Meet the Artists: Spring 2026 Interview Series Now Online and On View at SJIMA

Lauren Boilini, Janis Miltenberger, and Dan Brown share the stories behind their work — in their own words.

There's something that happens when you stand in front of a painting or a sculpture and something shifts — when the work stops being something you're looking at and starts being something you're inside of. For many visitors to SJIMA's Spring 2026 exhibitions, that shift begins before they even reach the galleries. It begins with hearing the artists themselves.

This spring, SJIMA sat down with all three exhibiting artists — Lauren Boilini, Janis Miltenberger, and Dan Brown — for in-depth conversations recorded in the galleries where their work is on view. The exhibitions remain on view through June 1, 2026.

Lauren Boilini: The World She's Building

In the Nichols Gallery, Lauren Boilini's Celestial Navigation fills the room with swirling congregations of birds, fish, moths, and insects — large-scale oil paintings on linen that pull you in and hold you there. In her interview, Boilini explains the impulse behind it all with characteristic directness: "I really want to be filling space."

But the work is more than compositional abundance. Boilini traces the show's title through several layers — a favorite episode of The West Wing, a piece of writing about moths drawn to light, and ultimately something more personal.

"The studio becomes the island," she explains, describing a fictional narrative that underlies her entire body of work — a world she's been quietly building across paintings for years, one that gives her, as she puts it, "company" in the studio and "places to research, places to go."

She also talks about the fish painting that started it all — begun during the early months of the pandemic, when she decided her response to a global crisis would be to "just cram this world full of fish" and paint her way through it. Six months of fish later, she moved on to moths and snakes. It's the kind of story that makes you want to go back and look at the work all over again.

Janis Miltenberger: What Glass Knows

Janis Miltenberger has been working in borosilicate glass since age 19 — and in her interview, filmed among the sculptures of Productive Uncertainty in the North Gallery, she speaks about her material the way you'd speak about a long friendship: with affection, respect, and a sense that it still surprises her.

"At least weekly I discover new things about the material that I hadn't really discovered before," she says.

The exhibition is organized around three distinct bodies of work, and Miltenberger walks through each of them. The Doctrine of Signatures pieces draw on a medieval system of botanical knowledge — the idea that plants carry visual clues to their healing properties — and Miltenberger found in it a natural meeting point for her lifelong interests in plants, healing, and storytelling. She describes how sandblasting the glass removes its surface shine, allowing the form to read more clearly: "I believe you can see the form much better once you're not dealing with a lot of reflections."

The cage sculptures of An Intimate Area began, she explains, with a love of Art Nouveau — its external/internal play, its organic forms — and grew into something more symbolic: a bird in a nest, holding a human heart and a wishbone. Sustenance, sustainability, hope.

And then there is the Works in Blue series — three pieces made in memory of her daughter Arianna, who was murdered six years ago. Miltenberger speaks about this with quiet courage, tracing the symbolism of each piece: a thistle for strength and durability, her daughter's middle name Iris meaning "colors of the rainbow," and a forget-me-not she has titled Forget You Not. It is among the most moving passages in any of the three interviews, and it reframes everything else in the exhibition.

Dan Brown: Making Things from What You Find

Dan Brown grew up watching a man living in his father's basement weave beautiful baskets from salvaged telephone wire. That early image — of beauty made from what others discard — stayed with him. Decades later, his constructed sculptures of metal, wood, and found objects fill SJIMA's Sterner Atrium Gallery, and in his interview Brown traces a path from wildlife biology degree to Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay to art teacher to full-time artist, all of it threaded through by the same habit of seeing possibility in material others pass by.

"It's kind of a disease," he says cheerfully, "because everything I see I can make into this or I can make into that."

He talks through specific pieces — a humpback whale leaping through a genuine old wagon rim, an eagle whose beak he always sculpts first because it's the hardest part, wood blocks salvaged from the school shop. And he explains his process with the kind of clarity that only comes from decades of doing: look at a thousand reference photos, draw a flat cartoon, bend rebar to match the outline, then begin giving it motion.

When asked why making art is a necessity for him, he pauses — he admits it was the hardest question he was given — and arrives somewhere honest:

"I really find that focus just calms me down. It makes me feel good. It kind of eliminates the rest of the world. And I guess that's the real need is to just be happy doing something."

Watch Online. Then Come See the Work.

All three interviews are available now at sjima.org/artist-interviews. If you're planning a visit to the museum, you can also watch them in the upstairs gallery — a chance to hear from the artists in the same building where their work is on view.

Celestial Navigation, Productive Uncertainty, and Iron and Wood: Sculptures of the Northwest are on view through June 1, 2026. SJIMA is located at 540 Spring Street in Friday Harbor and is open Friday through Monday, 11 AM–5 PM. General admission is $10; free for visitors under 18. Mondays are pay-what-you-like.

Plan your visit at sjima.org.

WATCH THE INTERVIEWS

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SJIMA gratefully acknowledges the generous support that makes our Spring 2026 exhibitions possible.

Honeywell Foundation, Mark Torrance Foundation, Town of Friday Harbor, San Juan County. In-Kind Sponsors: Browne’s Home Center, Harbor Rental, Printonyx, Terry Ogle Painting