Oshkosh-born and raised artist Michelle Grabner plays many roles in the arts in the Midwest and the country, from artist, teacher, and curator to parent, homeowner, and gardener. Grabner draws from her realms of activity, life experience, and work practices to produce paintings, sculptures, and weavings. For Sculpture Milwaukee, Grabner’s three bookends playfully evoke the stability of primary colors, symmetrical shapes, and balance. Their formal qualities are abstract, graphic, and flat, locating their familiar artistic visual language within modern abstraction and in alignment with Minimalism and Bauhaus design.

Although these are witty conceptual enlargements of a functional library artifact, the printed material that these bookends actually “prop up” is ambiguous. For example, they may be interpreted as supporting the varied social activities of the city, or its architecture, or Milwaukee’s abundant histories or its future chronicles.

The colossal bookends ask viewers to interpret the work’s abstract and material qualities and conceptualize its ability to humorously frame its surroundings. Ideally, the bookends also serve as an opportunity to celebrate the civic value of the book, public libraries, forms of fiction and nonfiction, and, of course, the power of literacy.