Artdose Projects Participates in Door County Contemporary Art Fair

Feature image: Courtesy of Door County Contemporary.

By Frank Juárez

Sheboygan, WI – Artdose Magazine is pleased to announce its participation in the upcoming Door County Contemporary at PenArt in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Featured artists are April Behnke, Frank Juárez, Linda Marcus, and Rachel Hausmann Schall.

Although their primary role in Artdose is to write about the visual arts, they are also artists that maintain active studio practices, exhibiting locally, nationally, and internationally. “I am excited to extend this opportunity, sharing another side of their individuality is essential to who they are.” – Frank Juárez, publisher

In April 2025, Artdose Magazine opened Artdose Projects. Artdose Projects provides the perfect backdrop for experimentation, conversation, and community building—sparked by curiosity, creative risk-taking, and critical discourse.

Promotional graphic for the Door County Contemporary art fair held at PenArt in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, from June 4th to 7th, 2026.

April Behnke

An abstract artwork featuring a vibrant pattern of intersecting geometric shapes in shades of pink, purple, and orange. — *Slip Slide*
2025
Flashe and acrylic on canvas
18 x 24 in
Courtesy of the artist.

In her work, April explores perception and visual instability through systems that are constructed and continually disrupted. She uses repetition, alignment, and pattern as starting points before allowing them to fracture, shift, and dissolve across the surface. Order is never fully resolved, but becomes a site of tension where clarity and disruption coexist.

Grids and other structured systems are obscured, reoriented, and interrupted. Through shifting color relationships, foreground and background often reverse, producing spatial ambiguity.

These paintings ask the viewer to remain active in looking. Meaning is not fixed but unfolds over time through changing relationships between parts. In this way, the work reflects an ongoing interest in perception as an unstable, embodied experience.

April Behnke earned her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and has completed residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha and the Slak Foundation in the Netherlands. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including in Mexico City, Seoul, New York City, Berlin, Chicago, London, and Basel. Her work is included in Georgetown University’s art collection and has been featured in Chicago Gallery News, Washington Post, Time Out Chicago, and CBS News, among other media outlets. She has received numerous awards including the FY2026 Illinois Arts Council Creative Accelerator Grant. Behnke is based in Chicago, IL.

Frank Juárez

An abstract artwork featuring a collage of black and white shapes with textured surfaces and varying patterns. — *Absence No. 1*
2024
Mixed media
10 x 8 in
Courtesy of the artist.

Frank’s art is driven by daily observations. He reduces those visuals into paintings with an experimental and intuitive approach. He brings what is important to the surface so that viewers can interpret and develop their own meaning and connection.

Frank Juárez is an award-winning art educator, curator, and arts advocate based in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Known for his commitment to elevating contemporary art and supporting Wisconsin artists, Juárez has spearheaded numerous initiatives, including the Midwest Artist Studios Project and the 365 Artists 365 Days Project. In addition to his roles as publisher of Artdose magazine and editor-in-chief of SchoolArts magazine, Juárez has curated exhibitions and juried art shows throughout the Midwest. His dedication to art education and advocacy has earned him numerous accolades, making him a pivotal figure in Wisconsin’s art community.

Linda Marcus

Abstract sculpture with a shiny, textured surface in shades of blue and gold, displayed on a white pedestal. — *Blue Mover*
2026
Ceramic
10 x 9 x 8 in.
Courtesy of the artist.

Linda is a sculptor.

She cuts, layers, folds and reimagines relationships of power and identity through both the domestic and feminist lens.

Clay is one of her partners. It is a craft material, considered on the outskirts of fine art, the perfect medium to transgress boundaries.

Linda’s current body of work criticizes the hierarchies which relegate female ceramicist to the periphery. She works to redefine the feminine body and identity with form. She aims to elevate invisible labor which has often been dismissed and relegated as “women’s work”.

The vessels she makes are formed by reimagining a common tool in fashion design” the dart”. It was designed by male tailors to create silhouettes to satisfy the male gaze. By employing the dart in clay, she can create imperfect torso-like, uncanny, warped and asymmetrical vessel. She hopes to question aesthetic perfection and the traditional role of women in the art world as mere objects of visual pleasure and admiration.

By creating in this way, her imagination is unbound by rules of design or even beauty

She has also used this technique in the printmaking process and to reimagine the common substrates of painting with raw linen and felt.

Linda’s process is laborious: but by manipulating, weaving, winding and layering, it creates repetition; a meditative mode, one that imbues her to the work created.

It’s a simultaneous act of validation and of devotion.

Linda Marcus is a multidisciplinary artist whose work lies in the intersection of sculpture and painting. Central to her practice is material exploration through the lenses of feminism, domesticity and abstraction.

Marcus lives and works in Milwaukee Wisconsin where she raised her three kids and is actively in promoting the Milwaukee and larger Midwest art community through several channels.

Marcus’s work has been widely exhibited in both galleries and museums both regionally and nationally. Marcus has been awarded several art residencies throughout the country including the Vermont Studio and the Studios at Mass Moca. Marcus has won several regional awards for her work. She is also a writer for Artdose Magazine and Art Director at the Saint Kate Arts hotel in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

Marcus is also a member of the international artist collective “Teleportal” as well as the newly formed art collective “Darktimes”.

Rachel Hausmann Schall

An abstract artwork featuring bold colors like pink, green, and gold, with various shapes and textures layered together. — *First Kiss*
2026
Wood, paper clay, gesso, collage, and acrylic paint
8 x 8 x 3 in.
Courtesy of the artist.

Rachel challenges the excess and consumption of visual information by beginning each piece with an act of destruction: ripping or cutting apart drawings, paintings, prints, images, or found material. She approaches her work with a collage mindset, carefully navigating the relationships between lines, shapes, colors, and negative space layer by layer. She often starts by collaging the entirety of a surface, painting over it, adding more collage, and then sanding it away to create a variety of different textures and marks. The act of covering up while simultaneously revealing areas of the surface is reflective of how we choose to edit and consume visual culture today. What she finds most fascinating is the residual surface that’s leftover from her initial marks after many layers have been added. Rachel likes discovering what will “survive” the repetitive process of collaging, sanding, and painting over and over again. It’s important for her work to surprise her.

Each piece holds a unique history of marks, covered or revealed with each new move, acting like a record of racing thoughts and emotions. Through a marriage of materials, the collages invite the viewer to consider the chaotic and overwhelming nature of experiencing visual culture today.

Rachel Hausmann Schall (she/her) is a born and raised midwestern artist, writer, and educator living and working in central Wisconsin. She received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) in 2015 and has exhibited nationally at a variety of museums, galleries, and artist-run spaces across the nation. Her visual art practice is rooted in collage and mark making, although she works across many mediums. Solo exhibitions include Twosies (Chamber, Milwaukee, WI, 2016), 12 oz. Lounge (Project 1612, Peoria, IL, 2018), Affix & Repeat (Real Tinsel, Milwaukee, WI, 2021) and Leave All the Doors Open (No Instructions Gallery, Milwaukee, WI, 2025). Rachel completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019 and was recognized as a finalist for the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in 2016.

Rachel is co-editor of Artdose Magazine and has contributed writing to publications like Sixty Inches From Center, Dovetail Magazine, and Flat Rate Contemporary. She is co-organizer of the Grilled Cheese Grant, an artist-run project that raises funds for emerging artists in Wisconsin with grilled cheese sandwiches. Rachel also works as the Artist Residency & Adult Program Manager at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin.