Creative Power: ARTS for ALL Wisconsin’s Traveling Exhibition
MONROE — Monroe Arts Center is hosting Creative Power: ARTS for ALL Wisconsin Traveling Exhibition on display in the Frehner Gallery until March.
ARTS for ALL Wisconsin conducts effective and well-loved arts programs for people with disabilities throughout the state. ARTS for ALL Wisconsin is unique among all other arts organizations in providing statewide, in-depth, and comprehensive arts activities and programming for individuals across the full spectrum of disabilities.
Each spring, jurors select ten works of visual art and at least four poems from over 200 submissions to the annual ARTS for ALL call for art to be added to CREATIVE POWER: The ARTS for ALL Wisconsin Traveling Exhibition, an exhibition of 30 visual artworks and four framed poems that travel to libraries, galleries, and public buildings throughout the state each year. Each award-winning work spends three years as part of the Creative Power Traveling Exhibition.
The Galleries at the Monroe Arts Center are open to the public at this time. Masks worn over the nose and mouth are required to enter the building.
This exhibit has been supported by MAC Corporate Underwriter Colony Brands, Inc. and Season Media Underwriter Big Radio, with additional support from Mike and Shelley Muranyi, Paul and Sue Barrett, NS Jan Johnson, David, and Janeen Babler, and Chuck and Chris Wellington.
For more information, visit
monroeartscenter.com or call 608.325.5700.
MAC hosting From the Cutting Room Floor
MONROE — The work of local artists Deborah Haklin and Stephanie Mahr will be on exhibit in the Monroe Arts Center’s Wellington Gallery from Friday, Jan. 28 through March 25. Both artists are proud to share their message of “respecting your environment and being true to your uniqueness” in creating work that “inspires all for a stylish and clean future.”
Mahr shares how the exhibit “From the Cutting Room Floor” shines a light on fabric waste in the fashion industry; “Your body demands a healthy environment to thrive but it’s hard to honor yourself when we live in a place where we dump roughly 15 million tons of textile waste in landfills each year.”
Mahr grew up in Adams-Friendship. Aside from being one of the last classes to dabble in home economics, sewing wasn’t really something she explored until her 20s. She accepted a sewing job in the hemming department at Lands’ End. After picking up the concept quickly, she really enjoyed it.
Stephanie would remake and upcycle things she found around her house to practice techniques on different textures. Today, Stephanie continues to learn and grow on new and existing skills. She has a sewing studio in New Glarus where she relishes in the art of sewing every day.
Sewing became an early obsession for Haklin. How was clothing made, the intersection of seams, why certain fabrics moved the way they did, the gorgeous way that the body presents a garment; these were all questions that ran through her head as a small child of five. She imagined herself laboring beneath elaborate gowns of her own creation and holding fashion shows in the living room.
She began sewing for hire at 15, learning from the nuns in high school how to sew from a pattern and she immediately began her career. She continued on to fashion school in Chicago where she learned the finer points of original garment creation. Decades later, she is the founder, owner, and ethical couturier of The Artful Dressmaker. In her effort to operate as a zero-waste fashion design business, she has developed designs that utilize what is otherwise seen as garbage and transformed into luxury, into Art.
The Galleries at the Monroe Arts Center are open to the public at this time. Masks worn over the nose and mouth are required to enter the building.
This exhibit has been supported by MAC Corporate Underwriter Colony Brands, Inc. and Season Media Underwriter Big Radio, with additional support from Mike and Shelley Muranyi, Paul and Sue Barrett, NS Jan Johnson, David, and Janeen Babler, and Chuck and Chris Wellington.
