Feature image: 2026 Emerging Artists
In partnership with John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Sheboygan, WI – Artdose magazine is pleased to announce the 2026 Emerging Artists Program Cohort. They are Matthew Braunginn (Madison), Amanda Langer (Jefferson), Jade Pergl (Milwaukee), Brianna Stehling Santacruz (Milwaukee), and Cassandra Xiong (Wausau). We are excited to have R-Lo (Madison) return as a mentor.
The Emerging Artists Program is a 3-day event that features a new cohort of emerging artists. Bringing them together for professional development, support, networking, and camaraderie sets the stage for an impactful art experience at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
The goal of the program is to provide professional support and opportunities for emerging artists, which continues to evolve, guided by the artists’ ideas.
The Matrix transforms into a space that will spark curiosity and conversations featuring a great representation of sculpture, collages, mixed media, paintings, and drawings. Artists share their creative backgrounds, influences, personal stories, and artistic journeys with the community.
Art will be available for purchase (unless otherwise noted by the artist).
Programming
- Friday, July 17, 5 – 7 pm: Artist Talks at Paradigm Music + Coffee, 1202 N. 8th Street. FREE.
- Saturday, July 18, 10 am – 5 pm: Midsummer Festival of the Arts. FREE.
- Sunday, July 19, 10 am – 4 pm: Midsummer Festival of the Arts. FREE.
About the Artists
Matthew Braunginn
Higgs’ work is rooted in the tradition of abstract expressionism and is informed by the cultural inheritance of Black America. Incorporating this inheritance of music, history, and its insistence on creation as an act of resistance. Through it, Higgs positions his creations as a masculine practice of building and creation, rather than domination and destruction
Each piece is crafted within a soundscape, encompassing genres such as Jazz, Funk, Soul, Hip-Hop, Classical, and beyond. Each composition is infused with the structures of those sounds, as he explores the intersection of his internal and external worlds through his bold use of color, a throughline palette, metaphysical structures, geometry, and spatial expressions.
Amanda Langer
As two vastly different materials, steel and fiber represent opposites, extremes, or opposing forces, and Amanda is intrigued by the search for a balance and a harmony between them. The work she creates explores the contrasting natures between these materials in a way that complements them both and invites each to alter its nature to their mutual benefit. She employs a variety of metal and fiber techniques in her work, including plasma cutting and MIG welding, as well as oxy-acetylene torch work to create textures and holes. She also uses angle grinders, wire brushes, and various abrasives to clean and polish the steel. She knits and crochets the yarn or thread by hand and attaches it to the metal via sewing, and sometimes she crochets directly onto the metal surface.
The contrast between these materials reflects the conflicts and tensions in our human and more-than-human world–between individuals, groups, factions, cultures, and between our human society and the environment we depend on. The challenge of bringing cold, unyielding steel and warm, pliable yarn into play with earth other reflects the challenges of bringing disparate entities into collaboration in other realms of life. Amanda hopes that in the discovery of ways to combine these materials, there are hints to how we might solve the bigger, heavier, and far more pressing problems in the world. These materials and the surprising and delightful ways they can connect demonstrate the infinite potential to cooperate and exist together in collective peace and abundance.
Jade Pergl
Jade is a painter living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her work explores femininity, imagination, and emotional tension through gesture and structure. Her practice is guided by intuition and material sensitivity. Using paint to examine how softness and strength can exist simultaneously. She approaches vulnerability as an intention and a controlled position. Emphasizing balance, pressure, and restraint within the painted surface. Through this process, Jade investigates contradictions. Lightness paired with tension, beauty paired with discomfort, conflict paired with peace. Creating work that emphasizes emotional presence and physical awareness.
Brianna Stehling Santacruz
Brianna’s work approaches art as a shared emotional experience rather than an act of observation. At the core of her work is an exploration of the emotional spectrum that shapes our lives, grief, strength, self-love, love for others, growth, and change. Through abstraction, she uses color as an emotional language, allowing each hue to hold depth, memory, and meaning beyond words. What distinguishes her work is its emphasis on participation and connection. She creates interactive installations using cut-out forms embedded with introspective questions, inviting viewers to write directly with the installation.
By responding with a marker, participants become collaborators, transforming the piece into a living archive of shared reflection. This process shifts the role of the audience from observer to active participant, fostering emotional awareness and collective healing. These installations can be found on her website under portfolio. By creating spaces where people are encouraged to pause, reflect, and express themselves, Brianna’s work becomes a tool for emotional processing and empowerment. It invites individuals to recognize their own experiences within a larger collective narrative, fostering empathy, self-awareness, and healing. Through this approach, her practice extends beyond the visual, becoming an act of care, dialogue, and transformation. She believes this commitment to emotional accessibility, community engagement, and meaningful impact makes her work a catalyst for personal and social change.
Cassandra Xiong
Cassandra’s work is rooted in social change, challenging our current social systems’ disdain for the arts by using creativity as an intentional act of resistance, healing, and liberation. She creates collages, zines, and poetry as a means of processing her emotions in real time. As a result, her work embraces an imperfect final product. She usually begins each piece with no clear vision in mind. She lets the art find itself in the process.
This lack of vision is not a passive decision, but a deliberate choice to embrace the evolutionary flow of creating. It reflects the reality of life. Cassandra’s most inspired by collage because it is a wonderful metaphor for the world: all the pieces are assorted, diverse, seemingly unfitting yet still complementary, and ultimately come together as a whole to create a new, unique, and beautiful image that is reflective of all its parts. She expands her work by facilitating workshops centered on these philosophies so that others may experience creativity as a vessel for building the world they desire.
About the Mentor
R-Lo
R-Lo’s work aims to examine contrast within self and the other.
Often by way of automatic drawing, R-Lo combines layers of painterly, sculptural, and illustrative aesthetics using charcoal to create 2D images. This process allows the artist to explore a stream of consciousness within a dark fantastical universe reflective of real world and surreal experiences. He believes these explorations help him mentally and spiritually process internal, social, and political stressors. His work often takes on subjects and themes related to love, conflict, and loss. With his work, R-Lo intends to evoke emotions associated with these subjects but to also bring into question the context of morality, negotiating boundaries between right and wrong. This becomes a call for the viewer to interrogate their compassion and empathy in a world of beauties and horror.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
The John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC), located north of Milwaukee in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, is known for promoting the understanding and appreciation of the work of self-taught and contemporary artists through exhibitions and commissioned works of art.
Founded in 1967, JMKAC has preserved, studied, and exhibited artist-built environments, earning a worldwide reputation. Art environments involve an individual significantly transforming their surroundings into an exceptional, multifaceted work of art.
The Arts Center’s downtown Sheboygan facility includes eight galleries, two performance spaces, a café, a museum shop, and a drop-in art-making studio. Among its program offerings are community arts projects; artist residencies; presentations of dance, film, and music; a free weekly summer concert series; classes and workshops; an onsite arts-based preschool; and approximately twelve original exhibitions of the work of self-taught and contemporary artists annually. JMKAC also administers the renowned Arts/Industry residency program, which is hosted by Kohler Co.
Source: jmkac.org
About Artdose magazine
Founded in 2013, Artdose magazine LLC is an independent print and digital art magazine based in Wisconsin, committed to connecting and supporting the visual arts in the Midwest. Published by Frank Juárez, the magazine is premised on the belief that we all share common goals of engaging, educating, and offering diverse art experiences to our audience and readership.
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Interested in learning about the emerging artists program? Contact us.
