A Breath of Fresh Art
“Democracy in Life & Art”
A Breath of Fresh Art was a joint project of Katherine Kramer Projects and the Mount Horeb Area Arts Association, made possible by grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board and Dane County Arts. The event was held on September 21-22, 2024 at Primrose Retreat, featuring performing and visual artists exploring the theme of Democracy in Life & Art.
Audience members followed maps around an historic farmstead to take in performances and view art installations by more than two dozen dancers, musicians, spoken word artists, and visual artists from Dane County and the Driftless Area arts communiity.
“A Breath of Fresh Art" is supported in part by generous grants from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as by Dane Arts. Thank you to Create Wisconsin and TNW Theater Ensemble for fiscal receiver services.
Thank you to our supporters.
Artist Sponsor: Elizabeth Stanfield
Stage Sponsors: Judy McKnight-Predmore, Tim Kruse, Luke & Laura Metzker, Jack Kramer & Susan Hayes
Friends of the Arts: Scott Sobol, Sawyer and Clayton Reynolds, and Ashley Sheridan
Artist Lineup
Primrose Tap Ensemble
Katherine Kramer, a jazz tap artist, is dedicated to building community through art, and art through community. After decades of performing around the globe, she is thrilled to be in Wisconsin, performing with tap dancers Sean Frenzel and Shona Mitteldorf, and pianist Leah Reinardy.
-
Sean Frenzel is a graduate of UW-Stevens Point, achieving a BA in Dance and Arts Management in 2020 before moving to Madison in 2022 to further pursue a career in the non-profit sector. He has been tap dancing since he was two years old and has studied under Cory Lozier, Matt Pospeshil, Mark Yonally, Jeannie Hill, and Katherine Kramer. Sean has been a performer, choreographer, dance instructor, sound board operator, stage manager, and director of several productions throughout his career. The ideas of improvisation, interpersonal connection, and whimsy are at the core of his creative process, and he hopes to continue to find new and unique ways to push himself as a dancer and musician.
-
Shona Mitteldorf began her dance training in childhood, focusing on tap dance in addition to hip-hop, jazz, ballet, and contemporary styles. During her college years at Johns Hopkins University, she was active in student dance organizations, and she received the Homewood Arts Certificate in Dance. Since moving to the Madison, Wisconsin area in 2014, Shona has been teaching tap and also co-directs Breakthrough Dance Company.
-
Leah Reinardy is a multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and composer whose creative work is most informed by limitations. As a disabled artist, they view their limitations as parameters that spark the creative process rather than barriers to overcome. Leah studied percussion and jazz piano at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where they served as musical director for tap master Heather Cornell for 2 years. This transformative experience led them to intentionally seek collaborations with dancers of many disciplines including tap, samba, maracatu, and ballet.
Omari Carter
Omari Carter is the founder of Motion Dance Collective, a screendance production company for which he directs, produces, choreographs, and performs. Hailing from London, England, Carter performed for 7 years in the West End and international tour of Stomp!. Following this, Carter graduated from the trailblaizing MA in Screendance at London Contemporary Dance School in 2020, where he became an assistant lecturer in dance until 2023. Carter's practice revolves predominantly around dances of Hip Hop Culture, Screendance and Body Percussion.
As a director, videographer, and editor, Carter has created digital-dance and documentary content for Breakin’ Convention Hip Hop Theatre Festival (UK), Parkinson’s UK, Dance Woking (UK), DanceXchange (UK), South East Dance, Akademi (UK), Calmer UK, National Centre for Circus Arts (UK), Jason Mabana Dance (UK), Pagrav Dance Company (UK), and Mouvement Perpétuel (Canada).
As an independent choreographer and dancer, he has created works for Google, Britain’s Got Talent, Weetabix, Stanton Warriors, Greenpeace UK, Diabetes UK, and ADAD (Association of Dance from the African Diaspora).
Most recently Carter was co-curator of Akademi Dance-Film Festival 2021 (One of London's first South-Asian Dance-Film Festivals), a committee member of PoP [Performances of the Popular] Moves UK, Digital Creative for Pavilion Dance South West (Bournemouth, UK) and features twice in Vol. 12 of The International Journal of Screendance. He is currently on the event programming team for San Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (USA) and is now an assistant professor in the dance department at UW-Madison after participating in the International Visiting Artist Residency at UW-Madison in the April 2022.
Erica Pinigis & Maritess Escueta
Maritess and Erica found an unexpected sisterhood in each other by raging against the machine, fighting the heteropatriarchy, dreaming big, and being absurdly silly during lock down in 2020. Shared love for dance, humanity, and each other has kept them connected long distance since then.
