One of Wisconsin’s leading artistic minds is making a nearby museum the de facto home for her works.
Artist and curator Michelle Grabner is donating more than 2,000 works – mostly comprising her own paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures – to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. The donation spans her three-decade career and also includes 300 works from her personal art collection and an archive of teaching materials stemming from her role as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Know somebody making an impact in Milwaukee?
Born in Oshkosh in 1962, the internationally recognized artist is known for her paintings, prints and sculptures that blend everyday craft with conceptual art, inspired by repetition and domestic patterns and objects. Grabner has works at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Milwaukee Art Museum – recall her hypnotic radial painting Untitled (2007). But the massive gift means JMKAC will become “the principal institutional home for Grabner’s work and teaching archives,” according to a press release.
Grabner’s relationship with JMKAC started in 2017 when she participated in its Arts/Industry residency, which lets artists create works in the Kohler Co. pottery and foundry and collaborate with workers. Since then, she’s acted as an advisor to the program and has been an exhibited artist and guest curator at JMKAC. When the Art Preserve opened in 2021, Grabner designed one of its artistic bathrooms, which features walls of tiles in plaid and gingham patterns. Most recently, she was a resident with Kohler Co.’s MakerSpace program, and the resulting works were shown in a recently closed exhibition at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton.
“This gift is so much more than the transfer of a remarkable body of work. It is an expression of trust built over years of relationship,” said JMKAC executive director Amy Horst in a press release. “To be chosen as the permanent home for an artist’s life’s work is an honor and a reflection of our mission. We’re grateful for Michelle’s confidence in us, and we’re committed to caring for these works in ways that keep them alive – through research, exhibitions, education and the countless conversations they’ll spark for years to come.”
In a statement, Grabner said, “I am deeply grateful to have my work enter the collection of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, an institution renowned for championing the power of regional imagination and its enduring influence on contemporary art.” She also cited the museum’s stewardship of works from former faculty of the Painting and Drawing Department at the Art Institute of Chicago as “meaningful.”
Michelle Grabner, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist and NORR COHAN, New York; Photo by Matthew Herrmann
Beyond her artistic practice, Grabner is the co-founder and co-director of The Suburban gallery in Walker’s Point and The Poor Farm, an artistic residency that places participants in a rundown historic building in rural Wisconsin. In 2014, she co-curated the Whitney Biennial in New York, the longest-running survey of American art. She was also named a Milwaukee Magazine Betty Award winner in 2021 and a Guggenheim Fellow.
“That Grabner is a Wisconsin artist with international significance makes this gift especially meaningful – it ensures that a practice with global reach remains rooted in the place that shaped it,” said JMKAC chief curator Jodi Throckmorton.
In the coming months, the Arts Center plans to catalog and research the donated collection, with an exhibition to be announced at a later date.
