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Milwaukee artist Sonja Thomsen opened her first solo show in her hometown in a decade in March at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.
“and then down became up: new works by sonja thomsen” runs through May 31, and closes with a 3 p.m. conversation with Meg Jackson Fox, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, and closing reception from 2 until 5 p.m.
“My work has changed and grown a lot in that (decade),” Thomsen says as we stand in the gallery that houses the multi-media exhibition, including photographs and sculptures, including a number of dynamic mobiles.
“So it felt really important to build something that felt like it belonged. I really wanted to integrate into the architecture (of the gallery). So these pieces specifically were designed for this room because I was trying to figure out how to respond to this (space).”
But perhaps even more important than the space is the inspiration for the show: Hazel Larsen Archer, a Milwaukee native who attended Milwaukee State Teachers College before heading to continue her studies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. Archer later became a teacher of photography, among other roles, at this institution that was a refuge and creative space for many artists fleeing fascism in Europe.
The show opens with photos of two women.
“It's like a title wall, but it's two photographs ("table of contents (i)" and "table of contents (ii)") that kind of introduce you to these two women – Lucia Moholy and Hazel Larson Archer – that I've been kind of orbiting in the studio, learning about and thinking about in relation to art education and photography history.
“I did a solo show in Chicago about Lucia, and this show holds a lot of Lucia, but it's really about Hazel, because Hazel was born here in Milwaukee; she grew up kitty corner from South Shore Park. It's been kind of a detective project for me to learn about her history here. Hazel suffered polio at age of 10, and she went to Gaenslen School.
“She went to Milwaukee State Teachers College, where she also was in school with Ruth Asawa. The two of them found their way to Black Mountain College, and (to) Josef and Anni Albers who had left the Bauhaus."
The Nazis shuttered the Bauhaus, leading the Nagys and others, including architects Mies van der Rohe and (Bauhaus founder) Walter Gropius, to seek refuge in the United States, with Mies becoming a leading light in Modernism from his Chicago base.
These many connections that Thomsen – who began as a trained photographer – has with Hazel Larsen Archer have been an inspiration to the show, and some of the works even integrate figure shapes from Archer’s photography.
“Hazel, was born where I'm from, of Danish immigrants,” Thomsen explains. “I teach between Milwaukee and Chicago. These two schools (Bauhaus and Black Mountain College) were really important to art education, and I've been teaching at SAIC now for 10 years, which has its own kind of lineage to the Bauhaus and teaching art.
“So there's this kind of autobiography that I'm trying to locate myself in their stories, too.”
Thomsen calls Hazel, her “art grandmother.”
The work in the show has many layers and an image of a dancer from one of Archer’s photos is a recurring theme in a number of different pieces (Thomsen also studied dance), including "awakening &," a brightly colored latex print on vinyl that’s affixed to a large south-facing window overlooking the sculpture garden.
On a sunny day – or so I'm told, as I visited on a grey day tipping down incessantly with rain – the transparent print positively glows with yellow and blue, casting rays of color into the gallery.
Thomsen is one of the city’s most engaging artists and that it’s been a decade since her last solo show here seems hard to believe.
”This show came about because I was a Ruth Arts Mary L. Nohl Awardee, and Polly Morris, who runs Lynden, learned about my research on Hazel, and she said, ‘oh, this seems like a really interesting project that I should support.’
“She knew I wanted to move into sculpture because I was trained and have been working with this idea of the expanding practice of photography, so they commissioned a small sculpture out there ("embrace (transverse)," just beyond the gallery windows) that’s basically a mirror of this one (inside the gallery).”
There’s still time to see the show and, if you aim for a warm, sunny day, you can also enjoy a walk through the sculpture garden and see this work close-up.
As for the show's title...
“This idea of ‘and then down became up’,” says Thomsen, “I took apart my very first camera lens from Rufus King (High School) that I started studying photography with. And the optics of the camera remind us of the way that our eye works. We actually see everything upside down ... physically and then mentally it is kind of flipped.
“So as I've been trying to approach women in history that have traditionally been marginalized, not included, I was also feeling a little frustrated, maybe rage-filled or a little upset about it. I wanted to just pivot that energy and then down became up as, actually, it's not a negative, it's a yes and it's a positive. It's amazing that they were there. They are there. They're there for me to discover. They're there for all of us to learn about.”
The show, Thomsen says, is part of a larger project, which will include more work created here in Milwaukee, including photographs and videos she hopes to make, including in the Bay View house in which Hazel lived.
She then hopes to travel variations of the show to North Carolina and Tucson, where Archer later lived and where her family still holds the artist’s archive.
Thomsen has been making connections in both places recently, including at Black Mountain, where she was invited to do a residency after the school learned about her Archer- and Moholy-inspired work, and in Tuscon where she recently was awarded a research fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona.
“For the last six months, I've been talking to people (about this),” she says. "I want this work to triangulate these places. Everyone's like, why wouldn’t you want it in New York or L.A.?’ Of course, yes. I also want it there. But it feels really important to map their space.”
Of course, the third point in the triangle is Milwaukee.
“I really, really, really want to – and I don't know if the Art Museum, or maybe the Haggerty, would do it – bring it all back here and do a bigger show that really can celebrate Hazel. She has such a beautiful story here.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
