Berenz earns Nohl Fellowship

Tom Berenz, assistant professor in the UW-Parkside Art Department, recently won the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for 2018 in the Established Artist category. This fellowship will award Berenz with $20,000 for his creative research. Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the Bradley Family Foundation, the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress.

Berenz will use the money to make large-scale 72-inch x 96-inch paintings for an exhibition at the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee, which will open in June, 2018.

Berenz received his B.F.A. from UW-Oshkosh, his M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and his M.F.A. from UW-Madison. His paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally and have been featured in multiple publications; most notably, New American Paintings and Huffington Post.

“My paintings are about my relationship to the world around me – cerebral and physical, intellectual and visceral,” Berenz said. “I use the motif of chaos and disorder as a metaphor to discuss personal, sociopolitical, environmental, and ideological issues. I explore the existential self and examine personal narratives – some literal, others more enigmatic. Notions of loss, place, memory, space, and time are central as I reexamine personal experiences from my past and present.”

Berenz is in his fifth year teaching at UW-Parkside.