The Madison Arts Commission is a municipal arts agency managed by a citizen commission composed of ten residents and one Alderperson who are appointed by the Mayor and confirmed by the Common Council. The eleven member commission is staffed with a full-time arts administrator. The Commission was created by ordinance in 1974 to advise the Mayor and thee Common Council on public policy matters relating to the arts. It originally began as a unit in the Parks Division of the City of Madison. Since then, it has moved to the Neighborhood Planning, Urban Design & Historic Preservation section of the Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development.

• Projects, Programs, & Partnerships 2018-2019
• Projects, Programs, & Partnerships 2016-2017
• Photos of Jan 18, 2018 Honors event
• Programs, Projects and Partners Biennial Report - 2014/2015
• Images of City of Madison supported arts and culture projects 2014/2015

COMMISSIONERS AND STAFF

Sheri Carter – Common Council Representative to the Madison Arts Commission

Katie Howarth Ryan
Katie Howarth Ryan was recently named to the Advisory Council of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMOCA), where she serves on the Permanent Collection Committee. Ryan completed two terms on MMOCA's Board of Trustees and had previously been its Curator of Education. Ryan also currently serves as a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art.

Ryan moved to Wisconsin from New York where she worked at Art in America magazine and was ARTFORUM magazine's Managing Editor. In Wisconsin, Ryan pursued graduate work in art history at UW-Madison and was a teaching assistant before taking the Education Curator position at MMOCA (then the Madison Art Center). When she left the museum, she continued to volunteer in the community with particular commitments on the Cooksville Historic Trust, Inc., the Historic Commission of Porter Township's Zoning Committee, Rotary Gardens Education Committee, and at the schools of her four children. She is currently a resident of Madison and a member of Rotary Club of Madison.

Anna January
Anna January is currently the Director of Individual Giving at Wisconsin Public Television. She has a background in fundraising, arts administration, museum administration, grants, community development, and art history.

Anna spent her childhood in Madison and returned to the city in 2014 after completing a MA in art history at McGill University (Montreal, QC Canada). While living in Montreal she also received a Fulbright Scholarship, supporting her research on Native arts practices, critical race theory, and intersectional feminism.

In addition to working at WPT, Anna has held positions at the University of Wisconsin's Division of the Arts, the Wisconsin Film Festival, Madison Children's Museum, the McCord Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Smithsonian Institution's Smithsonian Associates Program.

Lance Owens
Lance Owens is the founder and director of ArtWorking, a non-profit program that supports artists with disabilities, who wish to pursue careers in the arts and small business sectors. For most of the last two decades, Owens’ professional emphasis has been on inclusionary art practices, and microenterprise development within the disability community. In particular, Owens has focused on the intersection of arts entrepreneurship and social justice, and how art as a business practice can lead to inclusion in the community for marginalized populations. 

In addition to ArtWorking, Owens has been an art instructor, and a community based art-facilitator, coordinating projects that emphasize collaborative art making experiences for people that may or may not identify as artists. Owens has also been actively engaged in music creation and production for the last 30 years, with an emphasis on audio engineering and mixing.

Owens received his BA in fine art from the University of California at Santa Cruz, as well as an MFA from UW Madison, with an emphasis in printmaking.

Bethany Jurewicz
Bethany Jurewicz is the Director of Public Programming and Community Outreach at Garver Feed Mill. Formerly, she was the Exhibitions and Events Manager at the James Watrous Gallery, a program of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters where she remains on staff part-time as a financial advisor.

After gaining a masters degree in Contemporary Art Theory from Sotheby’s Institute in London, she moved to New York City and developed an expansive career in the food, beverage, and event industries. She relocated to Madison in 2014 and currently lives in the Atwood neighborhood on Madison's east side. Upon arrival, she gained employment as the business manager for various organizations and simultaneously produced large-scale culinary and visual art pop-ups as fundraisers for local non-profits, including The Apartment Project, Municipal, Makeshift, and the CSArt Dinner Series. Recently, she co-produced Femmestival with the Culinary Ladies Collective and curated Outside Looking In, a drive-thru exhibition in the windows of Garver Feed Mill. She looks forward to planning public events at Garver and throughout Madison that highlight Madison's creative economy while supporting artists, musicians, and culinary entrepreneurs.

Rae Senarighi / AKA Transpainter
Rae Senarighi / AKA Transpainter is your average non-binary cancer survivor inspiring self-compassion, activism and gender resilience via unapologetic portraiture and typography celebrating vibrant transgender and non-binary power. Rae's detailed, thoughtful artwork is influenced by years of scientific illustration, studying the natural world in micro and macro and being published multiple times in international publications such as Science and Nature magazines. 

As a fine artist, designer and muralist, he is best known for intricately illustrative typography and vividly colorful, large-scale portraiture. Rae champions storytelling through art, working to create accurate and celebratory representation of the transgender and non-binary community in the fine art world and beyond.

Rae’s work has been featured in galleries throughout the United States and internationally in a wide range of outlets such as TEDx, Art Voices magazine, DNA India, GLAAD and Netflix

Fabu Phillis Carter
Fabu Phillis Carter, is an artist professionally known as Poet Fabu in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a poet, columnist, storyteller, and teaching artist who writes to encourage, inspire and remind. Selected as the first African American to become a Madison Poet Laureate (2008-2012), she continues to share the Black experience living in the South, the Midwest and in Africa. She currently serves as poetry editor for the Capitol City Hues and is a culture columnist for the Cap Times newspaper. Dr. Fabu Carter has a PhD from the University of Nairobi, the African Women’s Center. Fabu currently works with Gary Glazner and the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (New York) sharing poetry with seniors at six facilities. She is a teaching artist with the Overture Center for the Arts and a well-known Wisconsin poet-in-residence. She is a recipient of fellowships from Dane Arts, Madison Jazz Consortium, Madison Arts Commission and the Wisconsin Arts Board and the author of four books of poetry. Her website is www.artistfabu.com.

Karin Wolf, Arts Program Administrator
Ms. Wolf came to the City of Madison in fall of 2006 with a background in arts project management, research, writing, and educational programs. She is the Arts Program Administrator for the Madison Arts Commission in the Department of Planning and Community and Economic Development.  She manages the City's arts grants, runs the gallery spaces, stewards the City's permanent collection of art, and handles the administration of new public art projects.

Prior to this position, she served as the Special Programs Coordinator in the Community Outreach Department at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, where she created award-winning programs for educators and K-16 students in art, design and technology. She has worked as an educational assistant at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, teaching, docenting, and assisting the Curator of Education.

She has a M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and undergraduate degrees in History, History of Cultures, and Afro-American History.

She is a long time supporter of the arts and arts education, and has been involved with many community organizations in establishing exhibitions, educational programs, film festivals, temporary art, and permanent public sculpture projects.

The Madison Arts Commission meets on the following days in 2022: