Michelle Grabner

But another thing that entered into that, a separate architecture, is something called a Leopold Bench.

And this came from Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, who introduced this into the collaboration.

And these are benches invented by the 20th century conservationist named Aldo Leopold, who's an Italian-American Midwestern conservationist who studied ecology.

And he created these very simple but very specific benches for observing the natural world.

There was a conference at the Getty this past April where they were talking about High Performance Magazine and then suddenly... every single person who got up on the stage talked about Chicago.

So, you know, it's not just Los Angeles or New York City.

There is something, again, ruminates within this world of Chicago, ruminates in the world of Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam in terms of from the suburban in Oak Park moving to Milwaukee and then the poor farm experiment and knowing that These kinds of spaces, for me, really ruminate and really get me excited because, again, it's these places of permission that are not about commodity but about play, about living, about being together, about community.

And again, the same thing is happening with us in Italy with the Nido residency that we are also.

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Coming up, a Wisconsin artist donates a major collection of her work to the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan.

We'll hear from a curator and the artist.

Hopefully other artists will see this as an opportunity that we should not, as artists, take it for granted that gifts are just coming from patrons or benefactors, that artists can have relationships with institutions.

That's next, here on WPR News.

[upbeat music] It's Wisconsin Today.

I'm Steve Daugherty.

This is WPR News.

Um, So, like, there's a whole...

And, you know, we wrote an essay, I think, for Michelle Grabner's issue of the...

Or edition of The Front about, you know, this idea of center and periphery and how the contemporary art world is more interested in the periphery in, you know, Bishkek or Lagos or, you know... asuncion than they are in cleveland

or minneapolis or chicago you know the third