August 21, 2026 – The Miller Art Museum is pleased to announce Lauren Semivan as the September featured artist in its ongoing 12 x 12 Project, an invitational series spotlighting contemporary artists from Wisconsin and the greater Midwest. On view September 1 through 30, the exhibition features a selection of photographs from Semivan's False Twilight series.
Working with an early twentieth-century 8x10 large-format view camera, Semivan constructs temporary studio environments where drawing, painting, and found objects converge. These environments exist only long enough to be photographed before they are dismantled, transformed, or reincorporated into subsequent work—resulting in photographs that construct spaces where abstraction and representation coexist, guided as much by time and intuition as by intention. False Twilight takes its name from an astronomical phenomenon: the fleeting interval before dawn when the atmosphere catches light before the sun itself appears, illumination whose source remains unseen. Within Semivan's carefully constructed environments, that same threshold unfolds—photographs that do not seek to be solved, but inhabited, suspending not disbelief or reality, but certainty itself.
While rooted in traditional analog photography, Semivan’s process extends seamlessly into a contemporary digital workflow. Each image begins as an 8x 10 sheet-film negative before being scanned, where only minimal post-production adjustments are made. The finished photographs are produced as archival inkjet prints, preserving the extraordinary detail and tonal richness of the original negative while utilizing the precision, scale, and permanence afforded by contemporary digital printing.
The public is invited to celebrate the exhibition's opening with an artist talk and reception, featuring a conversation between Semivan and Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Suzanne Rose on Saturday, September 12 at 4pm.
“In an age conditioned by speed, Lauren’s work asks for the rarity of sustained attention,” says Rose. “The longer we remain with these photographs, the more they unlock our imagination, deepening our awareness of nuanced color and the energetic nature of gesture.”
August 14, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum in downtown Sturgeon Bay is pleased to announce an upcoming workshop, All the Things a Flower Can Become, led by 2026 Artist in Residence Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera. The first of two consecutive workshops, the program is set to take place Saturday, August 22 from 2 – 4 pm at the Dome House. REGISTER HERE.
The workshop takes its premise from a question Rodríguez Rivera has been considering in his recent work: what would one do if faced with the last bouquet of flowers in the world? Participants will each receive one or two flowers and spend the afternoon experimenting and exploring acts of observation, documenting, archiving, imagining, and transformation—dissecting, preserving, inventing, and seeing what unexpected results bloom along the way. The workshop is designed to embrace open-ended inquiry, inviting reflection on color, varied botanicals, pigment, and our future.
The workshop builds on Rodríguez Rivera's ongoing series of work, Becoming Post-Tropical, which explores material transformation, ecological vulnerability, and diasporic memory through natural pigments and organic materials sourced from the Door Peninsula landscape.
"I am increasingly interested in how different landscapes, sites, and spaces can be engaged as sites of translation and creation, where memory, material, and environment intersect to produce new forms and new visuals," said Rodríguez Rivera. "This workshop is an extension of that thinking—an invitation for our community to slow down and notice."
Rodríguez Rivera (b. 1988, Cataño, Puerto Rico) is an artist, designer, and educator based in Detroit, Michigan, whose work spans image-making, print, installation, and sculpture. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University. His work has been supported through 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.
August 7, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum in downtown Sturgeon Bay is pleased to announce the launch of its 2026 Dome House Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist Residency Program with artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera, whose whose work explores diasporic identity, ecological vulnerability, and community-rooted storytelling through site-specific installation and design. The program will launch with an Opening Celebration and Meet the Artist event on Saturday, August 15 from 4 - 6 pm. This event will take place at the Dome House and is free and open to the public.
Rodríguez Rivera, who goes by Juan Carlos professionally, brings to the residency a practice shaped by his roots in Cataño, Puerto Rico, and by years of site-specific, community-engaged work exploring identity, memory, and the future of the archipelago. During his residency, he will continue developing new work that reflects on place, belonging, and the narratives left out of institutionalized history.
