Haberman Local Luminaries: “Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts”

Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts

Join notable Milwaukee voices from the fields of art, education, and language as they reflect on the works in Erin Shirreff: Permanent Drafts. Through their varied lenses, we’ll explore themes of transformation, perception, and the spaces between seeing and understanding. Rooted in mixed media, Shirreff’s work invites us to slow down, to notice what shifts across materials and moments, and to reflect on what is preserved, altered, or lost in translation. Together, we’ll consider how both art and language mediate our experience of the world and reveal the complexity beneath its surface.

This drop-in experience is included with Museum admission and is free for Members. Admission tickets are available at the door or online.

Meet the luminaries

Amy Kirschke leads the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Learning and Engagement team to serve over 200,000 participants annually through family, teen, school, docent, and adult programs—at the Museum, in the community, and online. Since 2012, Amy has hosted Slow Art Saturdays in the Musuem’s galleries, exploring a single work of art in each hour-long session through close looking and facilitated dialogue. She holds her MSEd in Leadership in Museum Education from Bank Street College of Education in New York and her MS in Design Studies and Material Culture and BA in Cultural Geography/Sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Fatima Laster is a self-taught interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and owner/operator of 5 Points Art Gallery + Studios. With a Black American vantage point, Laster’s independent and communal practice broaches social-political subject matter (i.e. racism, sexism, classism, cultural appropriation, housing/land appropriation/displacement also known as “gentrification”, etc.), producing resistance art imbued with humor or irony in an attempt to disarmingly reveal rejected or overlooked perspectives and people. Laster’s honors include the Museum of Wisconsin Art 2022 Biennial, the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial Guest Curator, the 2023 Mary L. Nohl Fellow, and the 2024 Milwaukee Arts Board Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year.

Lorena Terando is Professor of Translation & Interpreting Studies at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She was a staff member of the United Nations English Translation Service, taught in New York University’s translation program, and translates and interprets on a freelance basis. Terando earned her PhD in Comparative Literature and Translation at the State University of NY in Binghamton, and her Maîtrise en Traduction at l’Université de Mons-Hainaut in Belgium. She focuses on empathy, exploring representations of memory and pain in language. She has translated Spiral of Silence (2019) and My Life as a Colombian Revolutionary (2004), testimonies of Colombian women in situations of conflict. Her current projects include Stories of the Crossing, a collection of oral testimonials of immigrants’ journeys as they cross the border into the United States; and Smokescreens, a translation of Olga Behar’s testimonial account of the storming of the Palace of Justice in Bogotá

Haberman Local Luminaries takes place annually and honors the late F. William Haberman, former president of the Herzfeld Foundation.

The Milwaukee Art Museum is grateful to its exhibition sponsors.

Sponsored by
Milwaukee Art Museum’s Photography Council

Image: Erin Shirreff (Canadian, b. 1975), Fig. 5 (detail), 2017. Archival pigment print. 43½ × 57½ × 3¼ in. Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty. Image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York. © Erin Shirreff