MILWAUKEE, WI.- Five recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists have been selected from a field of 168 applicants in the twenty-third annual competition. Evelyn Patricia Terry and Della Wells were chosen in the Established Artist category and will each receive a $20,000 fellowship. Nomka Enkhee, Laura Farahzad Mayer, and Yinan Wang will receive Emerging Artist fellowships of $10,000. Each artist will also receive a $5,000 professional development/production budget. All of the 2026 fellows are based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In addition to receiving an award, the Nohl Fellows will participate in professional development activities and studio visits, and in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in the summer of 2027. An exhibition catalogue will be published and disseminated nationally.

The finalists in the Established Artist category are Mike Gibisser, David Najib Kasir, Brit Krohmer, and Heidi Parkes.

The finalists in the Emerging artist category are Kayle Karbowski, Brandom Terres-Sanchez, and Sean Williamson.

The panel of jurors included Anthony Graham, Senior Curator at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; Mia Lopez, Curator of Latinx Art at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas; and Eileen Jeng Lynch, Director of Curatorial Programs, The Bronx Museum, New York. We were delighted to bring the jurors to Milwaukee for a public talk at the Haggerty Museum of Art and for studio visits with all twelve finalists.

The Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, the Nohl Fellowship program is a central pillar of Lynden’s support for artists. The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.

Artist Mary L. Nohl of Fox Point, Wisconsin, died in December 2001 at the age of 87. She left a $9.6 million bequest to the Greater Milwaukee Foundation. Her fund supports local visual arts and education programs, keeping her passion for the visual arts alive in the community.

The Fellows

Established Artists

EVELYN PATRICIA TERRY

Fueled by an instructor’s advice—“You graduate as printmakers, but feel free to explore other art disciplines”—Evelyn Patricia Terry built a career after earning a BFA and MS from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As a full-time professional artist, she enjoys writing, curating, mentoring, collecting art, archiving, and producing non-objective and figurative pastel drawings. She has created commissioned oil portraits, found-object assemblages, marked-up sewn recycled drawings, and book art using her recycled monotypes. Her recent site-specific commissioned installation at ThriveOn King, America’s Favor, America: Guests Who Came to Dinner and Stayed (2024), features a 16-foot table with recycled wood–turned legs, globally sourced ethnic dolls, a George Ray McCormick Sr. sculpture, and plates adorned with raw-food replicas. Together, these elements encourage healthy choices, thoughtful reflection, and a deeper understanding of America’s beginnings—how and why we are here.

“The good that I am seeking is also seeking me,” Terry, a Black American artist, affirms. “My work contributes to ‘Making America Great—Eventually.’” She is interested in artists who exemplify creative freedom: in her pantheon, you’ll find Faith Ringgold alongside newsmakers Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. Philosophically, metaphysics guides her manifestation of “the unseen,” while phenomenology informs “the seen”—nontraditional material choices that include “girly things” such as beads, buttons, jewelry parts, and glitter. Art consultants, museums, and galleries have assisted her in directing her artwork to more than 500 corporate, private, museum, and special library collections worldwide. She has exhibited locally, regionally, and internationally in Spain, Germany, Japan, and Russia, and has created public art projects for her neighborhood and for Mitchell International Airport. Terry was named a City of Milwaukee Artist of the Year in 2014.

DELLA WELLS

Della Wells (b. 1951, Milwaukee, Wisconsin), is a nationally recognized collage artist. As a child, she invented stories and characters based on her mother’s recollections of growing up in North Carolina during the 1920s through the 1940s. This practice led to her later narrative style. Much of Wells's work takes place in Mambo Land, a conceptual environment “where Black women rule."

Her collages, drawings, and recent collaborative textiles employ a symbolic vocabulary of imagery such as a chicken (symbol of fear and truth), ancestors peering through windows, butterflies (emancipation), and the reframing and reclaiming of racist tropes such as watermelon, alligators, and Miss Ann.

A play about her life by Y York, Don’t Tell Me I Can’t Fly, was workshopped at The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and premiered at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts in Milwaukee. Wells has illustrated two children’s books. Her work is included in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; the Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin; the Intuit Art Museum, Chicago; the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; the Bunker Artspace, Palm Beach, Florida; the Lumber Room Collection, Portland, Oregon; and many private collections. Wells received the City of Milwaukee Artist of the Year Award in 2016. She is represented by the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee and serves on the board of the Bronzeville Center for the Arts.

Emerging Artists

NOMKA ENKHEE

Nomka Enkhee is obsessed with repetitions, rituals, and tics, dealing with themes of the domestic, migration, translation, and systems of caretaking and migration. By merging drawing and poetry, she creates a lexicon of bodies through sculpture and performance. Enkhee is in constant conversation with the objects she creates through methods of preservation. Over the past year, she has invested in researching Tuuli, a form of oral Mongolian epic poetry. A traditional Tuuli combines eulogies, spells, idiomatic phrases, fairy tales, myths, and folk songs. She weaves in traditional elements of oral storytelling in her work, reinterpreting narration through experimental writing and performance. “I’m invested in exploring translation and its inherent gaps,” observes Enkhee, “creating an invisible void, friction, and immense freedom.”

Enkhee studied sculpture at the Kunsthochschule Mainz in Germany, received her BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), and is an alumna of the Yale Norfolk School of Art. She has received the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix emerging artist grant, a fellowship from the Plum Blossom Initiative's Bridge Work program, and has attended residencies at ACRE, Image Text Workshop Residency, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Special Collections. She has an upcoming residency at the Wassaic Project. In 2022, she founded the Ping Pong Book Club, a community group for AAPI people in Milwaukee that meets bi-weekly to discuss readings and organize public events. Enkhee is the co-director of e.s.r. (experimental sculpture room), an exhibition space and a publishing practice based in Milwaukee.

LAURA FARAHZAD MAYER

Laura Farahzad Mayer is a Milwaukee-based artist and educator. Her experience growing up as the daughter of an Iranian immigrant in a small town informs her work, which navigates through the grief of losing her father while seeking to connect two generations—her father and her children—who were never living at the same time. Her work explores themes of memory, grief, culture, and generational storytelling. Farahzad Mayer works across many mediums in her practice—process and form are often conceptual considerations in making the work—but frequently returns to printmaking, artist books, and small sculptures. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work, and her children are often active participants.

Laura Farahzad Mayer earned her BFA at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point before beginning a career as a graphic artist in Chicago. She completed her MA and MFA at the University of Iowa where she also earned a certificate from the Center for the Book. Farahzad Mayer is a professor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD).

YINAN WANG 王一男

Yinan Wang 王一男 is a filmmaker born and raised in Beijing and now based in Milwaukee. Working across personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms, his practice explores how memory, language, humor, ritual, and food shape our sense of home—following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing. His recent work, 甜腻腻 Thick & Sweet, reconstructs both personal and collective memories of a local Chinese restaurant through cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, quietly probing how images form—and deform—cultural identity.

Wang received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and his MFA from Temple University. His work has been shared across festivals, community programs, classrooms, and international venues. A 2022 Flaherty Fellow and 2020 University Film and Video Fellow, he has received the Cream City Cinema Jury Award and the Sikay Tang Critical Lens Award, and his practice has been supported by the Brico Forward Fund, the Harry L. Friedberg Award, and the Robert A. Nelson Scholarship.

The five fellows selected in the 2025 cycle of the competition—Michelle Grabner and Michael Newhall in the Established Artist category; and Emerging Artists Sarah Ballard, Margaret Griffin, and Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina + Alyx Christensen) —will open an exhibition of their work at the Haggerty Museum of Art in June 2026.