Mary Nohl
An Artist Between Worlds
By Leslie Umberger and Jane Bianco

Mary Louise Nohl was an artist undaunted by any challenge. Even with her exceptional character and talent, it was especially difficult as a young woman coming of age in the 1930s Midwest to gain artistic credibility on par with her male counterparts. Tackling each obstacle she encountered with humor and aplomb, Nohl eventually discovered that if she could not find a comfortable place in the existing world, she would have to make one of her own.

Born in 1914, Nohl would become, albeit posthumously, one of Wisconsin’s most notable artists. In 2007, six years after her death, her work was included in the major exhibition at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, “Sublime Spaces & Visionary Worlds.” The show situated Nohl among 21 other artists who had, over many years, transformed their personal surroundings — homes, yards, automobiles — into multi-faceted artistic realms. Nohl explored many materials and methods over eight decades; she was variously a cartoonist, painter, ceramist, silver smith, sculptor, printmaker and puppeteer. Her very versatility may have impeded recognition in any one area and throughout her artistic life, she remained on the margins of more focused groups of artists.

Today, Nohl is best known for the eye-popping art environment that she created in the yard of her parents’ summer cottage on the western shore of Lake Michigan, which she made her permanent home starting in the 1960s. She populated the one-and-a-half-acre lot with a curious assortment of stone and concrete creatures and objects: glass-inlaid fountains, pools, totems, human and biomorphic forms echoing variously the monuments of Easter Island and the beasts in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, giant fish walking upright and ghost-like figures hanging from the tall pines. But during her lifetime, it was her sculptural jewelry, of all her art forms, that garnered her significant critical attention.

Possessed of an artistic character, Nohl first became enamored of making things as a girl in the summer of 1924, building stone fence posts with her father at their summer cottage. He paid her 25 cents an hour to dive into the chilly water of Lake