The work of celebrated visual artist Laurel Lueders, who is a Full Professor and Chair of Visual Studies at LIM College, will be exhibited at the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) December 4 through February 28 at the museum’s DTN satellite location in Milwaukee. MOWA focuses on contemporary and emerging art and attracts 200,000 visitors annually. In addition to the exhibit, the museum is acquiring Professor Lueders’ work for its permanent collection.
Alongside Shifting, an immersive video installation, the exhibition presents photographs from Professor Lueders’ ongoing exploration of travel, memory, and place through abstraction of transient spaces such as airports, hotels, and train stations. This includes newly commissioned photographs taken on-site at Saint Kate The Arts Hotel, extending a long-standing body of work about the sensory experience of travel and discovery of unfamiliar spaces.
Professor Lueders has shown her photo-based prints and installations in more than 30 solo exhibits and over 300 group exhibitions, and she is the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, awards, and artist residencies.
Her photographs are said to convey a sense of time and place without a definitive narrative. By varying the shutter speed and moving the camera, Lueders creates gestural lines with light that capture the invisible as visible, evoking an otherworldly sense of reinterpreted space, newly imaged place, and the foggy transition of time.
“I am very happy to represent LIM alongside a season line-up of exhibits at MOWA that includes luminaries such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Steichen, Lewis Hine and Bruce Nauman,” said Professor Lueders. “I look forward to talking about LIM and how my photography practice connects to teaching in the Artist Talk and gallery tours for the exhibit.”
All shows at MOWA feature work of artists with a deep connection to the state of Wisconsin. Professor Lueders was raised in Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to MOWA, she has had solo exhibitions at many institutions around the world including the Czong Institute of Contemporary Art Museum (Gimpo, S. Korea), Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin (Spring Green, WI), NX2 Galerie (Berlin, Germany), Opus Projects (New York, NY), Harz University of Applied Sciences (Wernigerode, Germany), Schloss Museum (Quedlinburg, Germany) and Gallery Twenty-Four (New York, Paris and Berlin).
Her teaching career began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001, and she joined LIM College in 2013. In 2015, Professor Lueders created LIM’s "The Arts in Florence" program at Florence University of the Arts and has led the program each summer since. She has taught a variety of courses including Creative Photography and Experimental Media, Installation and Video Art, and Visual Studies Senior Capstone, among others. Professor Lueders holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
