The Fox Point Studio: A Space of Possibility
Part 2 of 5: Time Is Running Out
As mentioned in Part 1 of 5: Introduction, “I’ve decided to reprint, in a series of 5 chronological posts, the booklet published on the occasion of my exhibition, Time is Running Out.” I plan is to publish this series in full by the end of the year, so I can mentally start fresh with new projects already in motion come 2026. The Fox Point Studio was the foundation for the exhibition and the longest of the four essays in the booklet. The next post will be The Sketchbook, followed by the last two, The Metal Object, and The Protégé with the short conclusion.
Before I left for Wisconsin to install, I wrote in length about the opportunities that came along with this show, one of which was having the support to invite collaborators into the fold. In that post, there are some great work-in-progress pictures of the model studio, the anchor of the exhibition, being built by friend and artist Alex Gartelmann. He used sketches, photographs and descriptions to bring the studio out of the archive and into the gallery. The model was placed on a pedestal in front of enlarged photos of the interior to give the viewer a better understanding of this place that no longer exists. I am thrilled with the success of how this manifested, with the studio model and a few other objects in the show. My interest in lifting out history out into a contemporary space to activate conversation and memory is a part of how and why this work has value.
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 runs through March 14, 2026.
The Fox Point Studio: A Space of Possibility1
Four years after meeting at Downer College in 1915, Charlotte Partridge and Miriam Frink moved into an apartment in Chicago. This was the first of at least eight homes, some seasonal, that they shared prior to the completion of their “house on the hill” in Mequon in 1938. This modern home, designed by Milwaukee architect Harry Bogner and based on hyper-contemporary sketches by Partridge, was where they lived for the rest of their lives.2
Before the house on the hill, during the extended period of apartment living, they also had a spot they called the Fox Point Studio. It was built in the summer of 1930 as a three-season cottage on what they referred to as “the flats” along Lake Michigan, now North Beach Drive. It represents a time in Partridge and Frink’s lives when they needed to carve out space for themselves away from the bustle of the Layton School of Art. From 1930 to 1938, when they had the studio, Partridge and Frink were central to Wisconsin’s shifting and thriving art community. The studio wasn’t just a place to relax and unwind; it was a space for entertaining their friends and making art—a studio for dreaming about possibilities—an escape from the city.
The pair’s desire to be outdoors and near water was a constant throughout their lives. A previous seasonal rental on an island in the Milwaukee River likely set the foundation for elements of the Fox Point Studio. “For several summers, we rented that place. It had no electricity, no heat, and it was on the northern end of the island. We had people come out and spend the night with us…out in the open air, nobody around.” In the 1920s, you could get to this recently developed location from downtown by riding the Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company’s interurban train to the end of the line. As Frink describes it, guests could ride out and “get off at a certain place, and it was absolutely uninhabited. There were no houses there.”3
Between 1921 and 1938 they shared a string of apartments on Marshall Street, Frederick Avenue, and Kane Place, all located conveniently near the Layton School of Art in downtown Milwaukee. Living near the school and constantly working was taking a toll on the pair. Without a plan, they began looking for a permanent solution, a nearby “countryside” place to escape the city.4 Katherine Yates, who became their lifelong friend, joined them on their search. When the search proved unfruitful, she offered another suggestion: “ I’ve got four acres along the flats below our house. Why don’t you build there? You can build a little cottage.” At the time, the Yates land parcel (Katherine was the wife of prominent surgeon Dr. John L. Yates) ran down to the lakefront from the top of the bluff where the house at 957 East Wye Lane remains to this day.
Partridge, who had an established interest in architecture, drafted the plans and paid for the materials and work, which together cost around $1000.00, an estimated $19,000.00 in 2025. The 1922 Fox Point Village records list both Partridge and Frink as “owners of the premises on the Yates property,” but there was no signed agreement, lease, or contract between Partridge, Frink, and the Yateses. Frink explained, “Katherine didn’t ask for anything. People thought she was crazy and thought we were crazy.” The building work was done by the Yates’s carpenter, with Partridge closely overseeing and sometimes assisting with construction. The studio had a refrigerator, an electric stove, and a gravity-fed water system tapped from a spring in the bluff above the house that Yates knew about. “We got a tank over the kitchen sink. You could hear the water coming in. We piped it into the bathroom so we had cold water and could flush the toilet.” The studio’s plans and its construction are well documented in the archive, including photographs of Partridge supervising the build from the scaffolding and the moment she inscribed her initials in the wet cement of the hearth.
