Two MIAD alumni named Mary L. Nohl Fellows for 2025

Two alumni from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) have received Emerging Artist fellowships from the 2025 Mary L. Nohl Fund for its 2025 cycle: Margaret Griffin ’23 (Fine Art + New Studio Practice) and Open Kitchen, co-founded by Rudy Medina ’12 (Integrated Studio Arts).

Each year, the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship awards $70,000 between five visual artists in Established and Emerging Artist categories. Griffin and Medina will each receive $10,000, as well as a $5,000 professional development or production budget. Michelle Grabner and Michael Newhall were also awarded in the Established Artist category, and Sarah Ballard was selected as an Emerging Artist. The fellowship will culminate in an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art in summer 2026.

“When I received a phone call from Polly Morris, executive director of Lynden Sculpture Garden who administers the Nohl Fellowship …. I was filled with immense gratitude,” says Griffin. Although she was eligible to apply right after graduating in 2023, Griffin waited and applied for the 2025 cycle “in order to focus both on developing my practice, as well as myself as a person, being a new graduate … [I] felt not only incredibly grateful, but also very blessed to have received it.”

Medina’s Open Kitchen is a long-running project, founded in 2017 with his partner and co-founder Alyx Christensen and in partnership with his brother Alan Medina. “Open Kitchen is a passion project and somewhat of an anomaly,” explains Medina. “It began as a question about how we source food, where it comes from, and in the past four years, how we grow our own. These questions turned us into a public sphere that shape-shifts across the seasons by way of an artist-in-residence and curating regional and seasonal food-related research projects, gastronomic gatherings, interdisciplinary collaborations, and site-specific happenings.”

Margaret Griffin, “Accoutrements (Causatum of Touch),” 2024. Image courtesy of Lynden Sculpture Garden.

Reflecting on what receiving the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship means to Open Kitchen, Medina says, “The … fellowship comes at an opportune time, when we’ve been directing our energies towards tangible materials and archives for our findings across eight years of running Open Kitchen. We are really excited to develop a new body of work that will be exhibited alongside our cohort in 2026 at the Haggerty Museum. Lastly, we’d like to deeply thank Polly Morris, and the Lynden Sculpture Garden, for letting us evolve our work as artists-in-residence.”

During this fellowship, Griffin hopes to “further expand my understanding of what it takes to be a working artist, as well as form connections with artists and other professionals that I may not otherwise be able to. The next year and a half are going to require a lot of diligent, hard work, but I am looking forward to experiencing all that comes from it.”

Part of that hard work will be preparing for the final exhibition in 2026 at the Haggerty Museum of Art. For Griffin, it “will be the largest show I have had to prepare for thus far in my career. I am looking forward to the time I will spend working towards this milestone, which I know will allow me to grow in both endurance and persistence as an artist; being able to do this alongside the other fellowship artists I know will also deepen my understanding of the importance of community, something that I have learned over the years is one of, if not the most important, aspects of the creative field.”

As a MIAD student, Medina split his time between design, through Interior Architecture and Design, and art, through sculpture. “At that time it felt chaotic to be split between the highly disciplined process of architectural drawings and model making, and the counterintuitive ways of sculpting objects and exhibition spaces. What I appreciated about MIAD was their willingness to adapt to my unique conundrum. I was fortunate enough to be amongst a critical and constructive faculty that helped me pave the way for work that followed graduation. From these strong relationships with my professors came great friendships that I hold dear to this day.”

Forming strong relationships was also important in Griffin’s MIAD experience. A transfer student who started at MIAD during the COVID-19 pandemic, Griffin remembered an impactful visit by an alum to one of her online classes. The former student shared “that their time at MIAD was the most fruitful when they had ‘found their people,’” says Griffin. Will Pergl, sculpture faculty at MIAD, and Mira Rychner, sculpture lab technician, had a significant impact on Griffin’s MIAD experience. “I learned so much from them about not only art making and processes, but about what it means to grow as a maker, and person, of confidence—something that is of invaluable significance when it comes to pursuing a career in the arts.” Monica Miller, MIAD’s director of galleries and community engagement, also served as a mentor to Griffin.

After graduation, Griffin was accepted into the Plum Blossom Initiative’s 10-month Bridge Work professional development program. “During this program, the biggest impact I experienced … was the learning curve of, but eventual sustainable ability to, delegate my own schedule and time management outside of MIAD,” she explains. Now, Griffin is showing work in MIAD’s newest exhibition celebrating 10 years of the Bridge Work program. “Bridge Work: Ten Years of Making” is on view until March 8, 2025 in MIAD’s Frederick Layton Gallery.

Medina is also deeply connected to Milwaukee’s art community. “Through my junior and senior year at MIAD, I was already trying to sense the pulse of the art world at-large … Since 2010, I’ve directed and co-founded a range of public facing projects in Milwaukee and Chicago.” From experimental studio and exhibition venues, to formal art galleries with capacity for large-scaled installation and performance art, to a cinematheque located in a storefront on the south side of Chicago, to the current food and land-related research art collective Open Kitchen, Medina has connected, engaged with and enriched his community and the Milwaukee arts community as a whole.

Griffin and Medina were selected from a field of 157 applicants to the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship. Many finalists are also MIAD alumni: Phoenix Brown ’19 (Fine Art + New Studio Practice) and Ariana Vaeth ’17 (Integrated Studio Arts) were finalists in the established artist category, while Seth Ter Haar ’23 (Fine Art + New Studio Practice) and Brandom Terres-Sanchez ’23 (Fine Art + New Studio Practice) were finalists in the emerging artist category.

Learn more about the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship, explore MIAD’s Fine Art + New Studio Practice major, and keep up with Griffin and Medina!