Become a 2008/09 MARNmentee!

To strengthen the network of support for artists, provide in-depth professional resources and to contribute to the health of Wisconsin's arts community, MARN has created MARNmentors specifically for visual artists, literary artists, filmmakers and arts administrator in the Milwaukee area. MARN will act as a liaison between established working artists and administrators and those who are pursuing a career in the arts. Fourteen established artists with a track record of professionalism and who have a desire to pass on their knowledge to developing artists, have been selected as Mentors.

MARN and its Mentors believe it is essential to Milwaukee's art community that we cultivate relationships among our artists, and provide opportunities that encourage emerging artists to stay and work in Milwaukee. We are looking for highly motivated Mentees to participate in this program.

Being picked as a mentee you...

• work with one of the most respected artists in the state
• get into all the MARN workshops for a year for free
• get a free MARN membership for a year
• are guaranteed a spot in the final Mentor / Mentee exhibition at Walker's Point Center for the Arts
• gets you and your work published in the MARNmentors catalog
• are added to a group of past and present mentors and mentees that meet to critique their art

Deadline to apply is July 25, 2008, please submit:

• One page letter of intent
  • information about you and your work
  • what you'd like to get out of MARNmentors
• 10 visuals or samples of your work
  • Ideally this would be a CD or DVD of images and/or video
• a CV or Resume

Send to MARN, P.O. Box 713, Milwaukee, WI 53201

Questions? Contact Melissa Dorn Richards, melissa(at)marnonline(dot)com or 414/433-1900. There is a $100 fee for MARNmentors, due upon acceptance to the program. Scholarships and payment plans are available.

Additional Important Information

• Preference will be given to residents of Milwaukee County
• Mentors choose which mentee they would like to work with
• You may specify which Mentor(s) you would like to work with in your letter of intent.
• There are 4 full scholarships available
• Payment plans are available
• The $100 fee includes admission to MARN's 2008/09 Workshops and a Membership to MARN

THE VISUAL ART MENTORS

Santiago Cucullu was born in 1969 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives in Milwaukee. He received his M.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1999 and his B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. In addition he was a resident at the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Recent solo projects include exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; INOVA, Milwaukee; Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; and Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago. Group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney Biennial; How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Fresh: The Altoids Collection at the New Museum for Contemporary Art.

Waldek Dynerman is a professor in the Fine Arts Division, where he has taught drawing, printmaking, and painting since 1983. He works in wide range of media including painting, works on paper, and sculpture. He was the recipient of Milwaukee County Fellowship in 2001, and he showed his work in over sixty group and solo exhibitions in U.S. and Europe.

Lane Hall is a multi-media artist who currently teaches experimental narrative in the English Department at UWM, where he is a full professor. Within book, web and print formats he works with relationships between image and text and how meaning is made through narrative structures. His site-specific artwork often focuses upon animal subjects that occupy ambivalent places in culture: insects, reptiles, micro-life and vermin. These installations have been exhibited at the the Brooklyn Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Block Museum at Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon's Miller Gallery and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

Anne Kingsbury has been a lifelong artist and has acted as Executive Director for Woodland Pattern Book Center since 1979. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board, a grant from the Milwaukee Artists Foundation and an artist's fellowship from Art Futures. Kingsbury's work in mixed media has been featured in many publications, and she has participated in over sixty major exhibitions. She is currently attempting to bead an entire deer hide with journal entries starting with 1979.

Dara Larson is an Associate Professor of Art and Chairperson of the Aesthetic Engagement Ability Department at Alverno College. She teaches printmaking, fibers, papermaking, artist's books, contemporary topics in art and international studies courses to Spain and Mexico. Her work at the college included participation in the United States Department of Education Grants in Latin Studies and Peace and Conflict Studies. Larson relies upon the experiential elements of travel study to inform the content of her teaching and studio practice. She has lectured and studied in Europe, South America, Central America, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In July 2008, Larson will exhibit and lecture at the Saitama Museum of Modern Art in Japan with other artists from the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors Wisconsin Saitama Art Exchange.

kathryn e. martin is an Associate Lecturer at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (UWM) and part-time professor Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) where she teaches 2D, 3D, and Basic Drawing to Foundation and Pre-Art students. She received a BFA in Sculpture and Art History from MIAD and an MA and MFA from UWM in InterMedia Studies. martin has exhibited extensively, in solo and group shows throughout the United States, focusing on the observation of banal objects. In her site-specific, large scale installations, martin concentrates on objects’ formal characteristics and makes instinctive, yet calculated decisions to dissect, interpret, re-assemble, repeat, and change inherent functions to make visible the invisible. In addition to studio and gallery based work, martin has worked in the realms of Public Artist, Exhibition Designer, Visiting Artist, Artist’s Assistant, and time manager.

