2023 Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist-In-Residence: Christopher T Wood

Christopher T Wood is an Artist, Designer, Educator, and ‘Pataphysician living in Milwaukee after spending time in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. The products of his studio are often ongoing series of works on paper, driven by a need to promote societal long-term thinking. Implementing collaborations with chance events and forces of nature, his work provides imaginary solutions to impossible problems.

He earned an MFA in Painting from Northern Illinois University and a BFA in Visual Communication Design with a focus on Illustration from Dayton University. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and serves on the Board of AIGA Wisconsin as the Chair of Design For Good.

Wood has taken his practice to artist residencies in Iceland, Ireland, and Maryland, and has exhibited his work internationally at institutions including The Woodmere Art Museum, The Barnes Foundation, James Oliver Gallery, Portrait Society Gallery, The Drawing Hub-Berlin, and the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, and he regularly presents visiting artist lectures on his research.

2022 Al & Mickey Quinlan Artist-In-Residence: Nicole Shaver

Nicole Shaver is a Milwaukee area-based multi-disciplinary artist who creates in her rural studio in Saukville, WI. She creates artwork that is inspired by ideas of place and belonging. She researches different geographical sites and employs them as metaphorical compasses to create landscapes combining reality, fantasy and memory. Her sculptures are geologically and industrially influenced; a conglomerate of natural and man-made, plastic yet polished, navigating a space between a banal rock and a sublime ruby. She is a recent finalist for the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists and currently serves as Operations Manager for the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN) where she manages key daily operations in support of all initiatives across the organization including the communications for membership correspondence and centralized information. She is committed to the artistic community in southeastern Wisconsin, regularly exhibiting and joining together area creatives. In addition to her work with MARN, Nicole is also an artist in residence at Studio 224, a collaborative printmaking and photography space in Port Washington. She is also a founding member of the Rural Midwest Artists Cooperative, a new group of Midwestern art folx organizing and exhibiting together.

Visit Nicole’s website to learn more about her time at the Dome House and Empirical Evidence of Escarpment, the work she completed during her residency.

2021 Al & Mickey Quinlan Artists-In-Residence: Amy Usdin & Ariana Vaeth

Amy Usdin is a Twin-Cities-based fiber artist. She reclaims vintage fiber nets as armatures for sculptures that speak to memory, nostalgia and the meaning of objects. She exhibits regionally and nationally with recognition including the 2019 Surface Design Award from the Surface Design Association’s International Exhibition in Print and a 2020 Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Most recently, her work has been featured as curatorial selections for online artist interviews with warp and weft magazine and through-objects.com. 

Ariana Vaeth is a Milwaukee-based artist whose work is focused on contemporary realism through the self-portrait. Raised in Baltimore, MD, the artist is a Graduate of MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design) and fulfilled an exchange program at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Following undergrad, she completed a studio-based Artist in Residence program at her alma mater. Vaeth has shown in Milwaukee at the Portrait Society Gallery, the Charles Allis Museum, and Haggerty Museum of Art as well as Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, and the Museum of Science and Industry for ‘Black Creativity.’ She is a 2017 Mary L Nohl Fellow in the Emerging Artist category and was an inaugural recipient of Fellowship.art, a grant and 12-week program modeled on Gener8tor’s recognized accelerator for creative entrepreneurs.