Walking through the Lincoln Warehouse in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood can feel like winding through a maze. Each floor of the converted warehouse space is lined with doors leading to offices, galleries, shops and art spaces – like Tooth & Nail Studio.
Sculpture artist Janelle Gramling founded Tooth & Nail in 2024, as a space for beginners and established artists alike. The studio offers a wide range of classes, including workshops on “grief altars” – miniature grottoes dedicated to deceased loved ones. The ceramic altars can hold candles, photos, notes, jewelry or other remembrances of the departed.
Grief altars offer a “physical space to meet with our grief, to devote time to our beloved dead in a way that offers ritual and ceremony that our larger, wider culture doesn't really retain anymore,” says Abby Goelzer – a death doula and the owner of Milwaukee grief care center Garnet and the Moon.
Goelzer and Gramling co-teach the grief altar workshop, with Goelzer leading a grief processing portion of the class and Gramling leading the sculpting portion. But, like yin and yang, the two elements of the workshop are intimately connected.
“While Abby's walking through the grief portion, [participants] have the clay front of them – and it's kind of giving them the experience of processing and putting into the clay what they're thinking about,” Gramling explains.
For Gramling and Goelzer, the workshop is about much more than the end product. It’s about processing grief with others in an individualistic culture where negative feelings are too often processed in isolation, if at all.
“When we live and [when] we grow up in such a grief averse culture, it feels like a big, scary, daunting thing to sit with your grief and metabolize it and work through it,” says Goelzer. “And it doesn't have to be that way, especially when we're making art in community.”
And that’s in keeping with Tooth & Nail’s mission as community art space.
“We want to be a third space where people who are working artists or hobby artists or art-curious can come and meet each other and have creative experiences with each other,” Gramling says.
Tooth & Nail's next grief altar workshops are on April 26 and May 3. You can find their full calendar of events here.
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