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Kenilworth Open Studios
September 28, 2025 @ 11:00 am – 2:00 pm
Immerse yourself in creativity when Peck School of the Arts student and faculty artists open their studios to the public during Doors Open Milwaukee. From exhibitions and studio visits to live performances and family-friendly art activities, you’ll find something to excite you at Kenilworth Open Studios.
Located in the heart of Milwaukee’s East Side neighborhood, Kenilworth Square East is the Peck School of the Arts’ creative research facility. Formerly a Ford Model T factory, you’ll now find artist studios along with research, instruction, performance and production spaces.
2025 Schedule of Events
Here’s what we have planned for you at Kenilworth Open Studios. Schedule subject to change.
Architect-led Tour
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| 1st Floor – Prospect Avenue entrance | Professor James Shields, AIA, was one of the architects behind the major renovation that ushered in a new era for Kenilworth Square East. Professor Shields will offer firsthand insights into what went into its transformation. Gather at 11 a.m. for the tour. |
Art & Design
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| 1st Floor – Gallery | Faculty Exhibition: Sum Total 2025 |
| 3rd Floor – Gallery | Fibers Exhibition: Woven Images 2025 |
| 3rd Floor – Commons | Pop-up Sale & Display with OBJECT Student Organization |
| 3rd Floor – DVC Adream Lab (339) | Senior Design & Visual Communication students will be working on projects using the equipment, including risograph printing, laser cutting, vinyl cutting and more. |
| 3rd Floor – Digital Fabrication Lab (368, 375) | Hands-on Activity with DigiFab Student Organization |
| 3rd Floor – Patio | Paper Maker’s Garden, a paper making farm and interdisciplinary research collaboration with Electra Quinney Institute. |
| 4th Floor – Commons | Hands-on Activity with Print Club |
| 5th Floor – Commons | Family-friendly, Hands-on Art Activity with Art Education Faculty and Students |
| Various Floors – Studios | Get an inside look at various faculty, staff, and student studios |
Film & Animation
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| 1st Floor – Screening Room | Screening: Recent Student & Faculty Work |
| 4th Floor – Room 408 | Lighting & Cinematography Display |
| 4th Floor – Room 416 | Demonstration of Live, Interactive Foley Performance: Falling in Terms of Silent with Associate Professor Kelly Kirshtner |
| 4th Floor – Room 420 | Screening: Works-in-Progress by Graduate Students |
| 4th Floor – Room 445 | doc|UWM creates documentaries that connect communities and spark dialogue around social issues. Guests are invited to experience our studio, meet director Sean Kafer and students, and join us for a screening of Brady Street: Portrait of a Neighborhood. |
| 4th Floor – Room 468 | Spooky Candy Jam: Make your own animation out of candy using animation cameras with help from Animation Club members. Come play with your food! |
| 4th Floor – Room 485 | Animation Demonstration: Destructive animation and painting under the camera with Assistant Professor and experimental animator Laura Harrison |
| 4th Floor – Room 491 | VR Film Experience with Assistant Professor Joel Benjamin |
| 4th Floor – Commons | Handmade Film Workshop: Direct Animation, Scratch Film, “Film Destroy” Techniques and Loop Making |
| Various Floors – Studios | Get an inside look at various faculty, staff, and student studios |
Music, Theatre & Dance
| Location | Description |
|---|---|
| 5th Floor – Commons | Pop-up Classical Guitar Performances |
| 5th Floor – Commons | Music Historian Research Display |
| 5th Floor – Kenilworth Five-0-Eight Theatre | Musical Theatre Show Tunes Tune-Up |
| 6th Floor – Jan Serr Studio | Pop-up Performances by UWM Jazz’s “Jane’s Combo” |
| 6th Floor – Classroom (660) | 11 a.m. | Winterdances Open Rehearsal with Dawn Springer 11:30 a.m. | Care Open Rehearsal with Maria Gillespie 12:00 p.m. | The Canvas and the Cage Research project with Maria Gillespie 12:30 p.m. | Dance 412: Composition 1 Showing with Maria Gillespie 1:00 p.m. | Wild Space Dance Company Rehearsal with Dan Schuchart 1:30 p.m. | Winterdances Open Rehearsal with Ishmael Konney |
Artist Studios
Cam
308
I’m a printmaker and photographer who works across multiple mediums, creating art that combines traditional graffiti and digital.
Neb Berry
308
Printmaker and fibers artist using fabric, medical imagery, and food to dissect the fat body and experience. Currently focusing on food packaging and the way we speak about food and its effect on our bodies, both emotionally and physically.
Dawn Ellen Van Kley-Imes
308
Fiber Artist who is doing research in plant dyeing on fabric to use in quiltmaking and fabric collage. Plants gift us with many things which include color, medicine and food. They also share nutrition with each other through an underground network.
Josie Osborne
325
Josie Osborne is a print, collage and assemblage artist who is also a member of the Art Build Workers collective. Osborne’s personal work is informed by poetry, written word and personal experience.
Aaron Kia Napunako Boyd
331
Sculptor and metalworker of Kanaka ‘Oiwi and mixed heritage. Diasporic relationships of knowledge based on place/linking the passing of knowledge within indigenous communities and plant communities, senescence structures, and stewardship.
