Community Calendar

Throughout the month of September, a collection of works by local artist and retired librarian, John Suess, is on display at the New Berlin Public Library (15105 W. Library Ln, New Berlin).

The exhibit, which is free and open to the public during the library’s normal business hours, features 20 of Suess’ original paintings. Pieces included in the show are a variety of florals and a grouping of landscapes, many of which are based on local vantage points. Several paintings showcase beautiful autumn scenes, featuring bright oranges, yellows, and reds just in time for the upcoming fall season. One of those is a brand-new piece entitled, “And So It Goes,” which will make its debut at this show.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Suess, 75, has always had a passion for art. He began drawing and painting at the age of 3. After high school, he pursued a degree in commercial art at Milwaukee Area Technical College, but realized he was more interested in fine art instead. He eventually transferred to UW-Milwaukee where, after a brief stint in the Army Reserves, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in ancient history and a master’s degree in library science.

Suess spent the next 34 years working in the Milwaukee Public Library system, with the majority spent at MPL-Central in the science and business department. There, Suess met his wife, Mary, who is also a retired librarian.

Since retiring in 2007, Suess has devoted his free time to playing golf, working in his award-winning garden, taking photographs and…painting. Since his retirement, Suess has produced over 150 works of art, many of which he has sold, or gifted to family and friends.

Suess works primarily in acrylics and occasionally oils, and describes his style as impressionist, tonalism and color field, with some realism. His favorite subjects are landscapes, especially local scenery.

“I find my inspiration outdoors. While working in my garden, playing golf, or taking a walk or drive, I will often be captivated by the beauty of nature and stop to capture it with my camera. Then, I’ll make it come back to life on canvas,” Suess said.

Suess has also completed several commissioned works. In 2019, Suess was commissioned by his parish, Christ King, to produce works in celebration of its 80th anniversary. The largest of these paintings, Christ the King, a 30x40 acrylic on gesso board, is on permanent display on the southeast wall inside the church, while four others capturing the local church’s iconic steeple as viewed during each season, are on display in the vestibule.

Suess’ other recent showings include the North Shore Library this spring; Menomonee Falls Public Library and the Creative Edge Art Gallery in Twin Lakes last winter; the Park People Gala in November; public libraries in Mequon-Thiensville, Greenfield, Cudahy and Wauwatosa; County Parks, where a selection of his work featuring local golf courses was showcased in the clubhouses of courses such as Dretzka, Currie and Hansen; and Redline Milwaukee, where Suess was featured as part of the Modern Landscape exhibition in 2018.

“I’ve loved having the chance to display my art in various locations for local communities to enjoy and I’m grateful to the New Berlin Library for giving me the opportunity to bring my paintings to a new part of town. After the last couple of years we have all had, it is nice to be able to visit places and interact with others again. It’s long overdue and I hope many will check it out,” Suess said, interjecting a little of his librarian humor.

The exhibit, located in the library’s lobby, is free of charge and is open for viewing during the library’s normal hours of operation, which are as follows: Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday- Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sundays, 1-4 p.m. The library is closed for the Labor Day holiday this weekend, Saturday, September 2 through Monday, September 4 and will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, September 5.

Suess’ complete collection can be viewed on his website at JohnSuessFineArt.com and fans can follow him on Instagram and Facebook. Many of his pieces are available for sale on Etsy but visitors to the library’s exhibit can enjoy special pricing on the works included in the show by contacting John directly via his website.

Kea Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for creating the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she built in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982, with the intention of making it her home.

For decades prior, she had collected salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, she built the Ark on an empty lot; it was still unfinished when the city condemned it in 1987. Unable to find a new location, Tawana dismantled her ship in 1988. She spent the decades after the Ark’s destruction traveling, eventually settling and dying in Port Jervis, New York.

The Arts Center recently acquired the contents from her small apartment there, which included about thirty handmade boxes containing collaged and tied “encyclopedic files” and personal effects; Tawana’s blueprints for utopic, unrealized building projects; handmade stained-glass windows; and hundreds of sketches and manuscripts.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream represents the first museum show of Tawana’s work, and the first exhibition outside of the northeastern United States. Many of the objects are on view for the first time. It recontextualizes her work and life in several ways, including her long-running and largely unknown roles as architect, community activist, historian, educator, and craftsperson.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/kea-tawana-i-traveled-into-the-future-in-a-dream/

Image: Kea Tawana, untitled, n.d.; glass and wood; 21 x 17 x 1/2 in. Kea Tawana’s work presented in cooperation with PCK Media, Gallery Aferro, and the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University.

In her 2021 essay “A Family Reunion Near the End of the World,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplates our kinship with nature and proposes a road map for deepening our care and respect for all living things.
“Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when we realize that we have a common future, that our fates are linked.” She goes on to suggest, “Real kinship comes when you live it. It’s not a noun, but a verb, it’s not a thing, it’s what you do.”

