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‘The Nohl Dilemma’: further reflections on the Nohl
Fellowship Awards

By Debra Brehmer

This article is a follow-up to a previous piece on the Nohl
Fellowships. This issue has also garnered many reader
responses. Click here to read letters to the editor.

At the dawn of 2007, never, never would I have guessed that I
would awake at midnight one recent night, intently searching for
my dust-covered copy of Linda Nochlin’s Women, Art and
Power and Other Essays, which contains her 1971 essay, ”Why
Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Writing an art
history thesis on the Milwaukee artist Mary Nohl, had led me
many years ago to search for a theoretical understanding of
how an extremely intelligent, competent, motivated artist such
as Nohl could find no comfortable place for herself in a society
that did not allow older, single women to assert themselves
creatively or intellectually outside of the proper, established
channels.

For those who are unaware of her legacy, Mary Nohl graduated
from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1930s.
She spent most of her life in Fox Point, living in her parents’
cottage on Lake Michigan, where she transformed her home
and yard into an art environment. In summer, she would make
concrete sculptures outdoors. In winter she would paint, design
silver jewelry, create found-object compositions and carve
wood.

It was disheartening for me to have found a role model in Nohl
and at the same time run headlong into the fact that she
suffered for her interests. The problem was that Nohl did not
use any of the roles or guises society offered to define herself:
No husband, no children, no volunteerism, not even any
consumerism. She didn’t shop. She recycled. She defined
herself solely as an artist. The fact that she was a single
woman who lived alone made her existence suspect, in a way
that was not so different from the 17th century’s prejudice
against widows, midwives and single elderly women who were
subject to "witch" accusations.

Having long ago meandered away from overtly “feminist”
concerns as raising my old children and establishing myself as
a newly divorced single mother of three took precedence, I am
surprised to have landed back in the same intellectual dilemma,
a good decade later, with Mary Nohl, once again, leading the
way, now from the grave.

When Nohl died in 2001, she gave $9.6 million to the Greater
Milwaukee Foundation to fund artists and arts-related
programs. This was the largest single bequest the foundation
had ever received from a single donor. In my conversations
with Nohl in the years prior to her death, she had said that she
wanted other artists to have a bit of the good fortune she had
in life. She knew she was privileged to have inherited enough
family money to live her life making art on a full-time, daily
basis. Her extreme frugality was not out of cheapness but from
a creative and practical emphasis on using what was already
available. She saved her money and carefully oversaw her
investments to give it all away to other artists, as a sort of "pay
back" for what she considered her "luck." She also believed
wholeheartedly that there is no greater pursuit in life than the
creative cultivation of ideas.

It is with great irony, then, that the Fellowships for Individual
Artists, established from a portion of her bequest, have gone
almost exclusively to male artists over the four years of the
program. Each year, her fund awards three $15,000
scholarships to established artists and four $5,000 awards to
emerging artists. Of the 28 grants awarded, only five have
gone to women. For the past two years, no women received the
awards. This Fellowship ranks as one of the top five funding
programs for individual artists in the country. It can potentially
transform the Milwaukee art community by financially
supporting artists, staging exhibitions, exposing their work to
national curators and fostering a renewed sense of a
professional community here. Its importance cannot be
underestimated. But if the funding is primarily supporting the
careers of male artists, there must be a problem in the system
– somewhere.

Finding out where the problem lies is no easy task.

Whether this gender disparity stems from local issues of the
administrative or jurying process or from much larger and
deeply rooted national issues regarding the disadvantaged,
historical position of women or (most likely) a combination of
the two is an interesting and complex problem.

The first question people ask and the easiest one to answer is
whether women are applying in the same numbers as men.

Statistically, just as many women apply for the funding as men,
if not slightly more. (Minority artists do not apply
proportionately). In 2006 in the Established category, 33
women and 38 men applied. In the Emerging category, 37
women and 43 men applied. In totaling the applicants for all
four years, 313 women have applied versus 309 men. The
problem does not seem to be a lack of women artists.

When I asked last year’s three jurors about the problematic
result, they said it was an issue of quality. “As jurors,”
commented Nadine Wasserman, “we based our decisions on
the merit of the work presented to us. At the end of the process
our final decisions were unanimous.”

Another well-known local artist and writer, Tom Bamberger,
questioned whether “quality” was at the heart of the problem.
"The fellowships should be a matter of quality," Bamberger
commented. "Now that is obviously a very difficult and impure
concept. It's always going to be an argument, as it should be.
But say you convince yourself over time that the number of
great women and men artists in Milwaukee is not 50/50 (a
statistical improbability). If a semi-blind panel of men and
women kept selecting more men than women it could be that
there are more good men artists than women."

