The table is 16 feet long and impossible to ignore.
Set for a kind of symbolic dinner, “America’s Favor / America: Guests Who Came to Dinner and Stayed,” brings together globally sourced dolls, sculptural elements and uncanny food replicas. It’s both a history lesson and a pointed question about who gets a seat and why. It’s also one of the most recent works by Evelyn Patricia Terry, a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee alum whose art continues to evolve.
This year, her work landed one of the region’s biggest honors: the 2026 Mary L. Nohl Fellowship in the Established Artist category, which includes $25,000 in unrestricted funding. For Terry, the recognition is a continuation of the work she’s been creating, often without much institutional backing, since the 1970s.
“I had no idea how that could be — making a living as an artist,” Terry said of her early years. “People say ‘starving artist’ all the time. But that didn’t matter to me. I just kept doing it, and things fell in line.”
As a full-time artist, Terry’s work is held in more than 500 public and private collections, including the Milwaukee Art Museum, Stanford University and the Smithsonian. She’s also exhibited internationally in Moscow, Japan, Spain and Germany.
Finding her way
Terry grew up in Milwaukee with a mother who pushed her children toward practical careers. At UWM, Terry followed that advice, enrolling in home economics. But it never really clicked. “I was a quiet person (and) it was hard for me to learn things, even though I’d come home all the time and teach what I learned to my younger sisters,” she said.
What did click was a class called “related arts,” in which she made simple collages and stitched burlap. A professor pulled her aside and named a career she had never imagined before.
“They said, ‘I think you’re an artist,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t even know what that is… but my mother wants me to get a degree.’”
She found her way to the printmaking studio and knew she was in the right place. “When I looked at what they were doing, I felt like this is where I’m supposed to be,” she said. “That was amazing to me. I went home and told my mother I wanted to be an artist.”
The pivot wasn’t seamless. “I flunked out of school before I could get involved with the art program,” she said. Terry regrouped for a year at Milwaukee Area Technical College, then returned to UWM to study art in earnest.
Terry earned both a BFA and a master’s in art from UWM, as well as a MFA in printmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She then began building a practice that now spans collage, assemblage, printmaking, painting, book arts, site-specific installations and public art.
Along with the noteworthy exhibitions she has been part of across the globe, Terry has earned commissions with Northwestern Mutual Insurance Foundation, Planned Parenthood, Miller Brewing Company and more. It was a career trajectory built over time. Over the years, she’s made a concerted effort to address the issue of Black people missing in accounts of art history.
Looking behind and ahead
Looking back on her early education, Terry remembers what wasn’t there as much as what was. “There weren’t any Black artists in the books,” she said. “I thought I was the first one.”
That absence shaped how she approached both her own work and the broader art world. Beginning in the 1970s, Terry curated exhibitions, often focused on Black artists and women, and created catalogs to document them.
In her own work, that impulse shows up as accumulation. Terry collects materials ranging from paper scraps to dolls and builds from there. The dolls, many of them ethnically specific, recur across her work, acting as stand-ins for histories that have been simplified or overlooked.
“I collect a lot of marked up paper pieces,” she said. “I started sewing them together, and as I was sewing together, I listened to the news.”
A series often starts small — a fragment of a conversation, a headline — and builds from there. Pieces are stitched, layered and assembled, with narrative carried through both image and title.
Responding to the moment
In one piece, Terry responds to the separation of undocumented Mexican and Central American families at the border. “I was listening to NPR almost nonstop,” she said. “Children and parents were separated in detention centers.” Using rag paper and recycled scraps, she layers pastel, ink and graphite in an organic fashion until she feels it tells a story. “I never start with a sketch,” she added.
These days, Terry works out of a space that triples as her home, studio and gallery — a setup that reflects how closely her daily life and work are intertwined. Her front door bears an assembled directive: Be Nice or Leave.
It’s less of an attitude than an approach. Terry doesn’t over explain the work or over plan what comes next. She stays with what’s in front of her. “I live a day, and that’s it,” she said. “I live in the moment.”
