A Beautiful Experience: The Midwest Grotto Tradition

A Beautiful Experience: The Midwest Grotto Tradition takes its title from a slogan found on years of brochures, maps, and swag from the Dickeyville Grotto in Wisconsin. It is one of several grottoes found throughout the region. These sites began to inspire pilgrimage, tourism, reflection, and community gathering during the 1910s. This exhibition looks at their continuing influence on artists and visitors alike.

Materially, midwestern grottoes often reflect local industries, decorative trends, and an area’s geological makeup. Grotto architecture mainly comprises concrete embellished with objects including shells, marbles, colored glass, toys, figurines, fossils, and geodes. This accumulation, as well as the objects incorporated, creates a documentation of the maker’s life, faith, and home.

Madeline Buol is one of the few known women grotto builders. The materials she utilized include figurines and stones gathered during her travels. She had a special affinity for shells of all shapes and sizes.

The exhibition is the first public showing of Buol’s monumental thirteen-piece grotto since it was saved from the artist’s yard in 2011 by the Kohler Foundation, Inc. It was then gifted to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

In addition to Buol’s grotto, A Beautiful Experience includes objects related to the Midwest grottoes that directly inspired her, such as the Dickeyville Grotto, Jacob Baker’s “dream houses,” the Rudolph Grotto, and the Wegner Grotto. The exhibition illustrates the material histories of these grottoes and strategies for their conservation. Visitors are offered opportunities to learn about the legacy and care of Midwest grotto sites.

A Beautiful Experience also includes new work by Stephanie Shih and E. Saffronia Downing, each responding to the grotto tradition. Shih presents a work inspired by Jacob Baker and Chinese immigration in the U.S. Downing shares her explorations of clay and material foraging throughout the Midwest, providing insight into material studies for the concrete and construction materials often invented and improvised upon by grotto builders.