Featured Member Exhibition: Kristine Hinrichs
Invisible and Essential
October 16 – December 18, 2026
This work is from my continuing Photo a Day project. I have taken and posted a photograph to social media every day since July 2, 2011. More than 5500 straight days photographing (primarily) the Milwaukee community. The pieces presented here focus on those people whose work is important and essential yet are essentially invisible. We rarely notice them or appreciate the importance of their work. There are legions of people in our community who get up early every day to go to work, while many of us are still asleep or enjoying our morning coffee. They board buses for long rides to their jobs, open their businesses, head to construction sites in the height of COVID, make our coffee, and deliver our packages.
What would our lives be without all of them?
My use of silk organza for the large panels portrays those workers as nearly invisible and ghostly – the viewer can see through them and around them, without interacting with them. The same is true for the silk panel pieces – the workers are ghostly and ethereal. All of these pieces focus particularly on what I see while photographing before dawn – the people who are at work long before many of us, even on Thanksgiving. I developed the unique process for printing my images on silk, and displaying them as presented here, over approximately nine months. I had to develop it ‘from scratch’, including the design of the clear bracket. I print them myself on my inkjet printer using fabric specially prepared to accept pigment ink. It is important to me to have control of the entire process, down to the hand-sewing of the pieces.
I hope that this presentation causes the viewers to take a second look at these people who play an important part in our lives.
Each year during WPCA’s Annual Members Show, an esteemed juror selects four exhibiting artists whose work stands out for its excellence and impact. For 2026, juror Amal Azzam conducted a blind review of submissions, applying her own criteria to identify artists whose work resonated deeply with contemporary themes and artistic innovation.
Among the selected artists is Kristine Hinrichs, whose photography displayed remarkable technique and skill. Azzam noted that Hinrichs’ “poignantly shines a spotlight on essential workers and the middle class, evoking emotion, nostalgia, and reality.”
The 2026 Featured Member Exhibition Series will be comprised of four solo shows for Cynthia Hayes in the winter, followed by exhibitions from Susan Simensky Bietila (spring), Geornica Daniels (summer), and Kristine Hinrichs (fall).