Feature image: Jan Serr, Observers: Woman with Blue Umbrella, Oil on Linen, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
Jan Serr Summer Paintings: Looking at the Lakefront from Villa Terrace
Co-curated with Jan Serr
Opening event: August 5, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
August 6, 2026 – November 29, 2026
Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens, 2220 N Terrace Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202
By Annemarie Sawkins PhD
It is often said that music and art are kindred spirits. For Jan Serr, who began her career dedicated to music, the two disciplines have remained her lifelong passions. But when she was required to take a class in university to fulfill a visual arts requirement and learned in life drawing classes how to create art from life, she discovered her true calling. Serr earned a BFA and an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. While continuing her life drawing sessions, Serr also became an accomplished photographer.[1] She then taught at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for two years before moving to Canada, where her career blossomed. In Toronto, Serr integrated her figurative and landscape work for the first time. There, in the 1970s, she painted her “Observers” series, featuring single individuals in minimal or implied outdoor surroundings. After achieving success in Toronto—where she was represented by the Marlborough-Godard Gallery and had exhibitions in Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary—the multidisciplinary artist moved to Racine, Wisconsin. Once back in the United States, Serr was represented by the Seuferer/Chosy Gallery in Madison and by both the Dorothy Bradley Gallery and Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee.
Throughout most of her life, Serr has been “by the lake,” living only minutes from one of the Great Lakes: Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, or Lake Erie. After moving to Milwaukee’s East Side in 2008, she began taking full advantage of the lakefront and Lake Park. (Lake Park is one of three parks in Milwaukee designed by Frederick Law Olmsted—the landscape architect who was celebrated at the Villa Terrace Museum and Gardens in 2022. Olmsted was famous for integrating nature into urban settings and advancing the idea of “parks for all people.”) Lake Michigan, its diverse ecosystems, and the ways in which people enjoy the lakefront have inspired Serr’s artistic practice for decades. While her approach is unique, it is not singular.
For centuries artists have turned to various classic subjects for inspiration. Religious scenes and history paintings have long represented important themes for artists, along with the still life and the figure in nature. The eighteenth-century British painters John Constable and J.M.W. Turner (whose 250th birth anniversaries are celebrated in 2026) included streams, mill ponds, and stormy oceans with travelers in peril in their work. During the nineteenth century, when artists began abandoning their studios and painting en plein air, figures surrounded by untamed landscapes became subjects for new works of art. At the same time, the practice of bathing at home and in rivers, lakes, and oceans took on greater importance for health reasons. Leisure and coastal bathing became increasingly fashionable for those with means.
Many Impressionist artists, from Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Mary Cassatt to Joaquín Sorolla, were particularly fond of this novel subject matter. They often captured the interplay between humans and the coastal environment—from boaters and swimmers to swooping cliffside swallows. Through their work, artists such as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and Suzanne Valadon provided essential female perspectives on motherhood, children, and nudes. Bathers, alone or in groups, have been immortalized in countless paintings by artists eager to create genre scenes and to capture the transient effects of light on water and figures in motion.
As evidenced by contemporary artists, interest in these themes has not waned. From David Hockney (1937–2026), who has made the bright blue chlorinated swimming pool his leitmotif, to Amy Sherald and Derrick Adams, who celebrate African Americans in marine scenes, artists continue to explore the subject of bathers. By focusing on the human form in beach-themed paintings, Jan Serr celebrates her relationship to art, nature, and Milwaukee’s East Side.
With their summer colors and broad strokes, Serr’s beachgoers are caught unaware. They are sleeping, lounging on grass, swimming, and gazing at the wide expanse of water. Though called a lake, Lake Michigan is more like an “inland sea.” It is the fifth-largest lake in the world, covers over twenty-two thousand square miles, and contains more than eleven hundred cubic miles of water, making it a truly incredible resource. This massive rich body of water supports a complex web of life, from various fish and migrating birds to humans. For the bathers and parkgoers, it is their momentary place to relax, recreate, and while away the time. Serr catches people of all ages—sometimes alone, other times in groups—totally engaged with whatever they are doing, which often is nothing at all.
As an artist, Serr has always been captivated by the figure. Since her first life drawing class with Schomer Lichtner (1905–2006), Serr has continued to draw and paint the figure, at times en plein air and at other times in the studio, using her photographs as aide-mémoires. The artist Mary Bero has said, “My intention is to make the best art possible, using whatever media is suggested by the idea.”[2] Serr has never limited her practice, rather, as an educated artist, she has been influenced by many predecessors and peers in developing her own style. Serr’s early paintings and self-portraits show a deep knowledge and appreciation of the German Expressionists—namely Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, and Egon Schiele—as well as the West Coast Figurative painters like Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, and Nathan Oliveira. As noted by arts writer and editor Miriam Seidel, Jan Serr’s “earliest series of large paintings, “Bathers” (1968), is the work of an artist with a confident eye and hand, aware of the larger art world.”[3]
Looking back on her career, we see that Serr neither strictly follows representationalism nor is she an abstract expressionist. Instead, she finds a way to draw from many styles so that her paintings become lyrical vignettes, engaging summer stories, and compelling images. As viewers, we are drawn into her scenes so much so that we complete them, becoming voyeurs in the process.
The Villa Terrace exhibition is, in a sense, a focused retrospective of her figurative work. We see early paintings, work from her Canadian years, and paintings as recent as 2026.
“Going back 30,000 years and more,” Serr says, “the human figure has been a primal image in the history of art. What I’m doing is a tiny contemporary extension of that history. At the same time, every portrait I make is of an individual, a unique person, with their own feelings and thoughts. I respect that.”
Finally, with its profound connection to Milwaukee, this exhibition marks a “homecoming” for Serr, who has been a regular supporter of the arts in Milwaukee for decades. The Villa Terrace exhibition celebrates an artist educated in Milwaukee who once again anchors her career here. Following her successful period in Canada, Serr has had twenty- and forty-year retrospective exhibitions—at the Rahr-West Art Museum in 1985 and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as part of their Continuum series in 2011.
Serr has traveled the world and, in series after series, continues to bring the human figure—and the vibrant natural world it inhabits—vividly to life.
[1] Two books of Jan Serr’s photographs–Smoke and Mirrors: India Photographs and Then & Now: China Photographs (both 2016, Plumb Press)–have been published documenting this work and accompanied exhibitions at the Warehouse Art Museum, 2019 and 2022 respectively.
[2] See Mary Bero’s artist statement in the “Glitz and Grit: The Fine Art/Craft Connection” issue edited by Wyatt Osato, New Observations 98[New York] (November/December 1993), 12.
[3] Miriam Seidel, “To See How I Look: Perceiving the Figure in the Work of Jan Serr,” in About Face: Jan Serr, Institute of Visual Arts, Peck School of the Arts, UWM, (Milwaukee: Caledonia Projects, 2011):4.