BIO
Thorsen Kursél is a visual artist and former painting faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is the founder and former president of Dead Straight Stretchers Inc (1996 – 2021), a company that manufactured supports and surfaces for artists. He is co-founder of Open Canvas, an annual fundraiser (2000- 2014) benefitting the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. His work has been featured at TenBerke, New York NY, Charles Allis Art Museum, Milwaukee; the World Tattoo Gallery, Chicago; Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago; the James Watrous Gallery, Madison WI; the Overture Center for the Arts, Madison WI; Gallery 1308, the University of Wisconsin – Madison; the Freeport Art Museum, Freeport IL; the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign IL; ARC Chicago; the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, New York, NY; and the Conkling Gallery, Minnesota State University. His installation “Woo–Lip System” was included in the seminal Web Jam of 1993, a large collaborative warehouse event in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY called Organism. He was the guest curator of Shhh... a 2018 national multimedia exhibition at the Arts and Literature Laboratory, Madison WI. He Lives and works in Madison, WI and Brooklyn, NY.