MIAD Creativity Series
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 6 p.m.
Aaron Boyd ’93
“Be on the Field, the Art of Aaron Boyd”
MIAD 160 Auditorium & Gallery, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
Free admission. Tickets are required for this event due to limited seating. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
About the presentation
Aaron Boyd ’93 is an award-winning Milwaukee illustrator and creator of books for children and their communities children’s book creator whose work is included in the Cooper Hewitt collection at the Smithsonian. Throughout his career, Boyd has followed Guided by the advice: “Get in the short lines first,” See what works, learn, be open to different ideas and possibilities, and grow. Boyd shares how, over time, shared collective ideas, creativity and kindness return to inspire and affirm the transformative power of art.
Generously supported by Bert L. and Patricia S. Steigleder Charitable Trust.
“Through the MIAD Creativity Series, the college will bring distinctive and internationally renowned creatives to Milwaukee from a broad spectrum of the visual arts to enrich the experiences of MIAD students while engaging the community in new ways of thinking about, and appreciating, the arts and the world of design.”
– MIAD Past Board Chair Madeleine Kelly Lubar
Dominic Chambers - "Shadow Companions" | November 6, 2024
Wednesday, November 6, 2024, 6 p.m.
Dominic Chambers – “Shadow Companions”
MIAD, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
About the presentation
Dominic Chambers ’16 (M.F.A. Yale ’19) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models and contemporary concerns around race, identity and, most recently, the necessity for leisure and reflection – acts he believes the Black body has been imagined, and depicted, as incapable of.
This retrospective explores not only Chambers’ intellectual and creative trajectory but also the mentorship that has nurtured his creative impulses and intrigue – his “shadow companions.”
Generously supported by Bert L. and Patricia S. Steigleder Charitable Trust, and in part by a grant from the Milwaukee Arts Board and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin, with additional support from Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel.
Pao Houa Her - "Freshly Cut Plastic Flowers: The Hmong-American Dream" | November 8, 2023
Wednesday, November 8, 2023, 6 p.m.
Pao Houa Her – “Freshly Cut Plastic Flowers: The Hmong-American Dream”
MIAD, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
About the presentation
Pao Houa Her – an award-winning Hmong American photographer and Guggenheim Fellow – fled the northern jungles of Laos with her family when she was a baby, crossed the Mekong on her mother’s back, lived in the refugee camps in Thailand, and landed in America on a silver metal bird in the mid-1980s.
Her’s presentation will share stories, images, and observations centered on the Hmong-American experience and the complex realities of diasporic communities.
Pao, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, received her BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and her MFA from Yale University.
Generously sponsored by the Bert L. and Patricia S. Steigleder Charitable Trust with additional support from Sculpture Milwaukee.
Cas Holman - "The Power of Play: How We Can Use Imagination and Curiosity to Change the World"| February 15, 2023
Wednesday, February 15, 2023, 6 p.m.
Cas Holman – “The Power of Play: How We Can Use Imagination and Curiosity to Change the World”
MIAD, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
Free admission. Tickets are required for this event due to limited seating. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
About the presentation
Award-winning toy designer and educator Cas Holman illustrates how play is a fundamental element of creativity. Using her own design work and decades of observing and facilitating play, Holman explains how play inspires unexpected outcomes and allows for new discoveries.
Holman is founder and principal at toy company Heroes will Rise, and the designer of the world-renowned RIGAMAJIG. Her work can be seen at casholman.com.
Generously sponsored by the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.
vanessa german presents "citizen artist" | November 10, 2022
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 6 p.m.
vanessa german presents “citizen artist”
MIAD, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
Free admission. Tickets are required for this event due to limited seating. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
This event is generously supported by Bert L. and Patricia S. Steigleder Charitable Trust.
About the presentation
Sculptor, painter, writer, activist, performer, poet and visual storyteller, vanessa german is known for her sculptural assemblages or “Power Figures.” german will offer an intimate, interactive talk that journeys through the worlds of her practice as a visual and performance artist.
In conjunction with Then as Now: Woodland Pattern 1980-2022 exhibition on view through December 3, 2022.
Note: No audio recording, video recording or photography is permitted during this event.
About vanessa german
(b. Milwaukee, WI 1976)
vanessa german is a self-taught citizen artist working across sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installation, and photography, in order to repair and reshape disrupted systems, spaces, and connections. The artist’s practice proposes new models for social healing, utilizing creativity and tenderness as vital forces to reckon with the historical and ongoing catastrophes of structural racism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, resource extraction, and misogynoir.
A visual storyteller, german utilizes assemblage and mixed media, combining locally found objects to build protective ritualistic structures known as her power figures or tar babies. Modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and drawing on folk art practices, they are embellished with materials including beading, glass, fabric, and sculpted wood, and come into existence at the axis on which Black power, spirituality, mysticism and feminism converge.
german’s artistic practice is intertwined with and inextricable from her dedicated role in activism and community leadership. In 2011, german founded the Love Front Porch, an arts initiative for the women, children, and families of the local neighborhood that began after she moved her studio practice onto the front steps of her home. Three years later, in 2014, german opened the ARThouse, which combines a community studio, a large garden, an outdoor theatre, and an artist residency.
german has been awarded the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant, the 2017 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 United States Artist Grant and, most recently, the 2018 Don Tyson Prize from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Her work is held in private and public collections including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Akron Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Figge Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts, and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
Salvador Jiménez-Flores - "Art, Education & Citizenship: A Creative Journey" | November 17, 2021
MIAD Creativity Series welcomes Salvador Jiménez-Flores
Wednesday, November 17, 2021, 6 p.m.
vanessa german presents “citizen artist”
MIAD, 273 E. Erie St. Milwaukee
In-person at MIAD | Free & open to the public
Generously supported by Sculpture Milwaukee.
About the presentation
Salvador Jiménez-Flores shares his journey as an artist, an educator and a citizen. From making art as a coping mechanism as an immigrant teenager to the art he makes today, he explores the politics of identity and addresses issues of colonization, migration, “the other” and futurism. Jiménez-Flores has work on view along MIAD’s Riverwalk as part of Sculpture Milwaukee.
Titus Kaphar - Making Space for Black History: Amending the Landscape of American Art | February 5, 2020
Wednesday, February 5, 2020, 6 p.m.
Titus Kaphar
Titus Kaphar presents “Making Space for Black History: Amending the Landscape of American Art”
MIAD’s 4th Floor Raw Space. Free admission. .
Generous support by the Milwaukee Art Museum’s African American Art Alliance and the Layton Visiting Artist Fund.
About the presentation
Titus Kaphar confronts history and the canon of Western art head on – exposing troubling histories of our nation’s past and amplifying the voices of those who cannot speak for themselves.
About Titus Kaphar
A painter, sculptor and activist, Kaphar’s work is in public collections worldwide and his numerous accolades include:
- 2018 MacArthur Fellow
- 2018 Art for Justice Fund grantee
- 2018 Rappaport Prize winner
- 2016 Robert R. Rauschenberg Artist as Activist
- 2015 Creative Capital grantee
Kaphar’s artworks capture the spirit of social justice and change in America today (exemplified in his TIME cover portrait of the Ferguson protests).
The public presentation for the MIAD Creativity Series is part of a short residency at MIAD, during which Kaphar will engage with MIAD students in the classroom as well as with Milwaukee Public School students.
For previous Creativity Series events, please see the MIAD Creativity Series Archive.