Kevin Miyazaki is a photographer that does both commercial and personal work. At the heart of Miyazaki's photographs are the themes of memory, family history and architecture within society. He focuses on what lasts physically and emotionally in our view, and the ever-changing value of place in our memory. Current projects include documenting abandoned fast food restaurants and the reuse of Japanese American internment camp buildings. Miyazaki works commercially as magazine photographer.

Josie Osborne is a mixed media artist and printmaker living and working in Milwaukee. She is Director of Arts Alliances and Advocacy at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, where she worked with nationally recognized programs and led an annual art trip to New York. She exhibits her work regionally and nationally and is in many private collections. She was recently selected for a fellowship to Fundacion Valparaiso, an artist residency in southern Spain. Her work as an arts administrator has served and supported thousands of K-12 students, teachers, community members, alumni and college age art/design students. She received her MFA in graphics (printmaking) from UW-Madison and has a BA in art history and criticism and a BFA in drawing and painting from UW-Milwaukee.

John Riepenhoff's practice integrates the roles of an artist, curator, and art fair organizer. He runs several curatorial projects including the Green Gallery, the John Riepenhoff Experience, and is a cofounder and organizer of the Milwaukee International art fair. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Riepenhoff is committed to a local and international dialog through his art and his programing. He received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts.

Robert Smith is an award-winning photographer who discovered the joy of photography as a young boy. Using a camera given to him by his parents Smith recorded his family. Years later, one of those photographs would be exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum. It was a harbinger of work to come. He earned his Bachelors degree from Williams College and studied at the Milwaukee Center for Photography. Smith has worked as a commercial photographer, part-time teacher and was a long-time faculty member at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. His personal projects concentrate on family and landscape. Smith's work has been exhibited at Benham Gallery, Washington; Bucknell University, Pennslyvania; The Center for Fine Art, Colorado; Elaine Erickson Gallery, Wisconsin; Haggerty Museum of Art, Wisconsin; Hood Museum, New Hampshire, The Houston Center for Photography, Texas; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin and Meridian House, DC.

Pegi Taylor is the co-founder and chair of IN:SITE, an organization fostering temporary public art in Milwaukee County since the spring of 2006. IN:SITE curates, manages, promotes, and maintains installations, so a mentee would have a chance to engage in all these activities. In addition, Taylor is also founder and co-producer for the Performance Art Showcase, highlighting Southeastern Wisconsin performance art talents since 2004. For November of 2008, Taylor is co-producing My Vote Performs, where there will be performance art at twelve polling sites on Election Day. Depending on the interests of a mentee, s/he could be involved in one or both projects. This is a first of its kind in the nation project!

For both projects, a mentee would have a chance to participate in very public art. Taylor works freelance out of her home. The mentee would have regular meetings with Taylor at either her home or a coffee shop, and most communication would take place via email and phone.

Richard Taylor is a nationally represented artist, having exhibited most recently at the OK Harris Gallery, New York and the Tory Folliard Gallery, Wisconsin. He is also represented by galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago, Michigan and Minneapolis. His work has been featured in shows at the Tuscan Art Museum and the Navy Pier Show as curated by Dave Hickey. He is well known for his public art works, which can be found throughout Milwaukee. As artist-in-residence at Quad Graphics from 1987 to 1999, he designed and built large, abstract murals for Quad Graphics plants located all over the world. His studio is in Riverwest.

Fahimeh Vahdat is an Associate Professor of Painting and Printmaking. Her work in installation and mixed media art has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at venues in Naples, Italy and Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as Washington, D.C. In addition to exhibiting her own work, Vahdat is active in both the arts and educational communities, presenting in international conferences, curating exhibitions and jurying shows. Vahdat's work has received significant attention, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller and Andy Warhol Foundation Grant for New Forms. A native of Iran, Vahdat experienced displacement and religious exile as the revolution broke out in 1979 in Iran, first relocating to England and then to the U.S. Vahdat received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Jason Yi studied sculpture the University of Georgia (MFA 1995) and architecture at Virginia Tech (B Architecture 1988). He has exhibited nationally and internationally in places such as New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Italy and Austria. His most recent video exhibition at Gallery Korea in New York was curated by Melissa Chiu of the Asia Society Museum, Barbara London of the Museum of Modern Art and independent curator Yu Yeon Kim. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Kamiyama Museum of Art in Japan, Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles and the Edward F. Albee Foundation in New York. His awards include Mary L. Nohl Foundation Fellowship and Kamiyama Artist in Residence Fellowship. In 2006, he was selected as Milwaukee Artist of the Year by the Milwaukee Arts Board.

Rina Yoon is an Associate Professor in Printmaking at MIAD. She works on a large-scale using collagraph technique, a non-traditional intaglio process. Her images address ideas of memory and identity, the conflict between past and present selves, and the desire to resolve this tension. Yoon is represented by the Elaine Erickson Gallery, and has exhibited throughout the country, including the Katherine D. Murphy Gallery in Minneapolis.