Arts + Literature Laboratory exhibits reception

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory presents the next round of exhibitions, on display from Tuesday, March 3 through Saturday, April 18, 2026.

An opening reception for the new exhibitions at Arts + Literature Laboratory will be held Friday, March 13, 2026 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

Sita & Other Sisters: BLUE NAGA 

Sita and Other Sisters is a 15–30 minutes live, multimodal performance that weaves together poetry, embodied gesture, and audience participation. At its center is the figure of Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana epic, whose story has circulated across South and Southeast Asia in countless retellings. Sita is born from the Earth, wed to Rama, after being rescued from her abduction to Lanka, her purity was questioned. Though she walks through fire to prove her chastity, she remains doubted, ultimately exiled by Rama.

There will be a performance starting at 7:00pm during the Reception, and on two other Saturdays throughout the Exhibition, dates TBD.

In Thailand, Sita has been reappropriated as a symbol of resistance in the #MeToo movement, an emblem for survivors who refuse to carry the burden of shame imposed upon them. Drawing from this lineage, Sita & Other Sisters transforms performance into ritual. The artist stages a burial, inviting the audience to grieve collectively—not only for Sita, but for all women who have been subjected to violence, disbelief, and erasure.

The work unfolds as both mourning and refusal. By gathering the audience in a shared act of lamentation, Sita & Other Sisters disrupts the isolation of trauma and insists on the power of communal witness.

BLUE NAGA is a Thai interdisciplinary artist who works from a place of feminist haunting to create rituals that resist patriarchal and colonial narratives. Her works often animate female entities who refuse to forget violence through site-specific and participatory performances, installations, and video art. BLUE is currently a fine arts MFA candidate at UW-Madison. Her work has been showcased in multiple parts of the world, from London to Dubai, including at the UN Climate Meeting, COP28.

As the World Touches Us: Li Zhang 

As the World Touches Us brings together two-dimensional silk paintings and three-dimensional ceramic works inspired by the natural world and quiet emotional experiences. Plants, growth, decay, and the passing of time serve as starting points for the work. Some paintings turn inward, tracing moments of loss, growth, and parting, where emotional shifts unfold quietly alongside natural change.

In the silk paintings, mineral pigment is slowly guided into the silk through careful control and sustained focus, a process rooted in traditional Chinese silk painting. Color is built through many thin layers applied over time. This slow method reflects natural rhythms such as blooming, fading, and renewal. Forms drawn from flowers, stems, and flowing movement appear and dissolve. Earlier layers remain visible beneath the surface, suggesting how memory and feeling remain present over time.

The ceramic works extend these ideas into physical space. Each piece is formed with varied shapes and hand-carved surfaces that recall vessels, stones, and weathered fragments shaped by time. Carved lines, uneven textures, and visible marks of touch reflect pressure, erosion, and revision, showing a balance between fragility and strength.

Together, silk and ceramic create a conversation between delicacy and solidity, surface and form. As the World Touches Us invites viewers to slow down and notice how the natural world quietly touches us, leaving lasting impressions on both material and self.

Li Zhang is an artist and educator at Iowa State University whose practice spans painting, drawing, and ceramics, with a focus on the relationship between the natural world and human experience, as well as the dialogue between Western and Eastern traditions. Her work has been exhibited in both national and international venues.

Li’s artistic practice draws inspiration from natural forms and processes, including growth, movement, transition, and the passage of time. Through silk painting, she works with mineral pigments layered carefully into silk, allowing translucency, texture, and gradual change to emerge. In her ceramic work, Li explores these same ideas through three-dimensional form, using hand-built shapes, carved surfaces, and visible traces of touch to reference vessels, stones, and weathered fragments shaped by time.

Rivering: Marilyn Prescott

In the Rivering Series, Marilyn Prescott explores the lush forest environment surrounding the Fox River in NE Wisconsin. In an exhibit consisting of over 30 paintings and artist’s books, the artist has used her long walks as the springboard for large, heavily textured mixed media paintings. Monotype collage, Oriental papers, silk stripping and other experimental and eccentric media coalesce into abstract paintings that feature luminous, atmospheric backgrounds layered with hints of plants, animals, twigs, ice, snow.

Taking up a challenge originating with Cezanne, Prescott wrestles with colliding perspectives to explore the scrambled rhythms of our perception and memory when applied to the natural world. Visual memories are internalized then recontextualized in the studio to create a concrete artifact of the earlier experience. The resulting works are fractured glimpses seen through the prism of time. Human consciousness thus assumes an equal role in the act of creation.

Marilyn Prescott’s current series flows from her long solitary walks and hikes along the Fox River. She describes herself as “the supervisor of accidents”-developing imagery intuitively, by responding to evolving colors, shapes, textures in acrylic paint and mixed media. The artist says of her work, “I don’t make vistas. I don’t want an appreciative distancing. I want you to come close, to get dirt under your nails. I want you to walk along with me; to join me in willful immersion into a natural world that may be time limited." Marilyn Prescott has a BA from California State University at Long Beach, and graduate work at California State University at Fullerton and the University of California at Irvine. She has exhibited nationally and her work is in significant institutional and corporate collections across the US. She moved to NE Wisconsin in 2023.

