Gallery Hours are Thursday, Friday, and Saturday afternoons, 12-5 PM
OR by appointment, contact us at info@jazzgallerycenterforarts.org
Masks and other COVID-19 precautions are encouraged for all visitors.
Exhibition
May 24th, 2025 – July 19th, 2025
Opening Reception
Saturday, May 24th, 2025 from 4 – 6 PM
Dialogue: Two Emerging Artists 2025 Exhibition
For this annual exhibition JGCA invites two recent BFA grads, one from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and one from UWM Peck School of the Arts to participate in a two-person exhibition and related programming. This opportunity is designed as important encouragement and professional opportunities to two emerging Milwaukee artists as they transition from student to professional life.
Programming during the exhibition will include artist talks, gallery talk with Older Wiser Local (OWL) also open to the public and a possible hands-on workshops for community or exhibition related programming.
Selected Artists
Madison Winters, a Milwaukee-based artist from St. Louis, Missouri, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art focusing on Painting & Drawing, and Printmaking at Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Spring of 2025.
Winters’ current work focuses on using printmaking techniques fused with recycled material as environmentalist commentary, questioning what is understood as “natural” or “human-made”.
In 2023, Winters co-founded The Universe Art Collective with their sister, Taylor Winters, and has gained valuable experience through internships with Anchor Press Paper and Print, Real Tinsel, as well as being an officer for UWM’s Print Club.
Beyond their studio practice, Winters is actively involved in community arts education, teaching for Artist Working in Education’s Summer Truck Studio, directing art camps for Manchester Parks and Recreation, and leading art programs at Cloud 9, a community art studio. Looking ahead, Winters plans to pursue graduate studies in Fine Art while continuing to explore experimental printmaking, as well as expanding their painting practice.
Winters’ series Ecocide in the exhibition explores the complexities of living within the Anthropocene epoch—an interconnected and layered quilt of existence. Working within the conceptual territories of painting, they explore the intricate relationship between humanity and nature, by deliberate (or negligent) means.
Their materials include found and reclaimed objects: recycled cotton canvas, salvaged silkscreens, and ethically foraged organic matter. They employ screen printing, sewing, and eco-printing—a technique that extracts dye from gathered plant material— as artificial processes to represent the allegory of human intervention.
Melany Del Valle Suri ( B. 2003, Holguin) is a Cuban American artist currently living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She attended the Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston Texas where she grew up. In May, 2025 Melany received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design with a Major in New Studio Practices and a minor in illustration.
Del Valle Suri repurposes textures gathered from the environment and their personal experience which they transform and personify through painting. Through the utilization of overlapping of imagery they challenge the brain’s capacity to process visual information with how much or how little they choose to depict in these pulling moments.
They are intrigued by patterns and their relation to the human condition in regards to repetition and history. “I paint on wood for its memory retention. My process requires me to follow the trail of patterns and secret marks that my vision seeks to illuminate. These previously established marks of the wood and various washes merge the liminal presence of imagery and the shifting physicality of a wooden structure. I often consider the push and pull of an image, there is a balance to maintain. A balance of unpredictability and order are essential in understanding the push and pull that shapes our physical being and the world around us. How much information is required to place a picture together before the abstraction consumes the image.”