Join our mailing list

Pius PAC

Marissa & Susan Waraksa and Joshua Holzmann

Meet the Artists

 

Marissa Waraksa ’09

Marissa Waraksa graduated Pius XI in 2009, and still remembers chanting her graduation year with pride, voice echoing in collaboration with her classmates, yearning to move forth and spread the wings she’d been preening for four years. After high school, she attended UWM and MIAD for far too many degrees, in Vocal Music, Dance and Sculpture, with minors in Writing and Industrial Design. Little did she know the words would be the thing to come back to bite her. Now she owns and operates a media publishing company called Smokeblood, and spends far too much of her time under the daze of a blue light as a ghost called Keira Faer.

A storyteller and poetess by birth, dancer by blood, singer by training, woodworker and fiber artist by marriage, and an accidental actress, Marissa strives in her creative actions to focus her light in the right directions, even through the toughest of shadows. She explores through her work such topics as fear and death, love, relationships, societal patterns and cultural norms, anxiety, depression, femininity, and the quest for one’s inner truth.

 

Susan Waraksa ’71

Susan Waraksa started teaching herself to draw at a very young age, staying up late into the nights to emanate the style and technique of the Masters. She never could stop drawing once she started.

After graduating Pius XI Catholic High School in 1971, Susan earned her BFA in Metals from UWM, and has since been designing and sculpting jewelry, whether with a bouncing baby on her hip or not. She taught art for many years, finding joy in the creative resilience of youth, and brought many mediums and explorations to her students.

Though she began as a painting and drawing major in college, the moment she found out how malleable metal really was, the dichotomy of the material drew her in, and she never looked back. She has been creating hand-carved small sculptures ever since, whether they be wearable, functional, or abstract.

Drawn from the wilds of her tender heart and verdant mind, her work pulls on the tipping points of life, reflecting the balance necessary of a dancer on point, unwavering yet yielding.

 

Joshua Holzmann ’03

Joshua Holzmann is a native of Milwaukee and 2003 graduate of Pius XI Catholic High School. He holds a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA and an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. Recent exhibitions include presentations at the Riverside Art Museum, Barbara and Art Culver Center for the Arts and Phyllis Gill Gallery at the University California Riverside. Holzmann is faculty of painting and design at Otis College of Art and Design and Art Center College of Design.