the ski club

Brad Killam is an artist and educator who has lived his entire life not far from the western shores of Lake Michigan. Educated at Illinois State University and the Circle campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Killam began collaborating with Michelle Grabner to curate exhibitions, including Eight Days in November at the MAM in 1992, Amenities at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in 1994 and Bicycle Thieves at various locations in Milwaukee and Chicago in 1998. In Killam's own words, he "just wants to be an artist who also does other things for other people (organizing exhibitions, teaching, slamming the governor every chance I get)." In 1999, Killam and Grabner opened The Suburban in their Oak Park backyard, where it continued until its upcoming relocation to the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. In 2009, Killam and Grabner took on yet another major platforming project by opening the Poor Farm, an experimental international center for contemporary art in Little Wolf, Wisconsin. The artists of acclaim they have worked with are too numerous to mention here.

This show has an additional layer of relevance: In 1995, then-Hermetic Gallery director Nicholas Frank invited Killam to show at his space on Locust Street. Killam turned the show into an early iteration of CAR (Conceptual Arts Research), a collaboration with the full Killam/Grabner/Ribic family unit. The show, entitled Elephant, covered multiple locations, including the household garden and the then-UWM Art Museum (pre-INOVA), a collusion of domestic and exhibition space that would be a theme for all of his & Grabner's conjoined work that followed. The Ski Club, under the temporary programming direction of Frank, is proud to host a Killam solo exhibition on the 20th anniversary of this important moment in the history of the Hermetic.