Weeknight Dinners is a series of conceptual portraits focusing on the typical evening meal, when food and space often become secondary to the busy workday. The project, by artist Lois Bielefeld, explores common rituals, habits, and spaces that nonetheless reveal individualistic details about our private selves.
Bielefeld photographed the portraits Monday through Thursday evenings when time constraints due to work, parenting, and family activities often dictate dinner rituals. The series contains 78 portraits made in the US and Bourglinster, Luxembourg, where Bielefeld spent 10 weeks as an artist-in-residence in 2015.
Bielefeld shares reflections on her work in an interview with ICP Projected curator Wesley Verhoeve.
During the day, Weeknight Dinners can be viewed on monitors inside the ICP Museum and during evening hours, images are literally “projected” onto the windows of the ICP Museum; they can be viewed from the sidewalk outside the Museum and are most visible after sunset.
About the Artist
Lois Bielefeld is a series-based artist who splits her time between fine art and commercial photography. She works in photography, film, audio, and installation. Bielefeld lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her daughter and wife. Bielefeld has her BFA in photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology and from 2003 to 2010 she lived in New York City. Besides photography, she feels passionate about traveling, swimming, urban gardening, and bicycling adventures. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, ArtStart, Portrait Society Gallery, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin at Parkside, and the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, and she is a 2012 recipient of the Nohl Fellowship. In 2015, Bielefeld had a 10-week artist residency in Bourglinster, Luxembourg through the Museum of Wisconsin Art and the Luxembourg Ministry of Culture. Bielefeld is represented by Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee.