{"id":8077,"date":"2018-07-27T21:01:58","date_gmt":"2018-07-28T01:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=8077"},"modified":"2021-06-08T09:35:14","modified_gmt":"2021-06-08T13:35:14","slug":"mary-nohl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2018\/07\/27\/mary-nohl\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting Mary Nohl\u2019s Enchanted Cottage On The Shore of Lake Michigan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe wanted to believe a witch lived there,\u201d Jim Stingl, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, recalled<\/a>\u00a0not quite a month after the artist Mary Nohl died in 2001. He\u2019d been one of the young folks who, beginning in the 1950s and \u201860s, were attracted by mysterious rumors to her cottage on the shore of Lake Michigan in a wealthy suburb just north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. \u201cWe told and retold the stories we had heard. Her husband and son had drowned in Lake Michigan right outside her window, we were pretty sure. The statues on the lawn looked out over the water, waiting in vain for the pair to come home. And very possibly some of the sculptures in the yard used to be kids who were caught trespassing by the witch and turned to stone.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the 1960s and \u201870s, Nohl filled the tall grass and pines with more than 70 concrete sculptures that she crafted\u2014monumental heads, fish, dogs, a 12-foot-tall dinosaur, ghostlike figures, a fountain, \u201cruins\u201d of low walls and arched doorways. It was a world of creatures, smiling or somber, in gray stone with glass eyes that seemed to glow at night.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The front gate of Mary Nohl’s home at Fox Point, Wisconsin, with the columns she crafted with her father. (She added the heads on top much later.) July 9, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cSome people refer to me as a witch. I like that the best of all,\u201d Nohl said in Andrea Lotscher\u2019s documentary video \u201cMary Nohl: The Witch of Fox Point\u201d<\/a> from around 2000. She embraced it by embedding black pebbles in her doorstep to spell out the word \u201cBoo.\u201d But it wasn\u2019t as simple as that. The rumors also stung.\u00a0Nohl asserted in a 1996 interview<\/a> that being called a witch was evidence of prejudice against “women who use tools.”<\/p>\n

In fact, Nohl was a single woman (she sometimes found potential male suitors uncomfortable with her skills) and an art-school-trained modernist artist who drew inspiration from surrealism and folk art and the great lake.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo amount of disorder will induce me to give up my front row seat on the changing moods of Lake Michigan,\u201d Nohl wrote in a June 1972 newsletter, \u201cthe ice hills against the blue water in winter, and the afterglow of the sunsets in summer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Mary<\/a>
Mary Nohl’s home at Fox Point, Wisconsin, July 9, 2018. (Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Noel\u2019s wondrous home and much of her art and papers are now in the collection of the Kohler Arts Center<\/a> in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where she is the subject of the exhibition \u201cMary Nohl and the Walrus Club,\u201d<\/a> on view through June 2019. Her lakefront property and its enchanted garden were listed on the National Register of Historic Places<\/a> in 2005, but efforts to open them to the public have been stymied by neighborhood opposition. At present the location is closed to visitors, but you can see much from the street.\u00a0A decade and a half after her death, it\u2019s one of the rare folk art environments created by a woman that has been preserved.<\/p>\n

Nohl\u2019s style can bring to mind Paul Klee, Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Tove Jansson. She transformed her property into a visionary world of elemental stone beings, creatures of lake and land, gathered among ruins.<\/p>\n

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