Part 1 of 5: Introduction
Time Is Running Out
You’re today what you were yesterday plus a little more experience.
—Charlotte Partridge, 1965
As the year wraps up and my many years of working with one research topic potentially draws closer to an end, I’ve decided to reprint, in a series of five chronological posts, the booklet published on the occasion of my exhibition, Time is Running Out. I haven’t had a moment to recap the opening at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, in Milwaukee WI. on November 15, 2025 and may pepper in some thoughts with these December posts, but for now I offer you the Introduction. The following posts will be the four essays; The Fox Point Studio, The Sketchbook, The Metal Object, and The Protege with the short conclusion.
This writing is an expansion of archival research around life partners, Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink that resulted my book As Ever, Miriam. The booklet is small and comfortable to hold, Risograph printed by Bearbear on a navy blue cardstock cover that folds out in the back, with yellow interior paper. It was printed in an edition 100, available for purchase in the gallery and as of this week, online [scroll down the page for purchase] until sold out. The exhibition will run through March 14, 2026.
Introduction
Time is running out, and we are determined to have the material properly preserved, believing it to have a definite value. This is the last sentence of a letter drafted by Miriam Frink (1892-1977) to the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1972. She was writing on behalf of herself and her partner, Charlotte Partridge (1882-1975), with the hope of placing their papers in the collection. Frink was eventually successful, and their papers are now housed in the Archives Department of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries. This is where, in 2017, I first encountered their story and started asking questions.
The pair met in 1915 at Milwaukee-Downer College, where Partridge was the head of the fine arts department and Frink taught English. Partridge is best known as a champion for arts education and the founder of the Layton School of Art, Wisconsin’s only professional college-level art school at that time. In fact, the two co-founded the school, which opened in the basement of the Layton Art Gallery in 1920, and they ran it until 1954, when they were asked to step down by the board. The Layton School of Art closed in 1974, with select faculty going on to open the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD) later that year. By 1922, Partridge, already on the board of trustees of the Layton Art Gallery, had taken on an additional role as its director. She remained a trustee until 1973. While still co-directing the Layton School of Art, Partridge became involved in planning federal arts programming that supported artists during the Depression. She served as the director of the Wisconsin Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939. In 1940, she conducted a survey with the Federal Works Agency, funded by the Carnegie Foundation, that assessed contemporary art and art institutions in the United States. As the pair’s correspondence during this period attests, none of this work would have been possible without Frink’s logistical and administrative assistance, as well as her devoted attention to Partridge’s well-being.
Though neither was a Milwaukee native (Partridge was born in Minneapolis and Frink in Elkhart, Indiana), they enmeshed themselves in civic life and, as at Layton, sought out decision-making roles, particularly in their post-Layton period. Both Partridge and Frink were active in professional clubs, publications, and organizations, including the Wisconsin Designer-Craftsman, Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors, the Milwaukee Arts Center, the Women’s Advertising Club of Milwaukee, the Women’s Auxiliary of the State Historical Society, the Woman’s Club of Wisconsin, the Committee on Wisconsin Women, the Wisconsin Artists Federation, the Cordon Club in Chicago, the Milwaukee Club, the Milwaukee Country Historical Society, the College Art Association, the National Alliance of Art and Industry, the National Society of Colonial Dames in Wisconsin, the American Association of Museums, the Walrus Club, and the Zonta Club of Milwaukee. One of Partridge’s most notable civic projects was Zonta Manor. Partridge and Frink were both members of the Zonta Club, an international progressive women’s organization, and Zonta Manor was an affordable senior housing development that considered the needs of the elderly. Partridge worked closely with architects Lillian and Willis Leenhouts on the project.
Since the impact Frink and Partridge made on Milwaukee’s cultural landscape was extensive and remains underrecognized, my hope is that my research will encourage future scholarship, continued connections and conversations within contemporary networks, more questions, and deeper knowledge and understanding of their legacy.
This booklet, intended to support the exhibition Time Is Running Out at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, provides expanded imagining and research beyond my first book on the subject, As Ever, Miriam1. As Ever focuses on Frink and Partridge’s personal and professional correspondence over fifty years. That book complete, I had heaps of overflow material that continued to haunt me. Haunting as a motivation for storytelling is something I’ve learned to embrace. It is now a part of my research methodology, and it will follow me into my future projects.
Inspired by Frink and Partridge’s intertwined devotion to each other and to their expansive networks, Time Is Running Out explores four themes: domesticity, creativity, partnership, and community. It utilizes the archive, speculative imagination, and storytelling to engage with lesser-known parts of Frink and Partridge’s story and impact. Anchoring the exploration will be The Studio, The Sketchbook, The Metal Object, and The Protégé—all entry points into an intimate, lifelong collaboration. These themes will be brought into the gallery and represented in different mediums by my personal responses to the archive and through commissioned works created in collaboration with the Milwaukee networks that I have established during my various chapters living in Wisconsin.
Frink and Partridge’s Fox Point studio is the gateway that has allowed me to lean into the idea of what’s missing. What I find deeply important about the studio is that it was intended as a place to relax and unfurl. While I wish there were more written about the time that was spent there, these empty spaces leave much for the imagination. What’s missing is actually what was intended: a space not to be in the public eye, surrounded by students and benefactors. It served its purpose then—for privacy and relaxation—and continues to deliver now by creating space for imagination.
At the studio, it’s possible that Partridge sat at the small table overlooking the flats out onto the lake, sketching and taking notes. So, when I hold Partridge’s sketchbook filled with visual non sequiturs, I easily imagine her paints, brushes, ink pen, or pencil spread out before her on the small table in front of the studio windows. At the same time, I can picture Frink reading in the book nook with a sweater over her shoulders that has a monogram broach, the letters C and M entwined, pinned to its left side, with one of the many dogs they had over their lives together curled up on the floor next to her. I can envision Frink and Partridge watching the moonrise over the lake, reminiscing about their former student and friend, Helen Hoppin, who would never see the studio herself but would have certainly spent time there if she had lived longer.
On the day of the dedication of their Fox Point studio in 1930, Frink recalled they embedded an opal in the hearth. As I moved papers around and put dates on pages while working on this exhibition, my mind drifted to that little opal as the lone witness to a very special moment in time. I allowed myself to imagine the possibility that the artist Mary Nohl, known for scavenging materials for her projects, could have seen its glimmer and picked it out of the rubble left behind by the studio’s likely demolition in the ‘70s, placing it in one of her assemblage artworks or concrete yard sculptures.
The discovery that the studio was across from the now-notorious Mary Nohl house was made many years into my research and came as a total surprise. Yet it also aligns with my endless small-world experiences of Milwaukee’s communities2. The location and overlapping timelines would place Nohl as a junior and senior in college in the final years that Partridge and Frink used the studio. During this time, they would likely have crossed paths in the summer months when Nohl was home from school, vacationing at her parents’ summer cottage—the home that later became her life’s work and, in turn, has profoundly impacted my work. The discovery of this proximity has allowed me to connect myself to this lineage of deeply inspiring women, and to dream about what wasn’t saved and what could have happened. This imagining also allows me to see a future of radical possibility, of a transfer of information across generations.
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Part 2: The Fox Point Studio will be published Sunday, December 14 2025.
As Ever, Miriam was published in 2024 by OK Stamp Press, followed by a second edition (2025) by Combos Press.
Known locally as “smallwaukee” or “Small-Waukee.”
I love the idea of haunting as part of a research methodology!