Wisconsin’s Kohler Arts Center does ingenuity with both sparkle and substance.

I’ d never been in Sheboygan or, for that matter, Wisconsin, but, flying from Albuquerque to Chicago recently, I decided to take the plunge and visit what I learned is the Malibu of the Midwest. This small, handsome city is on Lake Michigan, big, blue, and beautiful as well as the Great Lakes’ surfing mecca. I knew Sheboygan as the home of the Chordettes — in my babyhood, everyone could sing “Mr. Sandman” and “Lollipop” — and of the intriguing Kohler Arts Center. Kohler, as in the Kohler Company, based since 1873 in Sheboygan and renowned for high-quality, high-design bath and kitchen fixtures.

The Kohler Arts Center is named for John Michael Kohler, the Austrian immigrant who founded the company, still family-run. The arts center started in 1967 in the patriarch’s mansion in the center of Sheboygan as a community art gallery and also a venue for lectures, concerts, theater, artists in residence, and America’s first arts-based preschool. The company wanted its employees, their families, and the city to enjoy the arts, and surfing wouldn’t do.

I knew the Kohler center from its heroic work conserving the outdoor, totemic, bizarre wood sculptures by Bernard Langlais displayed in Cushing in Midcoast Maine on the grounds of what used to be his hardscrabble farm. I also knew the Kohler as a most adventurous and practical place. That’s a rare blend but obviously a desirable one. Its location in Sheboygan, Wis., between Milwaukee and Green Bay, made it mysterious. Reputation is one thing. I wanted to see it for myself. I wasn’t disappointed. It has lots of good and, yes, idiosyncratic art, with more than half a dozen artists getting an in-depth look in what’s not a big place. Expect to be unnerved, moved, and perplexed. Expect to smile, too. The Kohler is doing essential work, and it’s doing it well.

This Is Where I’m Coming From is the overarching title of the Kohler’s main exhibition, really seven shows in one, focused on themes of home, or a special place that tugs at the heart, and heritage, a place familiar and precious to the artist but strange to almost everyone who’s not from there. As exhibitions go, it’s very different and fascinating. The project opened in June. Most of it runs until next year.

I’d heard of the Midwest grotto tradition, brought to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa especially by German immigrants and often on the grounds of churches or pilgrimage sites. They’re aplenty in Mexico, too, not German but a little Spanish and a little Indigenous. They’re sculptures, often life-size, usually starting with a concrete shape and then decorated with trinkets, stones from store-bought game marbles, pieces of stalagmites and stalactites, shells, rosary beads, family keepsakes, glass, petrified wood, toys, knickknacks, ceramic shards, little mirrors, whatever’s handy, attractive, and topical. Sometimes, they’re also architecture. A Beautiful Experience, one of the four parts of This Is Where I’m Coming From, displays a selection from this most unusual genre.

The manmade, handmade Midwest grottoes are meant to evoke natural grottoes, or caves, used for centuries, first by pagans and then by Christians, as roadside shrines and to spark prayer, though they can be secular, too. Projects such as the complex at the Holy Ghost Catholic Church in Dickeyville in southwestern Wisconsin helped inspire a serious grotto movement in the Midwest. The Dickeyville site, made in the 1920s by the parish priest, includes a cave, a Crucifixion scene, and fencing and handrails made from concrete, all decorated with thousands of bits of organic materials, found objects, and hundreds of gearshift knobs donated by Henry Ford.

The Kohler is many things, but, at least in terms of the visual arts, it specializes in artist environments. This sounds lofty, weird, and very niche — all true — but it’s a genre where the artist goes beyond the frame, beyond the studio and the gallery, and creates a total environment, usually but not always outdoors. It could be a sculpture program in a backyard, textile wall hangings covering a city loft, a purpose-built grotto in the Midwest, or Watts Towers in a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles, which are a collection of 17 soaring steel rebar towers, many of which have bases decorated with sculpture and mosaics made from the 1920s into the ’50s by the Italian immigrant tile mason Sabato Rodia. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden is another example.

The genre usually links art, location, and heritage warmly and tightly. Often, materials are commonplace. The artists tend to be self-taught or outsiders and quirky if not madcap. They’re not just creating individual works of art. They’re making imaginary worlds, often lavish, sometimes prodigal, sometimes poignant, each a phenomenon.

The Dickeyville grotto doesn’t travel — it sprawls over an acre and is both sculpture and architecture. The Kohler exhibition does include Madeline Buol’s grotto from the late 1940s. Buol (1902–1986) was the first to say that once she started, she couldn’t stop. Hers isn’t the art of less is more. She built her grotto in her backyard in Dubuque, Iowa, near the Wisconsin state line. It’s a 13-piece epic, all now owned by the Kohler, which did the intense conservation of the works a few years after Buol died. These grottoes are giant challenges, condition-wise, because of the Midwest’s freeze-and-thaw cycles and the wanderlust of the artists. They travel, seeing every trip as a search for materials. Matching shells and stones especially makes for headaches.

The grotto artists first need to learn how to pour concrete. In terms of design, the projects develop as they progress, so there’s lots of whimsy. The elements in Buol’s grotto range from 2 feet to 8 feet in height. Like the Dickeyville grotto and others, it combines religion and patriotism, with flags and Roman Catholic iconography twinned here and there. In Buol’s time, and, really, through the 1960s, many Americans assumed we were a Christian country, with the non-Christians accepted, mostly. Also, given the two world wars, Americans with German heritage felt under the social gun to affirm their bona fides when it came to e plurabis unum.

