From May through August Wisconsin’s summer art festivals offer unique art experiences at exciting outdoor venues. Each festival becomes an imaginative blend of fine art, cuisine, and entertainment that makes the most of the balmy seasonal weather. Choose from this array of exceptional summer festivals for the pure pleasure of admiring the artists or adding to an art collection.

A collaborative performance and mixed media installation at UWM's Union Art Gallery, “Implosion: Cultural Integration and Transformation,” attempts to draw a through-line among disparate cultures using the lightning rod of religious iconography. Rather than focusing on Abrahamic, monotheistic religious expressions, artists Leandro Soto, Raoul Deal, and René Maldonado, in collaboration with Nigerian dramatist Awam Amkpa, ask viewers to consider the feminine roots of polytheism.

A new art gallery creates excitement by turning previously bare walls into vehicles for fresh, contemporary work. Following are some of the galleries that have recently opened or are set to open this week: Primum Marketing Communications opens an intimate gallery in its second-floor conference room at 400 E. Wisconsin Ave., Suite 2A. Currently on display is “American Industrial Art,” featuring found objects left over from the Beloit Corp. The exhibit presents reinterpretations . . .

The journey from Latin America to the United States, literally and metaphorically, echoes the journey of creating an expression of art. Both require an individual to cross barriers with courage and faith, allowing history, heritage, hopes, dreams and experiences to transform into physical realities. These dual expressions resonate through multiple mediums in the exhibition “Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: Faces Seen, Hearts Unknown: The Human Landscape of Migration.”

Public art surprises the senses, exhibiting the unexpected on streets and sidewalks. IN:SITE, an arts organization dedicated to encouraging Milwaukee neighborhoods to create temporary public art, fulfills this mission. Lauren Bandari, Amy Mangrich, and Pegi Taylor founded IN:SITE in 2005, and on May 3 the organization presents its latest round of installations in Sherman Park. Working with other community-based organizations, the IN:SITE committee holds forums to plan and determine the logistics and purpose of each public art project in the chosen neighborhood.

Migrating across a country’s border requires courage. While this journey inspires hope for an improved future, it also necessitates perseverance. Expressing these themes visually and creatively, the exhibition “Caras Vemos, Corazones no Sabemos: Faces Seen, Hearts Unknown, The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration” documents the fluidity between the Mexican-American border as well as the intermingling of both cultures.

Hollyhock House, a residence in Los Angeles that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for oil-rich heiress Aline Barnsdall in 1919, is not among the architect’s most celebrated works. Indeed, it belongs to what has been considered by some historians as a less illustrious, almost anomalistic period of his career. However, within the last decade or so, there has been a resurgence of interest in the building, culminating in an exhibit by the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs that includes the Hollyhock House drawings in its possession as well as photographs by Edmund Teske, a friend of both Barnsdall and Wright. Through June 15, some of these drawings and photographs can be seen at Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.

As the city emerges from winter cold, a host of young artists emerge during Spring Gallery Night and Day. The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) offers its senior exhibition featuring 145 design and fine art students. Exciting new Latino artists display their work at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, and the Hotcakes Gallery showcases another six MARN Mentor 2008 award-winners. MIAD’s “2008 Senior Exhibition” features the vividly colored paintings of Brad Conklin, Katie Donoghue’s combinations of photographs and light boxes, Benjamin Rothschild’s sculpted metal toys, Julia Schilling’s dye-on-metal drawings coordinating with cast aluminum sculpture, Boris Ostrelov’s interactive mixed-media pieces, and Colin T. Dickson’s 31/2 Miles to the Center of Somewhere.

The accessible, enticing collection of artwork in the exhibition “16 Women” pays tribute to women past and present at the intimate Grava Gallery inside the MarshallBuilding. The appealing variety of artistic mediums—everything from an altered book to an homage to mothers in bas-relief on a ceramic birdhouse—provides provocative feminine viewpoints. Curator Sally Gauger Jensen uses Prismacolor pencil with meticulous precision in her drawing Bay View Venus, a window mannequin exposed at Hairy’s Hair Bar. Gauger’s Venus stands barely clothed and slim, a modern version that references historical portraits of the mythological goddess. She shares the exhibition space with her niece, Karen Gauger, whose black-and-white photograph Hello Bolivia silhouettes hills and spacious landscape against a gray granite sky.

A full spectrum of colors—hues ranging from bright sunrise to muted sunset—awakens the imagination in an exhibition and special event at the Racine Art Museum (RAM) and the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) this weekend. In a premiere retrospective opening April 13, the RAM features the artwork of Earl Pardon, a painter, industrial designer and jeweler. The exhibition, “Earl Pardon: Palette Maestro,” reveals the expertise