On, Wisconsin!: Learning from the Badger State’s Art Museums By Steven Rosen (This first ran in Cincinnati CityBeat, 9-23-09) A recent trip to Wisconsin reaffirmed for me the exciting correctness of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s efforts to build collections in Folk/Outsider Art and Contemporary Crafts. This year, the museum has displayed work from two new collections — Chicago collector Robert Lewis’ Outsider Art and Cincinnati collectors of Contemporary Craft Nancy and David Wolf. Next, of course, it needs to find a way to show such work permanently, possibly in a new building that is an art/architectural statement in itself. Activities in Wisconsin, especially in cities along the Lake Michigan shore, reflect some bold ways to do that. They also reveal the national interest in Folk/Outsider Art and Contemporary Crafts — especially those created by Ohioans. I had never heard of ceramist Jack “Ohio-boy” Earl until I saw his work at the impressive John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, one of the nation’s top museums for such work. It’s about an hour north of Milwaukee. The arts center is separate from but has historic connections to nearby Kohler Co., which makes kitchen and bathroom plumbing fixtures and tile and stonework. Turns out that Earl, a university-trained artist from northwest Ohio, has a long history of accomplishment in often-autobiographical, offbeat and often-humorous figurative ceramic work. He was one of the artists-in-residence at Kohler Co. way back in 1974. His pieces were part of the museum’s 15-artist American Story exhibit, which also featured established, trained painters like Cuban-refugee Expressionist Jose Bedia as well as Outsider (or Visionary) artists like the late Hawkins Bolden, a blind man who constructed “scarecrows” out of scrap. Racine — about an hour south of Milwaukee — has a modernist, downtown art-museum building that opened in 2003 and is devoted to the museum’s specialization in Contemporary Crafts.
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On Wisconsin: The Badger State’s Museums Feature Ohio Art