The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.

Artists in the exhibition include Juan William Chávez, David Freid, Lindsey French, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Nina Katchadourian, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, William Wegman, and Dyani White Hawk.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/sharing-the-same-breath/

Image: Emilie L. Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021; polystyrene foam, aluminum pipes, papier-mâché, epoxy resin, and acrylic matte medium. Courtesy of the artist and Mother Gallery. Photo: Ronald Amstutz.

As a storyteller, Patricia Piccinini gathers information from scientific research and current events to envision genetically and physically adapted organisms. These creatures, predominantly constructed with fiberglass, silicone, and hair, are geared for survival against human impact and rapidly changing environmental conditions. The creatures’ reconfigured bodies and new survival mechanisms hint at possibilities of new earth-dwelling species, modes of resilience, and evolutionary potentials in response to our changing Earth/home.

Inspired by local ecosystems, a life-size diorama constructed with recycled materials shelters Piccinini’s sculptures. The diorama is accompanied by a film following the journey of a human animal and a fictional Earth being walking through landscapes from Piccinini’s home of Australia.

Piccinini’s work illustrates scenes of mothering, fear, and alertness. Her depiction of recognizable physical and emotive mannerisms offers viewers the chance to connect with the sculptures, possibly inciting responses such as empathy, disgust, and fear. The sculptures’ mammalian bodies and expressions reduce the option for dissociation; any discomfort that may arise is that of making eye contact with an unfamiliar relative.

Patricia Piccinini, A Tangled Path Sustains Us (installation view, Hosfelt Gallery, 2022). Courtesy of the artist and Hosfelt Gallery. Photo: Miles Petersen.

The West Allis Farmers Market offers a wide variety of seasonal produce, fresh meats and eggs, honey and maple syrup, fresh-cut flowers and annual plants, and prepared foods. Our 2023 season will start May 6 and end November 25, 2023. Each year the Farmers Market is open from the first Saturday in May through the Saturday after Thanksgiving. We are open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to 6 p.m. and on Saturdays from 1 – 6 p.m. Please note we are closed Thanksgiving Day.

We open later in the day to allow the farmers to bring only the freshest produce, picked that morning, to the market.

It's the ultimate trivia mashup: Quiz by Geeks Who Drink, fun & games by Dave & Buster's. The ultimate trivia party is finally here. Geeks Who Drink and Dave & Buster's have teamed up to bring you the Dave & Buster's Trivai Show. It's a whole new format that combinest he super-social Geeks Who Drink trivia night with all the frenetic game-show action you'd expect from Dave & Buster's. Get ready for pop culture-centric trivia where winners receive Power Cards. In between rounds, join in on the physical challenge fun for bonus prizes - or just gawk at the people who do. All in all, it's two hours and it's free to play. No reservations needed, just show up! Teams can be up to six players, so bring your smartest friends (or some likable dummies)—or come solo. We can always help you join a team!

Throughout the month of September, a collection of works by local artist and retired librarian, John Suess, is on display at the New Berlin Public Library (15105 W. Library Ln, New Berlin).

The exhibit, which is free and open to the public during the library’s normal business hours, features 20 of Suess’ original paintings. Pieces included in the show are a variety of florals and a grouping of landscapes, many of which are based on local vantage points. Several paintings showcase beautiful autumn scenes, featuring bright oranges, yellows, and reds just in time for the upcoming fall season. One of those is a brand-new piece entitled, “And So It Goes,” which will make its debut at this show.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Suess, 75, has always had a passion for art. He began drawing and painting at the age of 3. After high school, he pursued a degree in commercial art at Milwaukee Area Technical College, but realized he was more interested in fine art instead. He eventually transferred to UW-Milwaukee where, after a brief stint in the Army Reserves, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in ancient history and a master’s degree in library science.

Suess spent the next 34 years working in the Milwaukee Public Library system, with the majority spent at MPL-Central in the science and business department. There, Suess met his wife, Mary, who is also a retired librarian.

Since retiring in 2007, Suess has devoted his free time to playing golf, working in his award-winning garden, taking photographs and…painting. Since his retirement, Suess has produced over 150 works of art, many of which he has sold, or gifted to family and friends.

Suess works primarily in acrylics and occasionally oils, and describes his style as impressionist, tonalism and color field, with some realism. His favorite subjects are landscapes, especially local scenery.

“I find my inspiration outdoors. While working in my garden, playing golf, or taking a walk or drive, I will often be captivated by the beauty of nature and stop to capture it with my camera. Then, I’ll make it come back to life on canvas,” Suess said.

Suess has also completed several commissioned works. In 2019, Suess was commissioned by his parish, Christ King, to produce works in celebration of its 80th anniversary. The largest of these paintings, Christ the King, a 30x40 acrylic on gesso board, is on permanent display on the southeast wall inside the church, while four others capturing the local church’s iconic steeple as viewed during each season, are on display in the vestibule.