Sanctuary Dreams, an exhibition by Ellie Braun

Braun's recent work has centered on the idea of imagining a future for the people, by the people. Combining work with commentary about social issues with colorful and bright visuals, Braun envisions a world vastly different from the one we are currently living in. Sanctuary Dreams presents an exploration of this idea in the context of community building. Braun examines the places and practices people turn to in order to work towards a bright future -- whether spiritual, religious, or cultural in one way or another -- and asks, what does creation and dreaming look like in a time of crisis?

The exhibition reflects Braun's ongoing commitment to making art accessible to everyone and her deep engagement with community-based artistic practice.

For the Love of Water, a group exhibition curated by Shea Schachameyer and Susan Simensky Bietila, featuring the work of April Stone, Bomgiizhik (Isaac Murdoch), Melanie Ariens, Richard Jones, Shea Schachameyer, and Susan Simensky Bietila

For the Love of Water is a grassroots resistance themed art exhibition to educate and inspire people to work collaboratively to protect the water. The show is a collaboration between Great Lakes artists whose work connects to water whether through the materials and methods used or the stories told. Water connects us all, and as such, so do the threats posed by extractive industries like mining and pipelines. By bringing the perspective of six different artists whose work is intimately connected to water, this exhibition encourages you to think about your connection to the water and presents a call to action.

April Stone, an Ojibwe Black Ash basket maker from the Bad River reservation in northern Wisconsin, has been working with black ash since 1998. She spent one year studying a basket in use before attempting to weave her first basket in the spring of 1999 and ended up falling in love with all things connected to this craft including live harvest and log processing of raw material into usable splint for weaving. Since 2000, she has researched and traveled extensively, sharing her skills with young and old. April harvests all of her raw materials from the ceded territory swamps and forests of northern Wisconsin and processes it all by hand, providing beautiful, natural material for her own baskets and for baskets made by others. She believes in the traditional skill building of handwork and the healing power of making baskets and has received much recognition for her working knowledge of Black Ash basketry, while being thought of as a patient and gentle educator.... Read More

Bomgiizhik is from Serpent River First Nation. He is of the Fish Clan and is Ojibwe. He has four beautiful children. He currently lives in the forest at Nimkii Aazhibikoong, a indigenous community that focuses on indigenous language, art, and land based activities. Being blessed with the opportunity, Bomgiizhik grew up in the traditional setting of hunting and gathering on the land. Having spent many year learning from Elders, he spends a lot of his time as a Story Teller. Many of these stories become his visual art pieces which have become recognized world wide. Bomgiizhik is also a singer song writer who loves to make music whenever he gets the chance. You will often find him on the land looking at his favorite plants or gazing into the beautiful night sky.

Melanie Ariens is a multi-media artist whose work focuses on the Great Lakes and freshwater issues. She uses art as a tool to create awareness and capture peoples’ hearts around water issues. Often she often uses a simple metaphor to frame how we perceive the state of the lakes. She creates water shrines and fetish pieces, serving to inspire stewardship for our shared waters, gently urging us all to celebrate and care for them. In the Great Lakes watershed where she lives, she feels we have a special responsibility to do this, for we are the stewards of one of the World’s greatest freshwater resources. Melanie has worked on many public art projects including for the Urban Ecology Center, the City of Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage district and the Watermarks project.

Richard Jones spent his early life with three bodies of water. A backyard swimming pool dug by his father, a yet wild neighborhood creek, and a chain of piedmont ravines flooded for hydro-power and cooling nuclear reactors. The tension between wildness and management control agendas in these bodies were reflected in the 70% of water that made up his own, and continues to show up in Richard’s work. This time was also marked by tutored lessons in drawing, which set his path and vision. Upon leaving his southern home he received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, discovered meditation from a Korean Zen Master and spent a long weekend at a Trappist Monastery in SC. He then spent thirty plus years in deep conversation with glass, a super-cooled liquid that at times has an uncanny resemblance to water. Currently he’s trying to excavate language from its watery origins; carving glass, making prints and engaging with other people.

Shea Schachameyer is from Milwaukee and today lives along the shores of Lake Superior and identifies as a queer woman, parent, adventurer, abolitionist, water protector, and community organizer. As a textile artist, Shea combines her commitment to social justice with her creativity to connect people to the times, places, and experiences that give us a feeling of belonging and connection in this beautiful, devastating world. While Shea’s work is based in traditional quilting practices, she incorporates innovative techniques into her art as well as her love of adventure and background in water science. Her map-based art is created from sewing layers of fabric together into topographic maps to tell stories of place. Shea’s larger works also seek to remind us that rest and self-care are radical acts of resistance and sometimes, the most important thing we can do is to hold one another.

Susan Simensky Bietila is a Milwaukee based activist artist. She is known primarily for her graphic non-fiction, published in the annual comics anthology, World War 3 Illustrated magazine, which she often co-edits. She also makes puppets which are carried by Water Protectors in communities where the waters are at risk from mining and pipelines. She works in scratchboard and ink, block prints, photography, silkscreen, cardboard sculpture and applique, and her stories often start with her own experience. Born in 1947, and growing up in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the famed High School of Music & Art, Brooklyn College in the age of Abstract Expressionism and much later UW-Milwaukee, studying printmaking and photography. She is also a retired RN, and finally free to do artwork all the time. Her first solo book, Front Lines: A Lifetime of Drawing Resistance is out from PM Press.