Mary Nohl (1914–2001) refused to be confined by artistic categorization. She was a woodcarver, painter, sculptor, ceramist, printmaker, potter, writer, illustrator, and jeweler who described herself as simply “a woman who likes tools.” 

In its current exhibition Greetings and Salutations and Boo: Mary Nohl + Catherine Morris, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center presents a complete reinstallation of Nohl’s living room from her lakeside artist-built environment in Fox Point, Wis. The exhibition will be on view through August 20 as part of the Arts Center’s yearlong 50th anniversary series title The Road Less Traveled. 

To complement this installation, Catherine Morris, Curator for Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, collaborated with the Arts Center to select several key works from Nohl’s oeuvre and discuss their significance. For Greeting and Salutations and Boo, Morris highlights Mary Nohl as a prolific artist in many mediums and explores the artist’s identity beyond that of an outlier in the community in which she lived. 

Since the 1970s, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center has preserved, studied, and exhibited art environments. Today, with well over 20,000 individual works of art by 30 different art-environment builders in the collection, the Arts Center is the world’s leading center for research and presentation of this work. 

Mary Nohl spent more than 50 years transforming the interior and exterior of her home into a multifaceted art environment. She built dozens of concrete sculptures in the yard. Her wooden reliefs of swimmers and boaters created a colorful, highly patterned home exterior. Wind chimes and wooden fish hung in the trees. Inside the home, she altered the floors, walls, light fixtures and furniture. In 2015, the Arts Center embarked on a large-scale restoration of the Fox Point site. That project is ongoing. 

Admission to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is by voluntary donation. The Arts Center, located at 608 New York Ave. in downtown Sheboygan, Wis., is open daily except major holidays. Call 920-458-6144 or visit jmkac.org for more information. 

This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Funding was also provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Kohler Trust for the Arts and Education and Sargento Foods Inc. The Arts Center thanks its many members for their support of exhibitions and programs through the year. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center is a 501(c)(3) (nonprofit) organization; donations are tax deductible.