MOWA BLOOM 2023

MOWA BLOOM 2023

The start of November brings a major floral arrangement exhibit to the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) in West Bend. This show is a real photographer’s delight. Join me to see the 2023 displays!

Floral Arrangements

Each year MOWA BLOOM attracts beautiful flower arrangements created and submitted by various Wisconsin florists. Many of them are inspired by artwork displayed in the MOWA galleries. Museum visitors are encouraged to vote for their favorite arrangements on ballots.

The BLOOM program described this year’s exhibit as follows.

Petals and Patterns

Art and flowers come together for the eleventh annual BLOOM. This year’s theme—Petals and Patterns—is inspired by the concurrent exhibition on view, Lon Michels: Disrupting Patterns, a bold, provocative presentation of color and form. Enjoy the beauty of dramatic floral arrangements featured throughout the museum galleries.

Lon Michels Exhibit

Concurrent to Bloom 2023, MOWA also hosted Disrupting Patterns, a major exhibit by Wisconsin artist Lon Michels.

The Fall, 2023 MOWA newsletter described this amazing exhibit.

DISRUPTING PATTERNS

Lon Michaels Disrupting Patterns is a mid-career retrospective of the Lodi-based painter. Early works from Michels’s twenty-something years in New York after he fled a repressive childhood in rural Wisconsin for the freedom—creative and otherwise—promised by the Big Apple. His magnetic personality and distinctive style caught the attention of the art establishment: Michels spent his days as an assistant to sculptor Louise Nevelson and his nights hobnobbing at Andy Warhol’s Factory. Michels learned the significance and the power of constructed environments. Warhol’s conception of celebrity affirmed his penchant for brilliant color and his inclination to highlight the individual.

Michels’s Neo-Pop figuration intuitively navigates the boundaries between framed, staged, and the projection of self through pattern. He captures members of his social circle informally at home or at work, such as The Gallerist, surrounded by the seeminly banal ephemera of daily life. Within the ordinary aspects of their lives, Michels highlights their idiosyncrasies and emphazizes their fragile, approachable humanity. The exhibition features forty-five paintings displayed within a re-created lounge environment of leopard-painted Buddha sculptures, a taxidermy bear, a 1961 camper van, a VW, and plush household furnishings.