September 17, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum will host its final public program for the 2026 Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist Residency, celebrating the conclusion of resident artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera's residency and his artistic output in Door County. The event will take place on Friday, September 25 from 4:30 – 6:30pm at the Dome House in Sturgeon Bay.
Rodríguez Rivera, a Detroit-based artist, designer, and educator originally from Cataño, Puerto Rico, spent his residency producing an extensive series of natural prints using pigments extracted from locally sourced flowers and plant materials gathered from the grounds of the Dome House and the surrounding Door County area. Working with fragmented petals, handmade paper, and small batches of bio-plastics made from Lake Michigan water, he set out to explore how the Peninsula's freshwater ecology and seasonal conditions would shape both process and outcome—with a goal of producing over 1,000 prints and bio-plastic forms over the course of his residency, forming what he described as a "deconstructed garden" within the Dome House's circular architecture. The works developed during his residency will be incorporated into Becoming Post-Tropical, his ongoing installation project imagining a present shaped by absence, in which nature has ceased to exist yet persists as memory, residue, and fiction.
“We’re excited to welcome the community to the Dome House to engage with Juan Carlos and experience his installation,” said Elizabeth Meissner-Gigstead, Executive Director of the Miller Art Museum.
The program will take place at the Dome House, located at 5015 S. Cave Point Dr. in Sturgeon Bay.
The Miller Art Museum’s artist residency program was first launched in 2021 and is an application-based program that invites early to mid-career-level Midwest artists to Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula to reside for 8 weeks at the 5,073-square-foot Dome House and allows artists to focus in the areas of creative development, fellowship, sense of place, learning, and community.
The Door County landscape has long inspired artists of all disciplines visiting or residing on the Peninsula. The Miller Art Museum’s permanent collection reflects this history with over 1,500 works it holds, comprised of many of Door County’s most celebrated artists, past and present. Its Dome House Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist Residency seeks to further broaden this scope and allow a new generation of artists to discover and immerse themselves in the amazing creative playground that is the Door Peninsula.
2026 DOME HOUSE AL & MICKEY QUINLAN ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera (b. 1988, Cataño, Puerto Rico) is an artist, designer, and educator based in Detroit, Michigan. His work spans image-making, print, installation, and sculpture, constructing pieces that respond directly to the environments he inhabits, and explores diasporic memory and ecological vulnerability through speculative practices, material experimentation, and collaborative projects. Grounded in his Caribbean experience and diasporic identity, he embraces fragmentation, repetition, and soft destruction as core making methods that allow the environment itself to shape the work.
In 2025, in collaboration with Puerto Rican artist Claudia A.G.P., Rodríguez Rivera co-created Imágenes para futuros decoloniales: Continente antillano at Galería Francisco Oller, Universidad de Puerto Rico. His work has appeared at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, and Beta-Local, among other institutions. He has held fellowships and residencies including the Solid/Liquid/Gas Residency at Fallingwater, the Haystack Open Residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and a Bridging the Divides Fellowship through Hunter College and Princeton University, with grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Instituto de Cultura de Puerto Rico. He holds a BFA from Miami International University of Art & Design and an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and currently serves as Assistant Professor and Co-Coordinator of the Graphic Design Program in the Art, Art History, and Design Department at Wayne State University.