Sophia Chen
Sophia Chen is a Sophomore that attends Middleton High School. She has been dancing for almost 10 years and most of which she has done traditional chinese dance. Sophia also enjoys doing artistic swimming, she swims for the MadCity Aqua Stars, and went to Junior Olympics this past summer. Sophia was also the 2023 Princess of Asia and placed 1st runner up the Miss Wisconsin Jr.Teen title this year. She has performed at multiple events this past year, including the international festival, and she can’t wait to perform at the Primrose Retreat!
Breakthrough Dance Company is an open-style dance company located in Madison, Wisconsin. Established in January 2015, the company welcomes adults of all experience levels and backgrounds, and does not hold auditions. Breakthrough’s goal is to help its members develop as dancers, grow as choreographers, and connect with the community.
Performing in this performance will be Dhyana Rabe, Jessie Solcz, Kallysa Taylor, Laura Prieto, Mandy Basich Kron, Rachael Peterson, Shona Mitteldorf, Tara Rollins
Heidi Marilyn
Heidi Marilyn, a multi-media artist and educator, is Wisconsin’s representative for Global Water Dances Inc., and has been developing the body of work ‘Water Calls’, for the past seven years. Her expressions often circulate around a theme of Ecological Integrity/ Divinity— with a triangular focus on seeding common ground, nurturing what connects us, and honoring what sustains us. This focus is a bridging agent across polarized parties, initiating grassroots efforts to preserve, restore and rejoice. This approach acknowledges the wholeness of earthly cycles, including those of our species.
Art Shegonee is a Native American ambassador to Wisconsin Indian Summer and Call for Peace Drum & Dance Company. He is a member of the Menominee and Potawatomi tribes in Wisconsin and his name is Canasa (Little Golden Eagle). As a member of the wolf clan, he is a traditional dancer in pow-wows throughout Wisconsin. He has performed as lead dancer for the Native American Music award-winning (NAMMY) Native American contemporary music group, Bruce, as head male dancer for the UWMadison pow-wow, as well as with folk singer Bill Miller and musician Michael Jacobs. He has served as the Affirmative Action consultant for Tellurian UCAN and as director of the former Native American Resource Center. He is also a certified instructor of Nonviolent Crisis Intervention for the National Crisis Prevention Institute, Inc., a former member of the EOC Citizen Ad Hoc Committee on community race and ethnic relations and a member of the Greater Madison Leadership (LGM). Shegonee has also acted in several film productions, including Rush for Grey Gold. Honored for his continued commitment to Native American education, in 1995 Wisconsin Historical Society included Shegonee’s image in their permanentexhibit, “People of the Woodlands: Wisconsin Indian Ways,” examining the history of Native American culture. He has been a cultural consultant, teacher and presenter at over 300 schools throughout Wisconsin and neighboring states. He joined Call for Peace as a founding member and lead male traditional Native American dancer in 1990.
The Stop and Listen play old-time stringband music with an old-time swagger and unique instrumentation. Specializing in fiddle tunes, jug band numbers, and country blues, they bring serious drive and groove with dextrous harmonica, remarkable improvisation on cello and fiddle, vocal harmonies, and banjos of uncompromising size.
The band is fronted by Daniel Plane (cello/fiddle) and Calvin Woodring (harmonica) and the will be joined by Mike Tiboris (clawhammer banjo).
Tani Diakite and Afrofunksters
Tani Diakite is a musical force who has inspired an entire community of artists. With his Kamale n'goni, a West African ancestor to the banjo, and his plaintive singing, he never fails to drop the deepest blues around.
Bob Weinswig
Bob Weinswig is a musician in the style of classic singer-songwriters such as Townes Van Zandt, Tom Waits, and Greg Brown. He taught high school students in recovery from mental health struggles and drugs and alcohol. He has also been a cook, a carpenter, a painter, an organic farmer, a yoga instructor, an artist, and a meditation teacher, in addition to being a hack musician. He got into wood carving to create art that ages, becomes one with nature and then deteriorates back into itself. He enjoys swimming for his sanity, long walks, and communing with kittens, donkeys, and geese for inspiration.
Sally de Broux Trio
-
Sally de Broux is a vocalist, teacher, and improvisor. Sally teaches vocal improvisation and community spontaneous composition and has studied with vocal improvisation pioneers: the great Bobby McFerrin and Rhiannon. Sally performs jazz and other vocals in the Madison area with a variety of jazz and other musicians and enjoys collaborating with others who share an interest in promoting the arts as an integral part of life for people of all ages and backgrounds.
-
Laurie Lang is a jazz bassist, composer, arranger, educator, and producer. Her creative approach allows her sound to reach its musical depths, as her instrument becomes her voice. Laurie is an active community member promoting improvised music as a musician, educator, and administrator. She has shared these gifts throughout her career with people of all ages and abilities.
