May 29, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum is pleased to present Adam Fulwiler | 12x12 Project, on view June 1 through June 30, 2026 in downtown Sturgeon Bay. Fulwiler is the first artist featured in the museum's newly launched 12x12 Project, an invitational exhibition series highlighting contemporary artists working across disciplines throughout Wisconsin and the greater Midwest. Conceived as an intimate platform for focused presentations of new work shaping the evolving regional art landscape, the series reflects the museum's ongoing commitment to contemporary practice while expanding access to the larger art dialogue taking place throughout the Midwest. An artist talk with Fulwiler will take place on Saturday, June 13, 2026, at 4 pm, with a public reception to follow. The talk and reception are free and open to the public. No registration required.
The exhibition features recent paintings by Wisconsin artist Adam Fulwiler, whose work examines communication, perception, improvisation, and painting's capacity for transformation through abstraction. At the heart of his work is the relationship with his younger brother, who experiences the world through the heightened perception of autism. Rather than describing that experience directly, Fulwiler translates it through a personal language of color, shape, rhythm, and spatial tension—constructing paintings that honor the extraordinary sensitivity through which his brother perceives life. A road trip the two shared in 2019, during which his brother cataloged the passing landscape with meticulous, equal attention to every object and detail, became a defining moment within the work.
Drawing on the influence of Josef Albers's understanding of color as a relational force, Fulwiler's compositions use chromatic interaction, provisional grids, repetition, and spatial fragmentation to create visual systems that shift through sustained looking. Improvisation plays a central role: Fulwiler often employs games, puzzles, and self-imposed rules within the studio, allowing structure and spontaneity to coexist. The resulting paintings move with the cadence of jazz, balancing repetition with interruption and harmony with dissonance.
His recent Stack works—shaped in part by playing blocks with his young son—explore gravity, instability, and the emotional tension between balance and collapse. Fragments of painted material are layered, sewn, and reconstructed into surfaces that recall quilting, mapping systems, architecture, and musical notation. Across the exhibition, abstraction becomes a language for navigating sensory experience, memory, and human connection.
ABOUT ADAM FULWILER
Adam Fulwiler received his BA in Painting from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and his MFA in Painting from the University of Arkansas, where he was awarded the 2022 Windgate Foundation Accelerator Grant. His work has been exhibited nationally and is included in the collections of the Walton Performing Arts Center, Walmart Home Office, and the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. Fulwiler currently serves as Executive Director of the Hardy Gallery in Ephraim, Wisconsin. The exhibition will be on display in downtown Sturgeon Bay through June 30, 2026.