Frink described the studio as delightful and talked about her father visiting. In correspondence, friends recall time spent there fondly: “There were three couches there, and we’d all spend the night.”5 Less is known about the time they spent there as a couple or on their own. Considering their schedules, taking space from their immense responsibilities was likely difficult. One unique surviving photograph offers a clue. On the back, in pencil: “on the beach in front of the studio.”6 A pair, the one on the right the easily identifiable Partridge, are sitting on a rock in the sand, joyfully embraced. The head of the woman that Partridge is holding--most likely Frink—is thrown back, laughing, her gaze downward. Was it Yates behind the camera? Whoever it was, it’s a rare, candid moment of intimacy from their archive.
The studio was dedicated on August 4,1930, which would have been Frink’s thirty-eighth birthday. “In the cement when it was still wet, we put our initials and the date, and it was my birthday, I think we put a little opal in it,” she recalled. “Bet a dollar it’s still there.”7 A little over a month later, the Milwaukee Journal published “Studio in Fox Point Is Built by Artists.” Partridge was credited with the design—and praised: “Making that room do the work—the ‘efficiency,’ as the apartment advertisers have it…is a marvel of architecture and ingenuity.”8 The article’s four photographs and a detailed description of the space help us imagine what it felt like inside. The spaces we don’t see in the 20 x 30-foot room are the “miniature bathroom” and “culinary corner” hidden behind the folding screen. Although we know they entertained quite frequently and there was a small kitchen area, there was only one mention of food to be found in their papers: a humorous story about guests who left a can of refrigerator biscuits that exploded inside the icebox. “Not a bit easy to get out, as I recall,” wrote Frink.”9
Dr. Yates died in 1938, the same year the Mequon house was completed, and Katherine decided to sell the Wye Lane house along with the studio. “When it came to selling that land, the house was an asset, and we were glad about it,” Miriam recollected.10 The buyers of the property had the building checked out by an architect, who Frink recalled saying to Partridge, condescendingly, “The proportions are practically perfect in the house.” Over thirty-five years later, Frink explained, “I have to laugh when I think about it because if Charlotte knew anything, she knew what proportion was.”
From the very beginning of the Layton School of Art, Partridge “had an intense desire to impress on her students the importance of modern architecture.” This is outwardly reflected in the design decisions made for the Fox Point Studio, the “house on the hill,” and in her later work collaborating on Zonta Manor with the Leenhouts. As early as 1921, “Partridge received permission from the Layton trustees to use one of the galleries at Layton to display an exhibition on model homes—one of the first temporary exhibitions to be held at the gallery and one of many that would deal with architecture.”11
Making the Fox Point Studio a central piece in the show centers Partridge’s passion for architecture and directly connects the exhibition to work she was doing at the Layton Art Gallery more than 100 years ago. I could not find any evidence in the Fox Point Village records indicating when the Fox Point Studio was removed or remodeled beyond a state of recognition, though we can surmise from Frink’s extensive recollections, recorded by her niece Susie Habenicht in 1974, that the studio was still there at that time and has only disappeared in the last fifty years. The model in the gallery, based on Partridge’s sketches in the archive, reclaims that ghostly, potent space and puts it back into conversation with the objects and ideas I have gathered.
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Part 3: The Sketchbook will be published on Sunday, December 14 2025. Find Part 1: Introduction here.
Editors note: All quotations in this essay are from transcriptions of 1974 interviews with Miriam Frink (MF) that are housed in the Charlotte Russell Partridge and Miriam Frink Papers, 1862-1980, at the University Of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries’ Archives Department, box 15, folder 10, unless otherwise noted.
Constance Daniell, “To Be Busy,” Milwaukee Journal, September 1, 1965.
MF transcriptions, taped May 1974, tape #5B p.2, #A5, p.3.
MF transcriptions, August 1974, #9A, p. 2-3 (and following paragraph).
MF transcriptions, August 1974, #10B, p. 1.
On the back in pencil: “July 30, on the peach in front of the studio.” Charlotte R. Partridge Photographs, box 1, Folder 7.
MF transcriptions, August 1974, #9A, p.3.
"Studio in Fox Point Is Built by Artists,” Milwaukee Journal, September 14, 1930.
MF transcriptions, August 1974, #10B, p.1.
MF transcriptions, August 1974, #9A, p.3.
John C. Eastberg and Eric Vogel, Layton’s Legacy: A Historic American Art Collection, 1888–2013 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 219.
Absolutely brilliant how the studio model brings forward Partridge's architectural vision in a way blueprints never could. The contrast between carving out refuge from the city and still maintaining that tether to creative comunity feels super relevant now, I find myself needng both without knowing how to balance them. That detail about the opal in the cement makes the whole narrative click in place.