LaNia Sproles: Products of the Heart opens at the Lynden Sculpture Garden on Sunday, November 12, 2023, with a reception from 2 to 4 pm. The artist will be in attendance. Sproles’s portraits, intimate in size and subject, reveal the artist’s fascination with kinship, inherited and constructed. The exhibition remains on view through Sunday, February 25,2024. The Lynden Sculpture Garden is located at 2145 West Brown Deer Road, Milwaukee, WI 53217. Gallery hours are daily 10 am-4 pm; closed Thursdays.
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Press images available by request.
The portraits in Products of the Heart are recent, finished between 2021 and 2023. The artist employs various methods of making—painting, drawing, printmaking, collage—to produce images that are alternately dreamy, playful, or clear-eyed. From the baroque, dimensional frames she incorporates into the earlier portraits to the patterned, nature-inflected backgrounds of the most recent work, Sproles builds vivid environments, full of talismans, to establish each subject’s emotional complexity. Most of the nine portraits in the exhibition are small-scale, with a single subject (that subject occasionally doubled or tripled). But when she works a little larger, what Sproles describes as “displays of sentiments” transform her subjects into “monumental emblems.” “Shorewood Ethnics,” a multi-part double-portrait collage that stretches across the surface of the wall, can also operate like a landscape.
These portraits are acts of reclamation, an answer to our imprinted faith that marginalized bodies are not sites of credence and power. Of her subjects, Sproles writes: “Their direct qualm gazes remind the viewer to spectate diligently and for the subjects to secure refuge in their dreamscapes. The nostalgic overtone entwined with fantastical elements solidify the playful adoration vital for these relationships of mine to thrive. Collectively, these figures pay homage to the importance of preserving one’s humanity through carefully maintained curiosity.”
LaNia Sproles: Products of the Heart is part of Lynden’s 2023 Call & Response programming. Call & Response is an ongoing project that gathers a community of artists who share a commitment to the radical Black imagination as a means to re-examine the past and imagine a better future. Other participants in the 2023 programming include artists Daniel Minter and Eneida Sanches, indigo activist Arianne King Comer, filmmaker and storyteller Portia Cobb, chef and food scholar Scott Alves Barton, and choreographer Reggie Wilson, among others. The 2023 Call & Response programming has received generous support from the Brico Fund, the Chipstone Foundation, the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund, and the Herzfeld Foundation.
About the Artist
Until recently, LaNia Sproles (American, b. 1995) lived and worked in the segregated city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin where they also received a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2017. Now based in Chicago, their work spans several disciplines including: printmaking, drawing, and collage. The philosophies of self-perception, queer and feminist theories, and inherent racial dogmas are essential to the artist’s work. Sproles examines the works of feminist artists and writers such as Octavia Butler, Kara Walker, and Rebecca Morgan. In 2020, they completed their year as a 2019 Mary L. Nohl Fellow, continued as a teaching artist-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, and guest curated an exhibition hosted by NADA art fair with The Green Gallery. Sproles has exhibited several artworks with Elijah Wheat Showroom hosted by David Zwirner’s online exhibition space, Platform, and with Goldfinch Gallery and FLXST Contemporary in Chicago.
About the Lynden
The Lynden operates as a laboratory at the intersection of art, nature, and culture. Since opening to the public in 2010, we have worked with artists, educators, students, and our community to create, support, and share experiences that integrate our collection of more than 50 monumental sculptures and temporary installations, Lynden’s community of artists, and the natural ecology of our 40-acre site. The sculpture garden is open to art and nature lovers of all ages daily, 10 am-4 pm; closed Thursdays. Admission is free. Annual memberships are available.