Most of these artist environments, like Buol’s, are immersive — we walk into them — but some aren’t. Stephanie Shih’s Toy Building (Dream House), made last year, started as a tribute to downtown Milwaukee’s former Toy Building, a six-story, green-brick pile built by China-born immigrant Charlie Toy in 1912. It housed a movie theater, a ballroom, a billiard hall, a Shanghai-style chop suey restaurant, clothing stores, and the Toy family’s penthouse home. Toy was a local celebrity who proved that not all Chinese immigrants ran opium dens and sold white women into slavery.

Shih (b. 1986), whose parents came to America from Taiwan, was an artist in residence at the Kohler in 2023, researching grottoes and the region’s once-considerable Chinese diaspora. She crowdsourced East Asian geegaws and built a vibrant and very fun shrine to Toy’s resilience and entrepreneurism but also to a long-gone Milwaukee. In 1939, the building was demolished for a parking lot.

Sheboygan has a hefty Hmong community, as does all of Wisconsin, immigration driven in part by the chaos of the Vietnam War and the subsequent Laotian Civil War. Pao Houa Her’s Imaginative Landscape, another section of This Is Where I’m Coming From, combines big, immersive, color photographs and a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall video depicting an older woman in ceremonial costume and a young man in a shirt and tie singing Hmong mourning poems. The video was performed and filmed in a Laotian landscape after Her’s husband died in 2021 and she briefly returned to Laos. It’s an acquired taste — not Cole Porter, suffice to say. But, as laments go, it’s effective.

Her’s photographs, in the same big space, are very beautiful. She and her family came to America in the mid-1980s when Her was a toddler, escaping through jungles in northern Laos. Her (b. 1982) used family memories, research, and Google maps to retrace, more or less, their escape. They are “lenticular” prints, a technique I didn’t know and that the label doesn’t define. Multiple images are sliced into thin strips, interlaced, and transferred to a single digital file. When printed, images have a gauzy but subtly 3-D look and seem as lush and as impenetrable as a jungle could be. All shades of green tend to live happily together, but who knew the color could be so dazzling? Her is very talented. I wrote about her work when I reviewed the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

At the Kohler, I liked Sarah Rowe’s Water Ledger — art about local Lakota and Ponca Natives’ view of water — but liked less Ashwini Bhat’s Indian-inspired ceramics. Rowe’s gallery was too small and claustrophobic while Bhat’s was too big and suffered from sameness. The meandering path in Bhat’s show, Reverberating Self, suggests discovery and surprise, but, in this case, less is more.

I like community-sourced, open-call exhibitions, which let local artists strut their stuff. And I Will Tell You Mine is a Salon-style show by local hobbyists, full-time artists, and children, with art about place or placelessness. It’s a wide-ranging theme. Such exhibitions always reveal one, two, and sometimes more gems among local art that’s never bad — this one is a juried show — but often derivative. Sandbar Sucker, by Kaiya Schroeder, is winsome and chipper. This child is bound for thrills and chills, in hardball politics or repo work, or as a tough-love mom. She won’t be Hillary Clinton bad. She’ll have a True Brat life. Sandbar Sucker is an example of a good work of art. It put one’s mind and eyes to work.

Familiar Textures: The Fibers of Childhood and Home uses textiles — clothing, blankets, carpets, upholstery — to reconstruct memories of home, origin stories, and emotions that comfort or haunt us. Some of the art’s a stretch, like videos in which textiles figure in the narrative, or wallpaper, which is made of wood fibers, a material often absorbing textiles in art jargon, hence the term “fiber art.” A couple don’t seem to be artist environments.

No matter. Yvette Mayorga’s Bedroom After 15th, from 2022, is a dreamy, exuberant young girl’s vision of Rococo high style. Purses, shoes, shelves, lighting, ceramics, a flip phone, sneakers, books, pillows, walls, a nightstand, and a TV are in pink-gone-nuke. It’s very 1980s or early ’90s since “Hello Kitty” figures pop from the walls, painted but meant to suggest wallpaper. Mayorga’s grandparents immigrated from Mexico to Chicago. Both her grandfathers worked in the Chicago factory that makes Tootsie Rolls. Very cute. The title? For Mayorga, her 15th birthday could have been marked by the traditional Mexican quinceañera birthday bash celebrating a teen girl’s coming-of-age. She declined the party for a cash gift she used to redecorate her bedroom as her private sanctuary.

The Kohler center, appropriate to the Kohler Company’s claim to fame, goes luxe when it comes to its public restrooms. The Kohler Foundation tends to support the installation of artist-designed restrooms in art museums where, for instance, someone in the Kohler family went to school. The Smith College Museum of Art, for instance, has fancy loos. Some dot the Sheboygan lav sphere as well. I love them. How smart. Everyone ought to powder his or her nose in style. Carter Kustera’s family washroom Tell Me Something I Don’t Already Know draws from information anonymously gleaned from the Kohler center’s members, more than 900 of whom sent in revelatory one-liners along with first names only. “Marjorie is a 100-year-old fairy tale princess,” “Barbara is allergic to shade,” and “Chris loves red shoes” are among the silly, sweet, titillating reveals — each one the inspiration for a silhouette that Kustera painted on the washroom wall.

Ann Agee’s 1999 washroom is Delft-gone-mad. The Kohler’s largest washroom is Matt Nolen’s Social History of Architecture, from 1998; near its ceiling is a border emblazoned with a Goethe quote: “Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Indeed. “Dream and be bold” is the right motto for the men and women often committing their lives to their artist environments.

I didn’t get to the Art Preserve, the Kohler building that houses its 30,000-object permanent collection and more than 30 artist environments. It’s on a nearly 40-acre site outside Sheboygan. But, finishing at the main arts-center campus after four in the afternoon, I’d run out of time. Next visit. I’ll leave my imaginary surfboard home. There’s too much to see and relish at the most unusual Kohler.