Lois Peterson: Beneath the Fields & Stacey Steinberg: Foundation

About this event

The James Watrous Gallery will feature concurrent solo exhibitions, showcasing large-scale graphite drawings of prairie fauna and woodland ecology by Lois Peterson and multi-layered architectural collagraph and mixed media prints by Stacey Steinberg, exploring loss, memory, and restoration.

Lois Peterson's large-scale graphite drawings apply the principles of abstraction to the tradition of botanical illustration. Bold and dramatic yet richly detailed, her drawings describe how dormant native prairie plants, rootsystems, degraded water environments, and fallen segments of trees play a critical role in our natural environment. In working on this series, Peterson found herself grieving over the steady disappearance of these vital ecological resources and seeking ways to protect them. She writes, "This series of drawings consistently offers me opportunities to engage with members of diverse communities, environmentalists, land restoration experts, and others looking for meaningful ways to make a positive environmental contribution within their own community."

Stacey Steinberg's current work considers architecture as both physical structure and psychological landscape. Like the people who inhabit them, buildings carry the marks of resilience and vulnerability. They are constructed, repaired, neglected, preserved and, sometimes, lost. Yet even when the physical place disappears, its emotional architecture remains. The houses in these works exist in uncertain states—fragmented, suspended and incomplete. They occupy the space between memory and place, permanence and impermanence, presence and absence. Some appear familiar yet impossible, reflecting the way memory reshapes the places we once knew. As physical structures dissolve, they become internal landscapes, revealing foundations of home that are not fixed in geography but carried within the body.

Join the artists and Wisconsin Academy staff on Sunday, November 15, 2026, from 3:00pm-5:00pm to celebrate the opening of their solo exhibitions Beneath the Fields and Foundation at the James Watrous Gallery.