An air of uneasiness lingers over the "Unmasked and Anonymous" exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and it has little to do with the severe, antiquated faces gazing at you from beneath glass vitrines. Perhaps it arises from the sense of history compressed into a rather tight space; perhaps it's the nagging conviction that the body of contemporary work presented here is somehow ill-equipped to bear the weight of all this history. The exhibit brings together the work of contemporary Wisconsin photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann...

Photograph can artfully bends reality when it's done well, and the works included in the Coalition of Photographic Arts Second Annual Juried Exhibition are, to be sure, done well. The photos of 42 Midwestern artists are included in this show at the Walker's Point Center for the Arts, making for a surprisingly...

When Richard Sennett published his provocative thesis on the diminishing boundaries between public and private selves in the late '70s, things like reality TV and the Patriot Act were unheard of. Today they're incontrovertible facts that have further breached this boundary.

Milwaukee's rich heritage of fine art photography continues this week when the Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA), a new network of artists in the city, opens their "Second Annual Juried Exhibition" at Walker's Point Center for the Arts on Sept. 12. With sixty images in the show representing four states, CoPA strives to continually promote Milwaukee as a focal point for fine art photography. The 42 participating artists produced more than 140 intriguing entries juried by George Slade, artistic director of the Minnesota Center for Photography and contributor to numerous photography publications. Slade hosts a gallery talk . . .

The concepts of shadows, abstract shapes and spatial relationships are all explored in the current Charles Allis Art Museum exhibit on John Heymann, “At a Moment’s Notice: The Photographs of John Heymann,” which runs through Sept. 21. Heymann, a photo-journalist featured in The New York Times and The Boston . . .

John Lennon picked up a pencil long before his mother Julia bought him his first guitar as a teenager. His talent consistently evolved, leading him to art school and a working practice as a visual artist afterwards. The exhibition "Coming Together Through the Art of John Lennon" is now on display at the Waukesha County . . .

The Milwaukee Art Museum goes all out tonight with an extravagant soiree in conjunction with their exhibit on British multi-media artists Gilbert and George from 5:30 to 9 p.m. There will be a handful of Express Talks on the exhibit, but the event will also be fittingly flamboyant: There will be male belly dancers, a program . . .

When Mike Brenner threatened last winter to close Hotcakes Gallery and leave town if funds were raised to erect a bronze statue of The Fonz, a lot of people accused him of being whiny, or worse. But at the heart of his complaint was the fact that, despite easily raising $85,000 for the Bronze Fonz, people just aren’t walking into local galleries and purchasing art, which makes it hard for those galleries to stay in business. Milwaukee loves art, though, right? Gallery Night is heavily attended, so much so that it’s sometimes hard to actually enjoy the art on the walls through the cheese-nibbling crowds. But galleries, particularly those showing emerging artists, come and go . . .

British artists Gilbert and George met at St. Martins College of Art in London, 1967, and have remained creative partners ever since. Their current exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum displays more than 40 large-scale photomontages that use a combination of body art, performance art, photography, printmaking and . . .

Sculptor Joel Hunnicutt and fellow artist Jody dePew McLeane are both obsessive and meticulous builders; the former with bits of wood, the latter through staccato strokes and layers of pastel. It is the relationship between form and material where the artists' bodies of work differ, and where the tension . . .