Suess’ other recent showings include the North Shore Library this spring; Menomonee Falls Public Library and the Creative Edge Art Gallery in Twin Lakes last winter; the Park People Gala in November; public libraries in Mequon-Thiensville, Greenfield, Cudahy and Wauwatosa; County Parks, where a selection of his work featuring local golf courses was showcased in the clubhouses of courses such as Dretzka, Currie and Hansen; and Redline Milwaukee, where Suess was featured as part of the Modern Landscape exhibition in 2018.

“I’ve loved having the chance to display my art in various locations for local communities to enjoy and I’m grateful to the New Berlin Library for giving me the opportunity to bring my paintings to a new part of town. After the last couple of years we have all had, it is nice to be able to visit places and interact with others again. It’s long overdue and I hope many will check it out,” Suess said, interjecting a little of his librarian humor.

The exhibit, located in the library’s lobby, is free of charge and is open for viewing during the library’s normal hours of operation, which are as follows: Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Friday- Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Sundays, 1-4 p.m. The library is closed for the Labor Day holiday this weekend, Saturday, September 2 through Monday, September 4 and will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, September 5.

Suess’ complete collection can be viewed on his website at JohnSuessFineArt.com and fans can follow him on Instagram and Facebook. Many of his pieces are available for sale on Etsy but visitors to the library’s exhibit can enjoy special pricing on the works included in the show by contacting John directly via his website.

In a new multiroom installation, artist Andrea Chung confronts the legacy and trauma of slavery from the perspective of an Afrofuturist utopia.

For this work, Chung activates the possibility of a new world, a “Black Atlantis” called Drexciya, to subvert the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Drexciya is an underwater world populated by the amphibious offspring of women thrown from slave ships during the Middle Passage. It was conceived by the eponymous and enigmatic electronic music duo active in Detroit in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Image: Andrea Chung, Filthy Water Cannot Be Washed, 2017; cyanotype and watercolor; 88 x 240 in. Courtesy of the artist.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/andrea-chung-if-they-put-an-iron-circle-around-your-neck-i-will-bite-it-away/
Chung’s installation is a meditation on the laws of Black physics. It highlights the ways Black people relate and respond to time and space in order to navigate a world full of dangerous and harmful systems. Within her evocation of this watery realm we can inhabit imagined pasts, presents, and futures to craft alternative realities forged by liberation, adaptation, resilience, defiance, and survival.

Kea Tawana (c. 1935–2016) is known for creating the Ark, an 86-foot-long, three-story ship she built in Newark, New Jersey, starting in 1982, with the intention of making it her home.

For decades prior, she had collected salvaged wood, glass shards, and other materials from abandoned buildings in the city’s Central Ward. Incorporating those materials, she built the Ark on an empty lot; it was still unfinished when the city condemned it in 1987. Unable to find a new location, Tawana dismantled her ship in 1988. She spent the decades after the Ark’s destruction traveling, eventually settling and dying in Port Jervis, New York.

The Arts Center recently acquired the contents from her small apartment there, which included about thirty handmade boxes containing collaged and tied “encyclopedic files” and personal effects; Tawana’s blueprints for utopic, unrealized building projects; handmade stained-glass windows; and hundreds of sketches and manuscripts.

Kea Tawana: I Traveled into the Future in a Dream represents the first museum show of Tawana’s work, and the first exhibition outside of the northeastern United States. Many of the objects are on view for the first time. It recontextualizes her work and life in several ways, including her long-running and largely unknown roles as architect, community activist, historian, educator, and craftsperson.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/kea-tawana-i-traveled-into-the-future-in-a-dream/

Image: Kea Tawana, untitled, n.d.; glass and wood; 21 x 17 x 1/2 in. Kea Tawana’s work presented in cooperation with PCK Media, Gallery Aferro, and the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University.

In her 2021 essay “A Family Reunion Near the End of the World,” botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer contemplates our kinship with nature and proposes a road map for deepening our care and respect for all living things.
“Being a relative,” she writes, “is more than shared blood from a common past. Real kinship arises when we realize that we have a common future, that our fates are linked.” She goes on to suggest, “Real kinship comes when you live it. It’s not a noun, but a verb, it’s not a thing, it’s what you do.”

The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.

Artists in the exhibition include Juan William Chávez, David Freid, Lindsey French, Emilie Louise Gossiaux, Nina Katchadourian, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, William Wegman, and Dyani White Hawk.

https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/sharing-the-same-breath/

Image: Emilie L. Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, 2021; polystyrene foam, aluminum pipes, papier-mâché, epoxy resin, and acrylic matte medium. Courtesy of the artist and Mother Gallery. Photo: Ronald Amstutz.