-
Isaac was born and raised in Madison, and has been playing guitar in a band since he was five years old. Currently, he tours nationally with his band Disq, and works as a producer and recording engineer. He is well versed in Funk, Bluegrass, and Jazz music, and gigs around town whenever he can. He is a multi-instrumentalist, song writer, and has collaborated with many bands and artists on the arrangements of their music recordings. His favorite musicians include The Beatles, Eric Dolphy, Norman Blake, XTC, Judee Sill, Oliver Nelson, Alice Coltrane, The Beach Boys and Charles Mingus to name a few. Isaac and his mom, Sally de Broux, have been making music together in various ways for more than twenty years.
Joe Mirenna
Joe Mirenna has performed as an acoustic multi-instrumentalist for over 50 years both solo and in several bands playing southern traditional music. Currently he focuses on ukulele melodic instrumentals - from classic pop standards of early 20th Century to the 60s and 70s, the coming-of-age music of the boomer generation, an era that can be argued as the most diverse and genre influencing form of popular music seen in our lifetime.
Cris Plata was born in South Texas, the son of migrant workers. Those early days of living in different migrant camps and following the harvest from region to region, exposed Cris to a wide range of musical experiences. His early musical experiences reflect his Mexican heritage. This heritage includes Norteno (Northern Mexico border music), conjunto (elements of both European and Mexican music fused by early residents of South Texas), and ranchera (Mexican country) music. Today, Cris describes this as "Mexican root's" music.
James Botsford
James Botsford is an Indian Rights attorney (mostly retired), a Winnebago Supreme Court Associate Justice, and author of 6 books of poetry, stories, rants, epigrams, and tribal court history. He pays membership dues to the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the ACLU. He lives along the banks of Big Sandy Creek near Wausau, Wisconsin with his starter wife of 45 years.
The Ramshackle Raconteurs
Local writers Alex Bledsoe, Matt Geiger, and S. K. Kruse will converge on stage to present Democracy: POV, a look at democracy through the lens of parenting, pirates, fascists, and aliens!
-
Alex Bledsoe grew up an hour north of Memphis (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He's been a reporter, photographer, editor, and door to door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in Wisconsin with his family. His works include The Hum and the Shiver, The Girls with Games of Blood, and other oddly titled novels, as well as short stories and essays.
-
Matt Geiger is an author, editor and journalist living in Wisconsin. He is a Midwest Book Award winner and contributes to numerous literary journals, magazines, newspapers and radio programs. His work has appeared in Strung Sporting Journal, Gray's Sporting Journal, Bear Hunting Magazine, Fur-Fish-Game Magazine, Whitetails Unlimited Magazine, Hypertext Review, Journal From the Heartland, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Green Mountain Review, the Sunlight Press and more. He is the author of two books.
-
S. K. Kruse always wanted to be an author. After her big debut in The Onion, however, she found herself on a twenty-five-year sabbatical to raise eleven children. Since emerging from this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction period of her life, her writing has won multiple awards in the National League of American Pen Women’s “Soul-making Keats Literary Competition,” and her collection of short stories, Tales from the Liminal, has been published by Deuxmers.
-
Danielle Dresden, co-producing artistic director of TNW Ensemble Theater, is an award-winning and published playwright. A teaching artist and a Wisconsin Ambassador for the Dramatists Guild, she strives to make the arts accessible for all and empower artists.
-
Donna Peckett, co-producing artistic director of TNW Ensemble Theater, is an actor, tap dancer, and devoted arts educator. A recipient of two Wisconsin Arts Board choreography fellowships and a Wisconsin Dance Council Recognition Award, she has a BA in Art History from the UW-Madison. She works to create performing arts experiences, which test artistic boundaries and connect with the greater community.
Beth Blahut
Beth Blahut is a fiber artist living in New Glarus. Her work usually involves a sewing machine, whether she's making images in lace with sewing thread, embroidered portraits, or sculpture with industrial felt. Currently she is developing creative projects and collaborating within the public sphere.
Lisa Frank is a Sony Alpha+ photographer and a MacDowell Colony fellow. She holds an MFA in Design Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has taught textile design in the Design Studies Department and digital photography in the Art Department. Lisa holds a BS in art education from the UW-Madison and a graduate certificate from the Yale School of Drama. Lisa has led nature photography workshops at Penland School of Crafts and the Aldo Leopold Nature Center on the subject of discovering the natural world using technology-based tools. Lisa’s journey to photography was a natural outgrowth of her childhood in the small northwestern Illinois town of Mount Carroll where she participated in the summer stock theatre, Timber Lake Playhouse, that her father founded. This love of theatre motivated Lisa to get a graduate certificate in scene painting and design at the Yale School of Drama. She worked for many years at the Metropolitan Opera as a union scenic artist and at scene shops responsible for Broadway productions and film sets. Frank also designed textiles, wall-coverings and decorative surfaces for high-end interiors while in the New York City area. Around the *turn of the century* (😲) she bought her first Apple computer, scanner and digital camera. She then began to discover a new, expressive medium. She now has a large body of nature-themed photographic artwork that is exhibited and sold as limited edition fine art prints. Lisa lives in the driftless area of rural Wisconsin with her partner and a menagerie of wild and domesticated animals.