But if we remember anything from the feminist and queer
discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, quality is subjective and
vulnerable to the dominant trends and power structure of the
culture. "Quality" is a notion cultivated as much from fashion
and the imposition of a dominant aesthetic than some
detached, objective "standard." So let’s just clear the playing
field here and say one thing for sure: The lack of women
receiving funding is not an issue of quality.

So what is at the heart of this dilemma? The history of the fund
and its jurying process need to be understood first.

Polly Morris, Marketing and Development director at Peck
School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, set
up the program and serves as its volunteer administrator. She
did not establish the Fellowship program in conjunction with
UWM, but independently. UWM acts as the fiscal receiver while
also providing facilities for the jurying and exhibition space for
the winners.

Morris explained that when she had heard about the Milwaukee
Foundation receiving the bequest, she wondered, "What are
they going to do with this money?" Having founded Danceworks
and served as its administrator for 10 years, Morris was very
familiar with non-profits, arts funding issues and the struggle to
survive as a working artist. She herself had studied dance with
Merce Cunningham in New York, then went on to earn a Ph.D.
in social history in England. She moved to Milwaukee in 1987
when her then husband took at job at UWM’s history
department where she also taught as an adjunct.

Morris subsequently wrote a proposal to use a portion of the
Nohl fund to provide grants to individual artists. The annual
budget for the program was set at $120,000 to cover the
awards and all expenses, including an exhibition, catalog, jurors
fees and travel expenses, etc. Morris also established a
$10,000 annual "Suitcase" fund which provides travel expenses
for artists to attend their out of town exhibition openings or to
cover shipping expenses so they can pursue national or
international exhibition opportunities, which are very costly.

After researching possible ways to administer this funding,
Morris settled on the current system, which not only seemed
the most fair and impartial for the artists applying, but which
also provided a secondary bonus of exposing their work to
national curators who would serve as judges.

To apply for the funding, artists submit an application and
samples of their work, either as slides or digitally. They also
include a resume and artist’s statement. The fund is open to
anyone in a four-county area: Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee
or Washington.

Each year, Morris secures three jurors from outside of the
Milwaukee area. She does this through recommendations, her
own research and connections and by perusing a list of
national curators. "I talk to curators all year round all over the
country," Morris said. "The idea is to secure jurors who have
the ability to show the work of Milwaukee artists." Morris also
said she tries to represent geographic, gender, ethnic and age
diversity within the three jurors each year. Three of the four
years featured panels of two women and one male juror. "I
killed myself to put this group together," she said of the three
judges this year, "but what happens between the chemistry of
the three jurors can’t be predicted. The assumption that women
jurors would recognize and pick women’s work has not held up.
Women curators are as subject to the forces that govern the
art world as male curators and a lot of that has to do with
fashion."

Many people have suggested that artists be included as jurors
to broaden the perspective, but Morris believes that it is far
more beneficial to artists to have curators looking at their work.
Curators have the power to include artists in exhibitions and
further their careers. Even if an artist doesn’t receive an award,
the curator has been introduced to their work and may
remember them when working on a later exhibition. One would
also think that curators would have a more diverse perspective
on a range of art making styles, while an artist might favor work
within the same genre as their own. Introducing national art
curators to the Milwaukee art community is an indirect bonus of
the Fellowships.

Some people in the art community, however, argue that the
choice of curators is too narrow and only represents certain
interests in young, contemporary, academic artwork. And some
people suggest that some of the artists who apply for funding
are actually the ones recommending jury choices to Morris.
One example, cited several times, was the case of Nicolas
Lampert, who won a $15,000 Fellowship in 2005. In 2004,
Lampert had invited curator Nato Thompson of MASS MoCA to
Milwaukee as a visiting lecturer at UWM where Lampert
teaches. Subsequently, Lampert was included in a show at
Mass MOCA. The next year Thompson was brought to UWM as
a juror and Lampert was one of the three winners in the top
category. "Every year there are people who at least one of the
jurors knows, "Morris said, "They need to acknowledge the
relationship. It’s always out in the open."

The jurors arrive in town for an intense two days of work. They
first give a public talk about their respective institutions or
careers. The next morning, they gather to look at the
Established artist entries. Each juror is given a huge notebook
with all of the applications, artist statements, resumes and work
samples. The artists’ names have been deleted from the
materials, creating a "blind" process. The jurors shift through
the diverse work and review it many times to winnow down the
numbers. Eventually, they select five to seven finalists for
studio visits. Later in the day, they begin the emerging artists’
category. They pick 10 finalists from this group and then the
final four. Emerging artists do not receive studio visits. Former
winners are invited to sit in on the process and they are also
invited to dinners with the curators, with the intention of
solidifying relationships or possibly opening doors.

