Five artists, including Nina Ghanbarzadeh and Roy F. Staab, have won southeastern Wisconsin’s prestigious prize for individual artists, the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship.
Each year, the Nohl Fund gives two established artists $35,000 and three emerging artists $15,000 each to create new work or complete work in progress. The funds, given in memory of the late artist Nohl, are unrestricted.
Each artist also will receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget.
The 21st annual competition drew 147 applicants.
The five winners, all based in Milwaukee, will participate in a Haggerty Museum of Art exhibit planned for 2025.
Winners in the established artist category:
- Visual artist Nina Ghanbarzadeh draws on geometric and biomorphic patterns, colors, and textures of her Persian cultural heritage. She emigrated here from Tehran in 2001 and earned her BFA in painting, drawing and graphic design from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2013. Her artwork “This Is Written From Right to Left” was best-in-show winner of the 2020 Wisconsin Biennial. She also is the founder of ARTKEE Educational Toys.
- Sculptor and installation artist Roy F. Staab uses natural materials to create ephemeral, site-specific artworks around the world in Europe, Asia and the United States. “Staab wants it both ways, a mixture of the wild and man-made,” Graeme Reid wrote in a review of Staab’s “Shadow Dance,” installed in 2016 on the grounds of Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. “Both ideas are woven into his sculptures, which are suited to their sites yet at odds with them.”
Winners in the emerging artist category:
- Writer, director and producer Justin Goodrum has created a short documentary on mental health disparities in Milwaukee’s Black community as well as the short film “The Stigma of the Durag,” which was presented on Milwaukee PBS’ “Black Nouveau” in 2023. He is working on “One Minute Remaining,” a feature-length documentary about the social and economic burden of incarceration on women.
- Photographer Jovanny Hernandez Caballero creates work about cultural heritage and identity. He is a first-generation American and a descendant of Mixtecs, a group of Indigenous people in Mexico. His photography documents both Milwaukee’s south side and his family’s native Oaxaca, Mexico. A UWM graduate, he is a photojournalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
- Painter Nicholas Perry, a UWM graduate, makes “figurative paintings that are built of art-historical influences, personal photography, and other visual languages,” he wrote in an artist statement. “Nicholas uses portraiture to investigate ideas such as sincerity, obsession, isolation, and anxiety,” the Nohl jurors declared.
Finalists in the established artist category included Mike Gibisser, Mariah Tate Klemens, Kim Miller and Kyle Seis.
Finalists in the emerging artist category included Amal Azzam, Asher Imtiaz, and Matthew Vivirito.
This year’s jurors included Allison Glenn, an independent curator and writer from New York; Misa Jeffereis, associate curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and Anisa Olufemi, independent curator and fellowship manager, Hamiltonian Artists, Washington. The jurors came to Milwaukee for a public talk and studio visits with the 12 finalists.
The Nohl Fellowship program is funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and Joy Engine, and administered by Lynden Sculpture Garden. It is open to artists who live in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties.
Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, who died in 2001, left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation to support local visual arts and education programs.
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