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 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...

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...

"New Intersections: Form and Meaning in Design," the current exhibit in the Brooks Stevens Gallery at MIAD is, as it intends to be, completely fun and very provocative. As consumers, we may not always understand the aim of product design when we're shopping for everyday objects like toothbrushes and potato peelers, but on some level we do understand what attracts us to a product.

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."

An air of uneasiness lingers over the "Unmasked and Anonymous" exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it has little to do with the severe, antiquated faces gazing at you from beneath glass vitrines. Perhaps it arises from the sense of history compressed into a rather tight space; perhaps it's the nagging conviction that the body of contemporary work presented here is somehow ill-equipped to bear the weight of all this history. The exhibit brings together the work of contemporary Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann...

Molding clay into containers to carry water or food inspired the initial use of this humble art medium. Yet through the centuries the art of pottery had transcended the functional to become both a decorative and collectible fine art. A new exhibit at Villa Terrace displays pieces of Norse Pottery created during a relatively short period of time, from 1903-1913...

  An extraordinary collection of artists will appear throughout the Milwaukee area this weekend. In Brookfield, the third annual Hidden River Art Festival returns to the grounds of the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts...

  Photography has long held a unique place in art. Sometimes it's conceptual, sometimes it's journalism, and the lines between art and documentary are blurred. When done well, photography is powerful. By its nature, photography is always documenting something and a narrative is implied. Even if you know intellectually that you're being taken for a ride via the photographer's visual trickery, you are drawn in anyway. Seeing, after all, is believing, even if a photograph very artfully bends reality. You willingly suspend disbelief...

Joseph Sinness' cross-hatched pileups of vegetation, bouquets of felines and swaths of lace converge with Erika Olson's cascades of organic material to reinterpret the pastoral and the prosaic in "Garden Variety," the Armoury Gallery's fourth exhibition. Olson's gouache and graphite works on paper conflate the palette and restraint of Suzuki Harunobu's feminine woodcuts with the sensitive, stylized surfaces characteristic of Ert’s fashion illustrations.

Regionalism was all the rage among Midwest artists, especially in the years between the world wars. But in light of "Wisconsin Legendary Artists," a small but worthwhile exhibition focused primarily but not entirely on the first half of the last century, not all art from the Badger State could so easily be defined. The spread in style and content is wide among the paintings and works on paper in the exhibit.

When Richard Sennett published his provocative thesis on the diminishing boundaries between public and private selves in the late '70s, things like reality TV and the Patriot Act were unheard of. Today they're incontrovertible facts that have further breached this boundary.

To paraphrase Chicago's adopted art star and provocateur Jeff Koons, if his work doesn't reach viewers through the intellect, it'll grab them by the genitals. At the very least, the Museum of Contemporary Art's comprehensive survey of the artist's iconic sculptural works, new paintings and companion exhibit, "Everything's Here: Jeff Koons and his experience of Chicago," engage the viewer in myriad ways, not all of them prurient.

Vintage-ology: the study of all things from the past characterized by an enduring appeal or excellence. It's the byword that Fossil, a billion-dollar corporation that designs leather goods, watches and apparel, calls their "canvas for creativity and the soul of their brand." A new exhibition at the Eisner American Museum of Advertising and Design titled "Celebrating 25 Years of Fossil Vintage-ology" expands on Fossil's modern appeal and branding. Corporate Fossil began in 1984 as an importer and wholesaler of watches, but in 1989 they developed a branding based on '40s and '50s vintage products. The company then branched out into marketing eyeglasses, sandals, fashion . . .