The second day of the jurying includes the studio visits where
curators meet the artists, see the work and ask questions.

Some artists have suggested that to eliminate the gender
problem the jurying system should not be blind and that gender
and ethnicity should be considered overtly. But the blind jury
process was actually created to protect artists from judgments
based on race and sex and is widely considered the more fair
approach.

If there is anything that could be changed in the current awards
system, perhaps there needs to be more diversity in the types
of curators brought on board. Institutions such as the Kohler
Art Center in Sheboygan, the American Craft Museum, smaller
venues such as the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, well-known
gallery dealers, art writers and theorists could be tapped as
well as an occasional artist who might offer a different point of
view. This seems like a part of the process that would not be
difficult to tweak.

The Illinois Arts Council also uses a blind jury process for its
awards, but it is configured differently than ours. Their concept
of “blind” is that no written materials are looked at during the
first round of the process. The Nohl process provides artist
statements and CV (with the names of the artists obscured). In
many cases, this written information could indirectly indicate the
gender of the artist. It could also be used as a crutch by the
curators: Artists who have exhibition records at certain venues
may gain instant credibility, no matter what their body of work
actually looks like during the review process. There is a lot of
money at stake here and the jurors may feel a need to rely on
external sources of validation for their choices. The Illinois
Council waits until the second round of the selection process to
look at additional submitted information, besides the work
itself. At the last stage, the jurors’ recommendations are
presented for final approval by the Illinois Arts Council. Perhaps
this “final approval” stage is where gender or ethnic
discrepancies might be amended.

According to Encarnacion M. Teruel, Director of Visual Arts, at
the Illinois Arts Council, an equitable and diverse outcome is
clearly part of their mission statement which calls for:
“Cultivating the arts in the lives of all Illinoisans through
responsive service to our diverse people and communities.”

The Illinois council uses juries of three to five arts professionals
who live out of state. The jurors are chosen on the basis of
their professional achievements and broad knowledge of the
arts to “represent a wide-range of artistic styles and aesthetic
concerns.”

The Wisconsin Arts Board uses a similar system and has not
had a problem of inequity. In 2006, two of its seven grants went
to women and in 2004, five of the seven grantees were women.
The first round of WAB reviewing is done without consulting
written documentation. The second round includes resumes
and statements, according to Mark J. Faire, Grants Programs
and Services Specialist.

Currently, the Nohl Fellowships tend to privilege young film,
installation or interdisciplinary artists, which reflects
contemporary trends in art practice. The Fellowships also favor
artists who emerge from UWM programs or who teach there,
with 19 of the 28 total artists receiving awards having some
UWM affiliation. Morris says this is to be expected. "The four-
county area is very limited," she said, "and most have some
affiliation. The UWM film department is a huge powerhouse.
The fact that several people from UWM have received the
award is no more than a commentary on the fact that UWM,
through its film and visual art departments, trains a lot of
artists.... and employs more of them than anyone else in town.
MIAD faculty and grads have been recognized regularly and
given that it’s a smaller school, this seems reasonable. I think
the high(er) success rate of faculty applicants reflects several
things unrelated to the process: faculty are conditioned to
apply for grants, and they have more experience applying."

An overall question that arises from ‘the Nohl dilemma’ involves
the notion of plurality. How "plural" is the art world on a national
or international level? We are under the impression that one of
the strengths of the contemporary art world is its openness to
form and idea. An "anything goes" global spirit in contemporary
culture perhaps provides an illusion of plurality. But, as
academicism has become an entrenched new requirement of
success in the art world, it seems as if the channels of
expression have narrowed, under the control of a few powerful
programs. The art world is actually a very small place with a
limited number of players. Perhaps what we are seeing with the
Nohl awards is evidence of the narrowness of this subculture.

One interesting trend that I noticed in the 2005 grantees was
not only the dominance of male artists, but an overwhelming
focus on male artists making work about the “male” condition:
Juan Juarez’s photographs of macho males from internet sites;
Nicolas Lampert’s war, machine, meat and bug collages; Fred
Stonehouse’s series of paintings featuring a male protagonist
in a context of gambling, drinking, and Catholic angst; Jason Yi’
s video about a father and his son on a camping trip; Matt
Rappaport’s video of big trucks coming and going; and
Stephen Wetzel’s science-oriented displays of things in glass
vitrines. Ironically, this very same panel of jurors was overheard
at a cocktail party after the jurying to ridicule some of the
entrants' work and decry any subject matter stemming from an
“ism” such as “feminism.”

