Through Jan. 18, 2009, seven winners of the 2007 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship awards exhibit their work at Inova/Kenilworth. The gallery has been newly expanded to include the splendid "Black Box," a windowless addition for video and film. Gallery Director Bruce Knackert and curator Nick Frank have patiently whipped Inova into shape. All that's needed now is an exhibition budget of decent proportions. Nohl Fellowship winner Mark Klassen offers a minimalist installation based in fear: terror on a New Jersey toll plaza, the possibility that an airbag will detonate when least expected, a sign emblazoned "Call Police Help!" Each scaled-down tollbooth is hand-built and painted icy-white. Directly overhead, faux fluorescent lights suggest an autopsy arena...

Video and video installation artists occupy the hazy gray zone between cinema, sculpture and performance art. By virtue of the medium's immediacy, accessibility and historically cheap aesthetics, video artists are saddled with the task of clearly defining their work outside the realm of mainstream and even avant-garde cinema. According to the show's curator, Andrea Inselmann, the video artists of "Stop. Look. Listen." explore three types of relationships: artist to mainstream cinema, sound to image, and the mirror relationship between the viewer and the body as subject. And while these themes...

After 18 months of renovation, the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) reopened the American Collections Galleries in grand style on Oct. 23. In collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that collects antique American furniture and ceramics, organizers coordinated curators and decorative arts collections to redefine the galleries and attempt to inspire awe and curiosity among visitors. Constructed on the MAM's lower level, the six galleries-the American Furniture Gallery, Hidden Dimensions, Loca Miraculi: Rooms of Wonder...

a new exhibit at the Haggerty Museum of Art, titled Stop. Look. Listen: An Exhibition of Video Works, more than a dozen international video artists challenge societys perceptions of reality. This scaled-down exhibition designed for the Haggerty traveled from the Herbert F.

A boy and girl stand back to back, arms crossed, in Michael Foster's three-panel oil painting titled Siblings. The body language gives viewers an immediate sense of psychological tension. Clouds of dissension in the background symbolize the stalemate between the 13-year-old boy and his 10-year-old sister, both fixed in their stances. More than 15 oils on panels and two charcoal drawings are included in the current exhibition "Michael Foster: Transitions" in the Ploch...

By presenting the essence of the environment surrounding her, Susan Diehl's meditative artwork reveals the innate beauty of the world. Employing techniques used by the Russian Impressionists-an inspiration she attributes to mentor Ron Lukas-Diehl overlays her images with thick impasto strokes of oil pigment. Yet the valuable treasures she unearths surface more clearly in her figurative work and miniature paintings. The title of her exhibition at the Charles Allis Art Museum, "Big and Little, Here and There," aptly describes the extensive...

This weekend's Gallery Night and Day takes a visual cue from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center's "Messages & Magic" exhibit, showcasing collage and assemblage works that piece together remnants of and references to modern life.

Katie Musolff, a 2004 graduate of Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, stakes her name on her award-winning oils. Her near-life-size portraits capture the unique persona and soul of her subject in masterful strokes, but a recent personal experience led her to redirecting the focus of her art and her life. This reevaluation of her subject matter and primary medium infuses her upcoming exhibition "Drawn from Life," which opens on Gallery Night at the Elaine Erickson Gallery, located on the first floor of the Third Ward's Marshall Building.

Were it not for memory and the visible onset of age, man might easily infer that he lives an infinite and unvarying existence. After all, isn't each day more or less indistinguishable from the last, bearing the fruit of yesterday and the seed of tomorrow? Perhaps, as Delacroix said, the role of art is to give value and substance to the passing of time, to interrupt the terrifying monotony of our days with glimmers of understanding. A new exhibit at Milwaukee Art Museum titled "Act/React" reveals the weightlessness that art engenders by erasing all memory of itself...

Unconventional but fascinating displays at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) feature fragments of photographs, remnants of mass-media images and found objects imprinted with the identifiable marks of popular culture. These bits and pieces scavenged from society comprise complementary exhibitions that explore the theme "Pieces of the Whole."