Feature image: Thomas Haneman, Hesperidia, 2022; acrylic on canvas; 30 x 40 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Portrait Society Gallery.
Submitted
Sheboygan, WI — This fall, the Arts Center invites audiences to step inside art exploring a lineup of exhibitions, events, and programming that explores how artists transform spaces into immersive experiences that connect art, life, and the world around us.
Several exhibitions will open this fall at JMKAC, including Robert Blackstone: Crystal City and Greater Than the Sum: Practices of Gathering, Reuse, and Assemblage. Together, these exhibitions explore the tradition of artist-built environments—a distinct genre centered on artists’ lifelong transformations of personal and shared spaces through accumulated objects, materials, and ideas. As an institution that helped define the field of artist- built environments, JMKAC continues this legacy through exhibitions and programs that examine the ways artists create immersive environments that reflect their experiences, histories, and visions of the world.
In early October, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra brings her Rhythm in Nature residency to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Art Preserve. Through workshops, field recording, listening exercises, and performance, Ibarra will invite participants to explore the rhythms of the natural world and our connection to the ecosystems around us.
Together, the fall exhibitions and programs invite visitors to look beyond the traditional boundaries of the gallery and consider how art is not separate from life—it surrounds us.
Upcoming Exhibitions
Robert Blackstone: Crystal City
September 12, 2026–February 7, 2027
Crystal City is a monumental found-object sculpture by Robert Blackstone (1971–2023) that depicts a self-contained modern city. Begun when he was a sophomore in high school, Blackstone built the work from found objects, electronics, harvested glass, toys, family videos, and personal mementos. Crystal City combines sound, light, movement, and living elements to create a miniature immersive urban landscape. First created and shown in Dayton, Ohio, this marks the first time the work will be exhibited outside that city.
Originally conceived as an elegy for Blackstone’s grandmother, the project evolved into a reflection on social and economic injustice and a vision of a more unified, interconnected city. The exhibition also features additional works by Blackstone drawn from the downtown Dayton bank building where he developed the project in its final years. Many of these sculptures attest to Blackstone’s interest in history, the passing of time, and the human condition.
Thomas Haneman: Synapses
September 12, 2026–February 7, 2027
Called “Floating Flowers” by Thomas Haneman, these fantastical botanical paintings, richly toned and wildly inventive, could be specimens from outer space, underwater, or some sort of Eden. Positioned out-of-space and time; they joyously spring from his canvases, unfettered by nature or science. Many of them face away from the viewer, growing in the direction of an unseen source of light or energy.
After emerging from a long and crippling depression, and inspired by his garden, Haneman’s subjects appear like synapses, the fresh sparks in his brain, brought on by his new-found happiness and excitement for life. They are the visual result of his healing; synaptic displays of joy.
His paintings bear reference to seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and eighteenth-century botanical illustrations, while feeling atemporal and contemporary.
Greater Than the Sum: Practices of Gathering, Reuse, and Assemblage
October 24, 2026–February 7, 2027
The artists included in the group exhibition each utilize practices of gathering, reuse, and assemblage. Through sculpture, fiber, found objects, and collected materials, they demonstrate how a component’s value is not found solely in its advertised or initial use, but in its ability to connect in countless ways with other beings, ideas, and objects to create complex, stronger, and richer collectives and meanings.
Working with materials carrying rich and often unknowable histories, the artists create physical manifestations of the relationships between material, cultural, and environmental experiences and histories. Their works reveal practices rooted in observation, collection, collaboration, and transformation.
The exhibition includes environmentally focused assemblages by Carolina Caycedo; spiritually charged sculptures by Arthur Simms; wrapped fiber works by Judith Scott; Kea Tawana’s custom-built trunks and systems of organization; and Lenore Tawney’s gathered materials, collaged boxes, and assemblages drawn from her studio practice. Together, the artists offer a range of models for connection, steeped in community and environmental contexts.
Through their artworks and artistic practices, the artists demonstrate the transformative and empowering nature of coming together, of beings and things, with our various stories, experiences, skills, and strengths. In this vein, artistic practices of gathering and reuse demonstrate that an interconnected assemblage, community, or ecosystem embodies a vaster potential value—that is, Greater Than the Sum of its parts.
About the John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Founded in 1967, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) is a nonprofit creative hub that supports the work of contemporary artists through original exhibitions, commissions, residencies, publications, and community programming across visual and performing arts. JMKAC was recently ranked No. 6 on ARTnews’s list of the 30 Best Art Museums in the United States, recognizing the institution among the country’s leading art museums. The only institution in the world that collects artist-built and artist home-based environments, JMKAC is a leading center for the research, preservation, and presentation of artists with wide-ranging practices and backgrounds from academically trained to self-taught and folk traditions, championing long-term relationships with artists and elevating work that has often been overlooked or under-recognized. JMKAC is a vital cultural resource that responds to the needs of its local and regional communities, preserving artistic heritage by uplifting contemporary voices and empowering future generations.
Hours
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday: 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Thursday: 10:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m.
Saturday, Sunday: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Locations
John Michael Kohler Arts Center: 608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, WI
Contact
Emily Shedal, Communications Specialist, JMKAC
EShedal@jmkac.org