September 11, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum in downtown Sturgeon Bay will will soon unveil two new exhibitions: the 51st Juried Annual, one of Wisconsin's longest-running juried visual art exhibitions, 
and Emmett Johns | Transcending Time, a solo exhibition of new abstract paintings and drawings. Both exhibitions open with a free public reception on Friday, September 18, 2026, from 5–7 pm, with remarks and awards at 6 pm. Light refreshments will be served and music will be provided by Craig Schultz. The 51st Juried Annual continues the Museum's longstanding tradition of surveying contemporary artistic practice from across the state. This year's exhibition was selected from 317 statewide submissions by a three-person jury panel consisting of Debra Brehmer, director of Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee and a longtime writer and curator; Cristian Andersson, curator of the Lawton Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and a practicing painter and performance artist; and Kimberly Burnett, a self-taught, Milwaukee-based realist painter. A total of $1,950 in cash awards will be presented at the opening reception, including three Special Merit Awards of $250 each, three Juror's Choice Awards of $200 each, the Gerhard Miller Award of Excellence ($500), and the Bonnie Hartmann Award for Outstanding Creativity ($100).
In jurying this year's submissions, several jurors were struck by shared threads running through the work. Andersson reflected on the exhibition as a counterpoint to an increasingly automated culture: "The work is a humanistic expression, the autonomous choice of the artist, amidst all of this noise of AI, an amalgamation of code and piracy."
Brehmer noted a recurring preoccupation among entrants with the idea of home—as shelter, memory, and refuge—while Burnett, reflecting on her own path from young museum visitor to juror, described the exhibition as evidence that "an artist's journey is a lifelong rearrangement."
"This exhibition is a testament to the strength and depth of creative practice in Wisconsin," said Suzanne Rose, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections of the Miller Art Museum. "For more than fifty years, it has provided regional visual artists with an important platform to share their work and contribute meaningfully to the evolving visual narrative of our region."
Emmett Johns | Transcending Time
Opening alongside the Juried Annual is a solo exhibition of new work by Emmett Johns, a regionally celebrated portrait artist and painter and whose abstractions draw on decades of practice at the intersection of Abstract Expressionism and Asian art and philosophy. For Johns, mastery is not a fixed destination but a willingness to begin again: each work starts with the deliberate act of setting aside what he already knows, allowing one intuitive mark to summon the next.
Johns' process unfolds like a kind of visual chess match—spontaneous, then reconsidered, gesture answering gesture—moving across ink journal drawings and larger, layered compositions alike. The results carry a musical quality, where density and open space work in tension, and a line's trajectory can remain visible to the eye even after the hand has lifted away. Rather than depicting subjects, Johns' abstractions aim for essence—an approach with roots in Zen aesthetics, where presence and honesty of mark matter more than description.
Transcending Time invites viewers into that same threshold of discovery, offering a body of work built not on certainty, but on the openness that comes from letting go.
Both exhibitions will be on view through November 7 at the Miller Art Museum, located at 107 S. 4th Avenue, Sturgeon Bay, WI 54235, inside the Door County Library in downtown Sturgeon Bay. Museum hours are Monday, 10 am–7 pm, and Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am–5 pm. Closed Sunday. Admission is free; an elevator provides access to galleries on the Ruth Morton Miller Mezzanine.