June 12, 2026 – The Miller Art Museum will launch its summer exhibition season with two compelling solo exhibitions that celebrate wonder, whimsy, and the sublime. Opening June 27 and on view through September 12, 2026, Bee-cause, Why Knot? by Racine-based artist Bill Reid and Awakening Space by Door County artist Margaret Lockwood invite visitors to experience distinct artistic perspectives rooted in observation, imagination, and a deep connection to place. Together, the two exhibitions engage in a compelling visual conversation, exploring themes of transformation, interconnectedness, and the ways we experience and interpret the world around us. An opening reception with both artists will take place on Friday, June 26, 2026 at 5 pm. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served and music will be provided by Craig Schultz.
Bee-cause, Why Knot? Features the work of Bill Reid––artist-in-residence at The Prairie School in Racine––who is recognized internationally as “one of the leading fabulists in a fabulousy world.” He has been making painted steel sculpture for over 30 years. An attendee of the Tulsa Welding School in Tulsa, OK, Reid has his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, MO, and his MA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, MI. Reid’s lively and animated work has been featured on television programs, including Milwaukee Public Television’s The Arts Page, and in numerous group and solo exhibitions. His work is included in private and public collections such as the Cornell Institute of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, and the Racine Art Museum.
The exhibition is a career retrospective spanning nearly five decades of an artist who has spent a lifetime bending reality through playful delight. Reid writes, “My process of working is elemental; using only a few hand tools and the heat of an oxyacetylene torch, I build my creatures out of thin sheets of metal and steel rods. Even as a young boy, I was drawn to the siren call of fire. Like a detective, I turn on the heat until the steel talks. After construction, the painting process brings the work to life. Painting has become an increasingly important aspect of the work. My sculptures are built around stories and word-play.”
Viewers are invited to step into the sublime through the exhibit that encompasses pinhole photography, in situ miniature dioramas documented in nature, narratively rich paintings, and metal sculptures that hang, roll, wind, and animate––including works never before seen. Reid’s menagerie of creatures moves across the full spectrum of human emotion, from intimate two-dimensional scenes to larger-than-life, almost fourth-dimensional absurdities.
“Like the dodo bird of long ago, I have come to represent things that do not exist. My sculptures require us to erase our perception of what is, and ask ourselves what could Bee?” Reid continued.
Reid’s work absorbs cultural anxieties and returns them as wonder—filtered through humor, tenderness, wordplay, and mischief. The make-believe world he constructs feels, somehow, truer than reality itself.
Awakening Space features the work of Margaret Lockwood, and traces more than five decades of a practice defined by quiet discipline and a steady pursuit of the sublime––one that draws from memory, landscape, and lived experience, and invites the viewer into quiet contemplation. Lockwood came to painting through her informal training in weaving, later earning her Master of Fine Arts in painting from Fontbonne University in Missouri. That foundation––an understanding of structure, rhythm, and the patience required to build surfaces through layering––never left her. Her work steadily distills, allowing atmosphere, color relationships, and softened form to emerge as its primary language, unfolding across many phases, each creating a universal destination, awakened.
Lockwood grew up in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago then went to Miami (of Ohio) University. Graduating with a degree in social work, she worked with families and children in need before getting married and moving to St. Louis to raise her family. When painting became her medium of choice in 1994, it led her to founding Woodwalk Gallery in Door County. All her paintings begin in a real time and place but then she works and reworks the images with many layers until the paintings can be any time and any place. She is a recipient of the Door County Master Artist award, the Milwaukee Women’s Professional Dimensions Sacagewea Award, the Wisconsin Arts Association Triennial exhibit in Madison and other awards and exhibits throughout the Midwest.
Though distinct in approach and visual language, Reid and Lockwood share a commitment to transformation as an act of seeing.
Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Suzanne Rose says, “Reid’s whimsical narratives reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary, collapsing the boundaries between fact and fiction, while Lockwood’s atmospheric compositions dissolve the familiar into spaces of reflection and possibility.”
Together, their work explores how meaning emerges through attention––whether directed outward toward the awes and absurdities of the natural world, or inward toward memory, sensation, and perception. In conversation, the exhibitions invite viewers to consider the interconnected nature of experience and reflect on the seen and unseen, the tangible and ephemeral, the playful and profound.
“Each artist offers a unique pathway into wonder, reminding us that the world is continually shaped by the ways we choose to observe, imagine, and inhabit it,” Rose continued.
Bee-cause, Why Knot? and Awakening Space will be on display in downtown Sturgeon Bay through September 27 in the museum’s main galleries and second floor Ruth Morton Miller Mezzanine.
EXHIBITION-RELATED PROGRAMMING
Artist Talk | Bill Reid
Saturday, June 27 | 2 pm
Join us on June 27 as artist Bill Reid sits down in conversation with Curator Suzanne Rose where he takes us behind the make-believe world of Bee-cause, Why Knot—sharing the ideas, instincts, and lifelong commitment to invention that have shaped his nearly five decades of work across pinhole photography, miniature dioramas, painting, and animated metal sculpture.
Artist Talk | Margaret Lockwood
Friday, July 17 | 5 pm
Join us as artist Margaret Lockwood sits down in conversation on Fri., July 17 with Miller Art Museum Curator Suzanne Rose, tracing the quiet, deliberate journey behind Awakening Space––from her early foundation in weaving to more than five decades of painting that draws from memory, landscape, and lived experience. Lockwood shares the discipline, intuition, and layered sensibility that have guided her steady pursuit of the sublime, and invites us into the atmospheric world of color, form, and feeling that defines her work.