Jacob Alba
337
Jeweler whose creative research interests revolve around the use of modern Digital Fabrication technology alongside traditional bench jewelry practices. Currently working on sculptural/architectural pieces exploring the skill of stone setting.
Arthur Gibson
342
Metalsmith whose research focuses on tool making both functional and sculptural. Inspired by the mishmashed dialectical objects of the surrealist movement. Current work involves combining various tools in an inventive and humourous way.
Lily Wilkie-Jones
343
A sculpture and print maker, I use found objects and photos to create metal objects and the environments around them.
Joel Butler
349
Anti-fascist intermedia artist who explores altered states of consciousness through automatism and flow. Grounded in the tradition of surrealism, playing with themes of queerness/othering, the grotesque, and the visual language of comics.
Jorge Ariel Escobar
349
Queer/Latinx image-maker exploring the ephemeral nature of analog photography as a metaphor for the fleeting, intimate connections within queer relationships.
Amy O’Neill
355
Observational painter interested in intersections and balances between community and isolation, and the collaborative effort to build and maintain shared commonalities. Currently working on small landscapes painted from direct observation.
Jeremy Plunkett
367
Hyperrealist Painter and Printmaker interested in how mundane subjects and cast light further insight metaphor for life and death, human and artifice, or use and waste.
Cynthia Brinich-Langlois
371
Even when we think we’re being subtle and unobtrusive, animals are aware and regard us with caution. They step aside, they recede and give us space. But they still watch us. So in these works, animals stare back at us. Their gaze meets ours.
Kelly Kirshtner
416
Kelly Kirshtner is an artist and sound designer whose work takes a speculative approach to storytelling through sound, moving image, and intermedia practices.
Alex Witteman
424
Photographer and sculptor whose work seeks to combine and amplify these two mediums through experimentation and documentation. Mostly explores themes of isolation and commodification of necessities in the modern world.
kathryn e. martin – meurer
435
An enthusiastic (and happy) maker who works to find inherent, potential connections between materials and meaning as a way to cite sculptures in space.
Daniel Atkinson
436
Exploring various processes in printmaking and brick sculpture.
Liya Du
437
As a visual artist and mother of two, my work explores the reconciliation of art and mothering life through themes of time, memory, domestic labor, and the mother–child relationship by using painting & drawing, book art and mix-media.
Ethan Sorge
442
Photographer who is interested in seeking out community narratives in Milwaukee. My current work is focused on the indigenous people and history of the area, two big topics that are often overlooked. I am also interested in making films.
Shirine Shah
449
Filmmaker, writer.
Alessandro Streccioni
449
If I close my eyes and see an image, where does that image come from? This is one of the questions that Alessandro Streccioni, filmmaker and artist, asks himself every day.
Lin Chen
455
Lin Chen is a experimental and documentary filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist exploring memory and everyday life.
Isaac Brooks
459
Filmmaker and sound recordist editing a current short work.
Steve Wetzel
465
In addition to my work as the head of school for Peck, I am an artist and filmmaker. For this event I will be wandering the halls, but please feel free to walk through my studio.
Jesse McLean
467
I’m primarily a filmmaker, making experimental nonfiction films. I’ve dedicated my creative research and art practice to exploring what it means to be human in relation to what is not.
Laura Harrison
485
I am a filmmaker whose creative practice incorporates painting, writing and all forms of animation to create experimental hybrid narrative films. Currently I am working on a new film entitled Partial Love Objects.
Joseph Mougel
494
Joseph Mougel’s site-responsive work spanning photography, video, & performance. His current explorations bridge historical photograpic processes with current technologies. Visitors can print an AI image as a cyanotype, to be toned with botanicals.
Geornica Daniels
524
In my sculptures and installations, I navigate the tension between preservation and loss. My works often undergo a metamorphosis during their creation, transitioning from pliable and moist states to structured and rigid forms.
Nathaniel Stern
535
Artist, poet, and engineer whose art explores the co-evolution of humans and technology – from fire and language to the Internet and AI. Recent exhibition of installations opened in Michigan, covered in Forbes, coming to Milwaukee and Kansas.
Winifred Elysse Newman
539
I am a researcher in neuroscience and architecture, and I also serve as the Dean of the College and Schools. For this event, please stop by for coffee and talk.
Mer Garcia
542
Printmaker and 3D artist whose explores the ties between memory, identity, and tradition. Rooted in storytelling, it seeks to preserve fragments of my heritage and family history, capturing memories to keep them alive.
Jack Lehtinen
543
My art practice looks to critique what is lost because of AI technologies by contrasting automated machine-made processes with tactile, human-centered practices like print and papermaking.
Angela Piehl
549
My collages, paintings, and drawings explore tensions found in accumulations.
Jamie Bertsch
553
The process is the point of it. Jamie Bertsch works in wood, paper, textiles + the poetics of color. Always learning about how things are made— and listening intently to the intuitive process of it all.
Cynthia Hayes
553
A painter whose recent work is inspired by observations made during her travels throughout China while visiting PSOA’s partner institution, Hubei University of Technology in Wuhan. Colorful contemporary and historical imagery coincide in her work.
New in 2025! Kenilworth Open Studios is taking place during Doors Open Milwaukee.