Michelle Grabner, a leading Wisconsin artist and curator, is making an enormous gift to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.
Grabner is donating more than 2,000 artworks from across her career, dating back to the 1990s, plus 300 works by other artists from her personal collection and an archive of her teaching materials from her work as a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Kohler Arts Center announced Grabner’s gift in an emailed statement.
While many museums around the country own works by Grabner – including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum – this gift will make the Kohler Arts Center the principal institutional home for her work.
“Few mid-career artists have comprehensive representation of their practice held within a single museum collection,” the Kohler stated.
“It is especially meaningful to make this gift to a museum that has been a site of creative collaboration and support for my own practice,” Grabner said in the Kohler’s statement. The Kohler’s commitment to experimentation, teaching and the vernacular has profoundly shaped the artistic culture of the Midwest, Grabner said.
Born in Oshkosh in 1962, Grabner divides her time between Milwaukee, Chicago and Waupaca County, where she is co-director of The Poor Farm, a nonprofit art site. She was a 2025 winner of the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, whose jurors praised the way her work invites viewers to take a fresh look at things they may have taken for granted.
For example, her contributions to the outdoor Sculpture Milwaukee exhibit in 2024 were three steel objects 8 feet tall painted in the primary colors of yellow, red and blue, installed blocks apart in Museum Center Park and in front of 411 E. Wisconsin Ave. and the Central Library. They looked like giant bookends.
Grabner’s gift to the Kohler will include approximately 700 paintings, 1,200 prints and photographs, and 200 sculptures she has made. The Kohler said it includes vitreous china pillows, bronze afghans and granny-square blankets, bronze mops and brooms, paper weavings, glass gingham works, Montessori bead works, and paintings and prints produced across the arc of her career.
The Kohler described Grabner’s art as “exploring themes of labor, domesticity, pattern, and repetition.” After a New York Times reviewer once dismissed her work with a “soccer mom” label, she responded playfully by creating soccer balls with gingham patterns.
Works by other artists she is donating include that of legendary self-taught artist Eugene von Bruenchenhein. The Kohler has an extensive von Bruenchenhein collection in its Arts Preserve.
Grabner’s interactions with the Kohler Arts Center go back to 2017, when she took part in an Arts/Industry residency, the arts center’s unique program with Kohler Co. Through that program she learned industrial casting techniques at the Kohler Foundry. Grabner also was commissioned to create a functional washroom for the opening of the Art Preserve in 2021. She also has mentored other artists participating in Arts/Industry and served as an advisor to the program.
She was co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, an important survey exhibit of contemporary American art. She is a professor of art and chair of the department of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Kohler said it will begin cataloging and researching the Grabner collection, with plans for an exhibit to be announced later.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin artist making enormous gift to Sheboygan arts center
Reporting by Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | USA TODAY Network