If it’s comfort to anyone, women are also not rising to positions
of power in the business or science worlds. Half of the
undergrad science majors and more than a third of the
engineering students are now women at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. But studies show they receive less
research support than male colleagues and do not reach top
academic ranks in comparative numbers. We all know the glum
statistics of the art world: only 23 percent of the solo shows in
New York City last year were by women artists, etcetera,
etcetera. A New York Times headline from December: “Pay
gap widens for some women: Loss greatest among college
educated.” And also in the New York Times Sunday magazine
on December 24, an article about the current “resegregation of
childhood,” based on sex roles titled “What’s Wrong with
Cinderella?”

But statistics are boring. They only become interesting when
they actually take material form …as in the Nohl awards. Then
statistics become depressing, complex, seemingly immutable,
intractable.

Polly Morris is perplexed by all of this. She said she thought
that over time the numbers would even out, and perhaps in four
more years, they will. She cannot predict or affect the juries’
decisions and said that the results have been "troubling." "I’ve
watched it for four years and my conclusion is that if it were
simple to fix, we would have fixed it. "

One thing she has done this year is to schedule a series of
workshops to help artists understand the process and learn
what they can do to present their work in the best possible light.
Morris says she thinks that some women may not be presenting
their work as well as they should. "You need to think really
carefully about what that 10-slide performance looks like," she
said, "the quality of images can make a huge difference."

Artist Michael Julian who received an emerging artists award in
2005 sat in on the 9 hour jurying process this year. "Having
applied to a lot of juried competitions over the years " Julian
wrote in an e-mail, "I have learned how much luck is involved in
conjunction with the presentation of awards..." who the jurors
are, where in the long sequence of viewing slides your images
fall, whose work is viewed right before your own, what the
viewing conditions in the room are like, all have a lot to do with
final selections."

Julian called the jurying process "mind numbing." He said that
painters, both abstract and figurative, were passed over without
a moment’s consideration this year. "Good painting and
or/beautiful images aren’t going to cut it, nor will paintings as
singular events. If there isn’t the appearance of a larger
concept driving the work, that is to say, a concept larger than
the personal exploration of design, technique and a personally
favored motif, you don’t have much of a chance (as a painter
anyway)."

Julian feels that the Fellowships might be better awarded in
categories of painting, photography, video etc. But Morris says
it would be too complicated and the pool of artists is too small
for such divisions.

Morris says that one solution to the problem would be to
reconfigure the program to serve only women artists. Based on
Nohl’s personal history, Morris said, “I would have no qualms
putting the money into the women artists’ community. I think we
could justify it.”

One thing positive about this debate is that it has caused the
local art community to look at itself, its objectives, and has
forced a dialog. This fund for individual artists is now a lifeline
of the art community and must be supported, nurtured and
appreciated for its every dollar. Perhaps the solution to this
problem is actually rather simple: Write diversity into the
funding objectives, seek plurality in the judges and provide a
final approval process to amend the jurors’ decisions, should
the outcome be too homogenous.

People frequently ask: ‘What would Mary Nohl think of this?’
Truthfully, Nohl was so deeply engaged in the daily process of
making art that she didn’t pay much attention to politics. But
because this enormous gift of the Fellowships came from this
singular, extraordinary person, it would be a shame for
Milwaukee not to actively and consciously hold onto what Mary
Nohl stood for in her life.

Perhaps the Mary Nohl funding should directly shape itself
around the tenets of Nohl’s existence. We have no better role
model. Her body of work was interdisciplinary before there was
a term to describe the practice of utilizing diverse media. She
worked in installation long before the 1990s generations of
artists codified the practice. Her work was pluralistic,
environmentally sound, diverse, inspired, and forthright in its
insistence on the primacy of invention and articulation. And it
was done by a woman who studied art at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago at a time when her female classmates
either became teachers or married and stopped making art.
Nohl defied all statistics and conventions. She stubbornly
insisted that there was no better or more meaningful life than
that of an artist.

As she once said: “When I get an idea, I have a drive to do it,
and I don’t rest until I see how I can make it work. That’s the
story of my life.”

If the Nohl Fellowship program needs a philosophical center, we
need look no further.

Comments? Email debrabrehmer@susceptibletoimages.com

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