‘Wherever you go, there you art’ is the working ethos of Wisconsin artist Jeff Zimpel, who’s almost three weeks into an eight-month stint as the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Saint Kate hotel (139 E. Kilbourn, Milwaukee; 414-276-8686) in downtown Milwaukee.
For an energetic and interdisciplinary guy, the studio that surrounds him (just one of the gig’s benefits) seems remarkably organized. One wall displays tiny jars of pigments with the precision of a wildly colorful periodic table, and brushes and pieces of watercolor paper sit neatly next to a simple wooden table.
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But look closer, and little details pop out. The “brushes” are a jumble of sticks and reeds, little bundles of bits and bobs from the natural world. The jars of pigments aren’t uniform, commercially produced paints from the art supply store, but specifically harvested items that he’s sourced from around the state and across the world.
“These represent a whole lot of time and effort–time in the forest, time in the rivers, time in the natural world,” explains Zimpel. “These pigments come from all over. As long as you can grind something up and make it into a colorful dust, I can wield it as a paint.”
Pigment jars hold dried algae and scoops of lake mud and a hundred other samples from nature. To create paint, he chips or shaves a little bit off, crushes it with a block of jade, and grinds it to a fine dust by hand, using a mortar and pestle and a glass muller. Activated with oil or a bit of water, it’s now ready to paint.
Simply having an individual artistic vision, though, is just one part of what Saint Kate curator Samantha Timm sought when filling this niche at the arts-focused property. The AIR Space studio/gallery occupies a corner of the boutique hotel that it shares with a handful of performing arts spaces, nestled between the Milwaukee River and the historic City Hall. The driving force behind the Artist in Residence program envisions connecting hotel guests with arts experiences in many disciplines. According to Timm, Jeff’s invitation to guests to participate in any and every way that speaks to them made him a perfect person to open the program.
“He can unearth ecosystems and networks and activate them in a way that lets people be immediately immersed in what happens here,” she says. “We’re committed through all our arts programs to pushing boundaries and showing guests new things, and co-creating something you can’t find anywhere else in the world.”
So what does that look like on a typical afternoon or evening in Milwaukee?
“As people walk by and come into the studio, I’ll welcome them to take a look at the different pigments and engage them with where they come from,” says Zimpel. “A lot of people who come through here come from all over, and they can very quickly think of a place that they’ve been where there’s a particular color that just struck them and stopped them in their tracks. What I like to do is invite people to use the paints and brushes to make marks on resin, and that allows me to then trap it. And once it’s trapped, and as it cures, it gives off a lot of heat. And it wouldn’t do anything if it were a commercial pigment, but since it’s a natural pigment, there are other things in that powder that start to move and change and almost dance as it hardens. Then I light it and photograph it with really intense lenses, and that allows me to see what’s going on at the microscopic level. These colors are just unbelievable, and it’s all dependent on where they’re from and what that landscape is made of.”
These marks, Jeff Zimpel’s macro photographs of the ephemeral pigments, and other co-created works of visual art line the walls and tables of the space now. Much of this creation will be on display at the residency’s culmination, a gallery show called “Studio Ecology” that will hang for two months in the hotel. Between now and then, though, there’s a lot more creative give-and-take he’d like to explore: “The guests who come here from all over, they will teach me more about all of these things.”
More formal opportunities, from artist talks to small-group tours (that start with a signature cocktail, the Painter’s Mark) of the hotel’s permanent collection, are on the schedule. Music and performing arts, too, have spontaneously popped up inside the AIR Studio. Zimpel even hopes to partner with the food and beverage staff at the hotel for collaborations.
“There’s undeniably an alchemical spirit working on so many levels here,” he said. “You know, you take all the elements, and they add up to more than the elements should.”
For Midwest artists in any medium interested in applying for future cycles of the Saint Kate residency, the application is online.