Maïa Brunel
Maïa Brunel is a ceramic and textile artist originally from Madison, Wisconsin. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 and now resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she continues to develop her artistic practice. Maïa's work delves into the themes of girlhood, innocence, and shame, allowing her to explore how her early experiences shape her current identity. Her artistic process is marked by a self-taught and experimental approach, which reflects both the impulsive, imaginative tendencies of childhood and her drive to work outside traditional methods.
Through her ceramics and textiles, Maïa examines the emotional landscapes of her youth, drawing parallels between the freedom of childhood creativity and the limitations imposed by adulthood. Her pieces often fuse folk craft traditions with contemporary art techniques, resulting in work that is both nostalgic and innovative. She is particularly interested in how the uninhibited, spontaneous actions of childhood can inform and inspire more deliberate creative practices. By embracing imperfections and immediacy in her work, Maïa captures the rawness and authenticity of human expression.
Mariah Moneda received her BFA from Arizona State University in Photography and is an interdisciplinary artist and instructor, pursuing her MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is an Ed-GRs Graduate and Theodora Herfulth Kubly Minority Fellow. Working with photography, sculpture, and social practice, Mariah draws on her lived experience as a first-generation, Filipino-American woman investigating the connection between memory and the body’s senses through its nuanced relationship with labor, ritual, and belonging. Through this lens she leans into the experiential and utilizes her practice as a tool to explore the liminal space between herself and community. Mariah has taught at San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, has spoken at the Herberger Institute of Design and Arts, Artist Colloquium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Grossmont Community College, and The School of Human Ecology. Her work has been shown nationally and regionally across the United States at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (Winston-Salem, NC) the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO) The AjA Project (San Diego, CA), with work in collections at Arizona State University’s Northlight Gallery.
Levi Sherman is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. He holds an MFA in book and paper art and a BFA in visual communication. Levi is co-founder of Partial Press, an experimental publishing project, and writes about artists’ books as the editor of Artists’ Book Reviews.
Lael Sheber
Lael Sheber is a self-taught portrait artist in Madison, WI. She found art through illness as a means of survival. Lael uses portraiture to depict the often dismissed emotional experiences of women, and is committed to elevating the representation of women of color. Lael feels most grounded and peaceful in nature and is passionate about incorporating the natural world in her work. She frequently enjoys walking through the woods where she collects bark and inspiration. Lael’s work offers the viewer a moment of deep connection, to feel grief and suffering alongside joy and hope. Lael has shown her work in galleries, community centers, and shops in Madison.
Landscape is my natural affinity, and I am fortunate to live in a beautiful rural area of Mt. Horeb, WI, surrounded by stunning views at every turn. My scenes almost always have a human footprint, whether it is a road, a structure, or a planted field. I believe that man and nature can work in close harmony together, and my painting reflects that conviction. Painting the farms in our area is also my stake in preserving a way of life that is increasingly threatened. Often I will have painted a barn only to return in a year’s time to find that it no longer exists. I also love the solid farmhouses that epitomize the tenets of form and function, and which fit so comfortably into their environment. Oil is my medium, as it is both forgiving and challenging. Generally I work on linen or canvas. I always want the viewer to come with me into the landscape of my paintings, whether it is a rural vista or a more intimate space. I like to escape to those places, and hope that those who see my work will join me there for an interlude of peace and repose.
-
Beth Racette is a visual artist who works in many mediums – acrylic ink paintings, sculpture and installation. Her work has explored a variety of topics from the prison system to the web of life. Underlying themes in her work are flow (i.e. history, societal resources, biology and life processes, contagion, inspiration and communication) and interconnection. She has been working on a Gaia Series of painting series since 2012. Her goal when she makes art is to utilize and integrate her entire self. Beth grew up in Wichita, Kansas and received her Masters of Fine Art in 1989 from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She administered community and education programs at Overture Center in Madison, Wisconsin for almost 30 years where she also served as the Galleries Director and has recently retired to focus more fully on her art and environmental work.
-
I was a student of Ellen Moore’s group dance improvisation from 1976 to 2005 and have happily danced with others who were in her loving, inspirational orbit since then.