST & PAPERMAKER

MARILYN PROPP

Raised in upstate New York, Marilyn Propp is an artist/educator whose recent exhibits include the Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta; MARN, Milwaukee; Rockford Art Museum, IL; Pearl Fincher Museum of Art, TX; Bellevue Arts Museum, WA; Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY; Kenosha Public Museum, WI; Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts, WI; LUX Center for the Arts, Lincoln, NE; Galeria AP, Universidad Veracruzana, Xalapa, Mexico; Columbia University School of the Arts, NYC; and DePaul Art Museum, Chicago. Her work traveled the country in "Pulped Under Pressure: The Art of Handmade Paper" from 2016 to 2024. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine; Brooklyn Museum Art School; Provincetown Workshop; and the San Francisco Art Institute’s pre-MFA program. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Residencies/Visiting Artist positions include Jentel, Wyoming; Cill Rialaig, Ireland; Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, and the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Propp has been supported through the Racine Art Museum Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Her work is in the collections of the DePaul Art Museum; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art; Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College; Summer Palace, Saudi Arabia; Amnesty International NYC; Old St. Patrick's Church, Chicago; Hallmark Collection and the AT&T Collection, Kansas City; and private collections throughout the U.S. She has taught at Carthage College Kenosha; Columbia College Chicago; the School of the Art Institute, Chicago; Loyola University; and has been a panelist/lecturer and has presented numerous papermaking workshops. In 1990 she co-founded Anchor Graphics, Chicago, a non-profit community-based printshop, which ran until 2015. After relocating from Chicago to Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2016, she reestablished it in Milwaukee as Anchor Press, Paper & Print.

MULTI MEDIA ARTIST

MELANIE ARIENS

Melanie Ariens is a multi-media artist, environmental advocate, and volunteer community coordinator with a diverse knowledge base and creative skill set that allows her to design and manage projects in an organized, creative, and upbeat manner. She is currently the Artist in Residence for Milwaukee Water Commons where she works planning and facilitating creative, water-inspired art experiences for local water leaders and community groups. Melanie received her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1992, specializing in painting, drawing, and printmaking, but has always enjoyed mixing it up and experimenting!

At Random Mural

Milwaukee, WI

Comfort Fuel Mural

Madison, WI

ARTIST

MIKE MCGUINESS

STUDIO ARTIST AND EDUCATOR

RACHEL DAVIS

Rachel Andrea Davis is a studio artist and educator from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Holding a Master of Arts from Kent State University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she is currently finishing her MFA in Intermedia and a Graduate Certificate in Non-Profit Management at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

She has exhibited work nationally and internationally throughout her career as an artist. Most recently, she participated in juried and invitational exhibitions at Athens Jewelry Week in Athens, Greece, and New York City Jewelry Week in New York City, New York in both 2018 and 2019. Other recent exhibitions include Art of Mind in Raleigh, NC; Statement Pieces in Pittsburgh, PA; SHAME in Wakefield, RI; 3rd Annual: The Egg Show in Oakland, CA; Schmuck/Schmock in Melbourne, Australia; and Materials Hard + Soft International Contemporary Craft Competition and Exhibition in Denton, TX. She was awarded the Juror’s Choice Award for So Fresh + So Clean Ethical Metalsmiths’ Student Exhibition in 2017 and is the current recipient of the Distinguished Graduate Student Fellowship Award from UW-Milwaukee.

ARTIST, WRITER, AND PRINTMAKER

RACHEL FOSTER

Rachel Foster is an artist, writer, and printmaker living in Milwaukee with an MFA from the California College of the Arts. Her work has been shown at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and Western Exhibitions, amongst others. She has been featured in the collections of the Ryerson Library at the Art Institute Chicago, ArtNow International, and The Museum of Contemporary Photography. She sits on the board of Anchor, Press, Paper and Print, Milwaukee’s community access print shop, and believes in supporting print education and opportunity.

Kosmic Owl Fae Leather Mask

Leather

$256

Dragon

Leather Mask

ARTISTS

SHANNON MORGAN

In the heart of a family of talented artists, my journey as an artist began with the guiding hand of my grandmother, who nurtured my love for painting at an early age. As a preteen, my mother's watchful eye honed my drawing skills, shaping my artistic foundation. Driven by a deep-seated passion for art, I pursued a degree in anthropology, expanding my horizons while continuing to explore the boundless realm of artistic expression. During my college years, I embraced various mediums and methods, unlocking new avenues for creative exploration. The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History provided a pivotal internship experience, igniting my passion for exploring the intersection of art and culture. Post-graduation, I immersed myself in an artistic multimedia ethnography project for the UCSC Anthropology department, while simultaneously managing production for a bridal jewelry company. It was during this time that my artistic journey took an unexpected turn. Inspired by my lifelong love for Renaissance Faires, I began crafting intricate leather masks, drawing upon my artistic background and my deep connection to the magical world of fairies.

The overwhelming response to my masks at Renaissance Faires across the country solidified my decision to dedicate my time and resources to this unique art form. For the past ten years, I have dedicated myself to refining my craft and pushing the boundaries of leather mask-making. Each mask tells a story, imbued with a sense of enchantment and wonder. I have experimented with new techniques, styles, and materials, constantly evolving and adapting my creative process. Relocating to Wisconsin in 2022, I joined the vibrant House of Rad art community in Milwaukee, where I now have one of my art workshops. This move reignited my passion for traditional visual art, leading to the creation of a captivating series of oil portrait paintings featuring my masks. My artistic journey has been a blend of exploration, experimentation, and deep-rooted passion. It is a testament to the power of art to transcend boundaries, inspire the imagination, and bring joy to others.

FRIENDS

CONNECT