Seeking Color | Museum of Wisconsin Art

Feb 15 2025

10:00 am - 1:00 pm | More Information Here | Register HERE

Join me at MOWA as we explore the Living Studio approach of Seeking Color – a growing collection of interdisciplinary practices aimed at inviting our creativity into dialogue with the other-than-human world.

Seeking Color prioritizes intuition over analysis; a peripheral blur over direct clarity, with the aim of uncovering the next big idea. Together, we will compose a workspace that encourages our multifaceted exploration of color. We will pay special attention to color’s ethereal nature, and how seeking it has a tendency to bring us face to face with vibrant life, transformation, and mysterious pools of inspiration.

“Cassette Canopy” installation for KASE + R.A.T.M.A.N (and friends) at the Ivy House

Photograph by Ethan Sorge

February 17, 2024
The Ivy House
Milwaukee, WI

@kase__music @r_a_t_m_a_n_ @knowsthetime @maalynapoleon @janehan20 @saxblak - along with each vibrant spirit that crushed it on the mic, & every luminous being making up the crowd. Look at how @theivyhousemke transformed with us

Cassette Canopy Installation at the Ivy House

Melting Faces with Jamie Breiwick, Ted King-Smith, and Emmitt James

Jordan Lee, John Christensen, Ted King-Smith, & Maaly Napoleon

You are a Living Studio
Your practice takes the shape of the vessels that make you feel welcome.

Take your studio with you as you navigate the world

Riverwest Pigment Walk with Celeste Contreras
Environmental Influence

The site specificity of your living studio matters in the way we transform matter. This is an ornament that grew out of a change in studio. To learn more about this project, explore here
Elements of a Living Studio

There are reoccurring elements in artist workspaces that feel especially alive.
Collaborative Resonance

Those who collaborate within your living studio give you the gift of the impact of their participation. Documentation is the gift that keeps on giving.

ARTServancy Exhibition at Gallery 224

I spent a year chasing around spectral color, holding still for hours listening to the trees speak, gazing into the darkness of the living night, and watching the great river of time flow and change like an ephemeral pond. Forest Beach Migratory Preserve speaks a powerful creative dialect - the so-called “Language of the Birds” that my friend and collaborator @coedouglass is often on about. The ecstatic hum of this place revealed that it was a living studio, one that inspired many photographs, writings, and brushes. Some of these creations have taken shape as an exhibition @gallery224 , and others have grown into a little book that will soon be available as a limited run.

Please join us for a gallery reception on Saturday, September 30th, from 6:00-7:30pm. Enjoy an evening of art & conversation in downtown Port Washington.
Drinks & light refreshments will be served. The exhibition is up now through the month of October (2023).

Gallery 224

STUDIO ECOLOGY

Saint Kate's Inaugural Artist in Residence

Studio Ecology

This Studio is Alive

This studio is a composition. It draws us in through light and shadow, sound and color, movements and rhythms, and as we make our way through the gallery doors we enter an ecosystem of creative potential. This space is in a constant state of transformation, like a healthy forest.

Studio Ecology is about offering our attention to the living community within an artist’s workspace and creating compositions out of endless combinations of tools, techniques, ideas, and collaborators. This studio invites you to alter your perception. Surround yourself with the elements of mark-making: the tools, the media, and a multitude of surfaces. Grind colorful rocks into dust so that we might paint fantastical visions of the living world that produced such vibrant color. Gather paint brushes from the natural world suspend them in windows to cast slow dancing shadows of an ancient technology.

“This studio is alive” is the spell that has been cast over the space, a conceptual atmosphere of encouragement. “This studio is alive” is an expression of gratitude, as spending time in such a space is a great privilege and inspiration. With every creative soul who makes an offering of their time and attention to this living studio, the composition grows into this unique Studio Ecology. We welcome you to participate in an ongoing process of mark-making and idea-sharing with artist-educator, Jeff Zimpel, as he inhabits The Saint Kate’s AIR Space.

"Chosen" is by Brit Nicole, the Sheperd Express's author of the year of 2022. The film was directed and produced by Johnson Media Consulting for 414 Day. Thank you to Imagine MKE and sponsor MKE Theatre District. Thank you to every creative flickering flame featured - it’s a wonderful gift to be included with you.

Studio Ecology: This Studio is Alive

Tending Tomorrow Podcast

Episode Description | Nov 2022 | 48 min 20 sec

In this episode of Tending Tomorrow, Coe and I welcome our very first guest, artist - educator - and, as he puts it, multi-hyphenate identifying Milwaukeean, Jeff Zimpel. We talk about the role that ritual plays in making art and practical reverence. Our conversation ranges from art and architecture, to education and ecology, an old-timey bellows as an act of performance art, and much more.

Please note: The Saint Kate Arts Hotel has extended Jeff's Studio Ecology into a yearlong residency that will culminate in August of 2023, with The Living Studio Conference. Keep an eye out for more on this event.

Places we talk about in this episode Arts at Large in Milwaukee, WI Forest Beach Migratory Preserve in Port Washington, WI Artservancy in Port Washington, WI St. Kate Arts Hotel in Milwaukee, WI References we discuss in this episode Garrison Institute, dir. 2021. The More than Human World with David Abram. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. First Paperback edition. Minneapolis, Minn: Milkweed Editions. “On Slowness – Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects.” https://twbta.com/and-also/on-slowness/.

The Painter’s Mark Collection

The Painter’s Mark Collection is a growing archive of artists’ marks suspended in resin. Currently, it’s comprised of contributions by a diverse population of painters from in and around the Greater Milwaukee Area, along with my own experiments in paint. The archive is a response to two driving questions:
What does paint do? & What does a mark reveal about its maker?

The Painter’s Mark Archive is a call to look more closely, appreciate more intensely, and feel inspired to reassess our relationships with earthly material.

Learn More

An Ecology of Marks

An Ecology of Marks is an exhibit that begins with a celebration of the power of paint, that shifts into an exploration of the variables of mark-making, influenced by the natural world. Earth pigment paints tell us stories of place, brushes wash up on the shores of Lake Michigan, and non-traditional surfaces encourage divergent approaches to composition. Every person is a mark-maker in multitudes, yet we have much to learn from marks made by the animate world around us. Artist Educator Jeff Zimpel brings together a wide-range of mark-makers to amplify and document the hope embedded within any given mark.

Above: Video created by Wm. Spencer Tait during the closing night celebration. Happenings curated by my collaborators and me - such a vibrant collection of mark-makers.

Artist-in-Residence

Screen Shot 2021-05-16 at 1.22.30 PM.png

Cohort MFA THESIS EXHIBITION
April 23, 2021 - May 14, 2021
INOVA Gallery at Kenilworth Square East | 2155 N Prospect Ave
Milwaukee, WI 53202 United States