"The Dome House residency offers a critical opportunity to expand my ongoing project, Becoming Post-Tropical, in close dialogue with a northern environment shaped by fresh water, seasonal change, and geological erosion. My goal is to explore how the Door Peninsula landscape informs my material experimentation," said Rodríguez Rivera.
Rodríguez Rivera holds an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute in New York and a BFA from Miami International University of Art & Design. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the Department of Art and Art History at Wayne State University in Detroit, where his teaching spans typography, graphic design, and design history. His work has been exhibited and supported through fellowships including the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and SFMOMA, and he is a former Mellon "Bridging the Divides" Fellow at CENTRO, developing a project reimagining the traditional Puerto Rican school workbook to surface overlooked narratives from the island's history.
July 30, 2026—The Miller Art Museum has announced the jury panel for its 51st Juried Annual, one of Wisconsin's longest-running juried visual art exhibitions. Submissions are currently open through Friday, August 21, 2026, and this year's three jurors will review entries from across the state to select the works featured in the exhibition this fall. This year's jury panel includes:
Debra Brehmer is the director of Portrait Society Gallery, a contemporary art space she founded in Milwaukee in 2008 known for spotlighting emerging, self-taught, and under-recognized artists. A writer and art historian with a master's degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Brehmer previously served as an editor at the Milwaukee Art Museum and founded Art Muscle, an influential Milwaukee arts magazine. She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic and teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. Brehmer brings more than two decades of curatorial and critical experience to the panel, along with a sharp eye for artists working outside conventional paths.
Cristian Andersson is a painter, performance artist, and curator of the Lawton Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, his alma mater. He has led the gallery since 2024, shaping a program of roughly seven exhibitions a year that showcases student, faculty, and regional, national, and international artists, and works to connect the gallery's programming to the concerns and landscapes of Northeast Wisconsin. As both a practicing artist and curator, Andersson brings a maker's perspective alongside an institutional eye for how work resonates with a broader public.
Kimberly Burnett is a self-educated, Milwaukee-based contemporary realist painter working primarily in oils and charcoal. Her work has been featured in Wisconsin's Own, an annual juried exhibition of the state's top contemporary artwork, as well as at the Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison. A member of Wisconsin Visual Artists, Burnett draws on classical influences and a self-directed studio practice, offering the panel a working artist's perspective grounded in technique and craft.
July 24, 2026 - The Miller Art Museum is pleased to announce the opening of its latest exhibition in the 12 x 12 Project, which features Milwaukee-based multimedia artist Lois Bielefeld. The exhibition will be on view in downtown Sturgeon Bay from August 1 through August 31. The public is invited to attend an Artist Talk with the artist on Saturday, August 1 at 4 pm. A public reception will follow the talk and is free and open to the public.
Featured in Lois Bielefeld | 12 x 12 Project is a portion of their ongoing series, To Commit to Memory. Developed over the past several years, the work centers on Bielefeld's parents and the home that has shaped their shared history. It began with a recurring morning ritual: the artist's mother, an Evangelical Christian, reciting passages of Scripture from memory while holding a plank position. Rather than treating the gesture as an anecdote, Bielefeld approaches it as a system of meaning through which belief is practiced, embodied, and carried forward—tracing how memory resides not only in recollection, but in the body, the home, and the repeated actions that organize everyday life.
Through portraits and house studies on view in the exhibition, along with video works accessible via QR codes, Bielefeld approaches family not as autobiography but as a site of investigation. Domestic artifacts and lived spaces function as interconnected forms of evidence, raising questions about how photographs participate in constructing memory rather than simply preserving it.
Collaboration is central to the project. The portraits—carefully orchestrated reenactments of lived experiences—are built through negotiation between artist and subject. Rather than resolving difference, the work occupies the space where opposing beliefs continue to coexist within a shared act of making. As Bielefeld's parents age and caregiving becomes part of the exchange, the project gains an added dimension without shifting its central inquiry: time becomes visible, and looking is transformed from passive observation into an act of presence.