Lesley Numbers: Artist in Residence at Schoofs Preserve
November 11, 2025 | Topics: featured artist
The Natural Realm presents Lesley Numbers, who is among 10 artists participating in a year-long residency program called ARTservancy, now in its sixth year. ARTservancy is a collaboration between Gallery 224 in Port Washington and the Restoring Lands Land Trust, (formerly Ozaukee Washington Land Trust and River Revitalization Foundation). Milwaukee Area Land Conservancy, Tall Pines Conservancy, and Lake Michigan Bird Observatory. The mission of ARTservancy is to promote the visionary work of both the artists and conservationists. Each artist has selected a preserve to spend time in and to engage with.
Reflections from the Artist
In his book, Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane writes about the necessity to imagine, seek out, (re)create and sustain “geographies of hope.” I read his book in tandem with visiting Schoofs Preserve over the past year and I’ve come to see the preserve—and land trusts more generally—as part of this expansive geography. Macfarlane elaborates, “Despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline. Hope is a discipline because it requires vigilance, concentration, and lucidity to imagine better possible futures—and then to push onwards, in search of their realization.” Artmaking, too, requires hope and discipline and I’ve appreciated the ways in which the ARTservancy project have both encouraged me to maintain and expand upon my creative practice and develop an intimate relationship with land that I, most likely, would have otherwise never known.
Initially, I was drawn to Schoofs Preserve for several reasons. As a gardener with a fairly recent obsession for learning about and tending to native plants, I appreciated the Preserve’s prairie restoration efforts and pollinator garden and its accompanying plant identification and signage. There is clearly an effort to educate visitors at Schoofs, with information on native plants and pollinators posted along trails and small markers designating each species of tree throughout the Preserve. At the trailhead, there’s a number of flyers posted including trail maps, a history of the land and an on-going list of insects and birds seen by visitors of the Preserve. Within a fairly small space, the Preserve also contains an impressive range of habitats including a pond (which attracts a wide variety of birds), meadows, white pine, cedar and maple forests and a creek that meanders through the woods.
Inspired by the variety of living beings that make a home at Schoofs Preserve, I decided to begin documenting and illustrating all of the plants, insects and birds I observed and/or heard in addition to the lists of identified species created by other volunteers and visitors. I wanted to see and draw the preserve in every season, and so I established a routine of visiting at least once, sometimes twice, a month (always around the full moon). If I visited a second time in one month, I invited a friend to join and always appreciated the things they witnessed that I missed during my solo visits; a cluster of morels, a deer trail that led to a previously unexplored area of creek; birdsongs I didn’t recognize. The trails are easy to remember after a visit or two and so I would let myself wander on the deer trails until I became a little disoriented and stumbled across something that felt magical: lush moss glowing at golden hour, a sundog emerging over the prairie, the mating calls of cranes as they circled over the pond, an owl scooping up a blue jay in a flash, a trail of hawk feathers leading to a teepee-like structure in the woods.
These magical moments are slowly becoming composite images for a small series of reductive woodblock prints. Inspired by the wayfinding signs at Schoofs Preserve, I’m creating four diamond-shaped prints to represent each of the four main walking trails. More ambitiously, I’m hoping to illustrate the 474 documented birds and insects I and other visitors have seen at Schoofs Preserve (so far), alongside the plants that they co-exist with. I’ve developed a discipline of regularly illustrating the flora and fauna on upcycled, dried tea bags and enlisted the help of friends, family and studio mates to help me collect the paper. My hope is to display the illustrations so that they create a map to scale, with the various plants and pollinators positioned where they might be found at the preserve.
I’m continuing to visit Schoofs on a monthly basis and I hope to maintain at least semi-regular visits after my time with ARTservancy is over. At this point, the preserve feels like a friend. Walking the trails is both comforting and engaging; there is always something I notice that I haven’t seen before. I’m reminded of a quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Gathering Moss, which I listened to on several of the drives to and from Schoofs: “Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child’s smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.” Through the work of the ARTservancy program and through the sharing of my art practice more generally, my hope is that others are inspired to look more closely at and develop more intimacy with the living world around them.
Gallery
Bio
I am an artist, educator, mother and earth-tender, born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin on ancestral Ho-Chunk land. After some time exploring New York City and Asheville, NC, studying yoga and apprenticing at a letterpress printshop, I eventually earned a B.S. in Art Education and an MFA in Printmaking, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, I am Director of Youth Education at Arts + Literature Laboratory and co-president of Polka! Press, a local printmaking cooperative in Madison. My art practice is rooted in a sense of spirit, curiosity and love and my imagery is inspired by daily walks with my dogs, the local biome, music, poetry, our shared humanity and dreams. My studio practice is varied but I primarily create reductive woodblock prints, hand drawn screen prints and botanical ink drawings that explore the beauty, wonder, joy and grief of our living and dying world. Website: Lesleyannenumbers.com.
This residency is sponsored Restoring Lands: A Wisconsin Land Trust. Additional ARTservancy artists in residence at other sites can be found here.
For more information about Schoofs Preserve go to our Find-a-Park page.
This is the latest in our series of featured artists, which is intended to showcase the work of photographers, artists, writers and other creative individuals in our community whose subjects or themes relate in some broad sense to nature, urban nature, people in nature, etc. To see a list of previously featured artists, click here. The work of the 2022-2023 ARTservancy artists in residence is currently being exhibited monthly at Gallery 224. To meet the other ARTservancy artists in residence, click here and then use the drop-down menu.
All images courtesy of the artist, except as noted. The featured photo at the top of Lesley Numbers at Schoofs Preserve is by Eddee Daniel. Restoring Lands is a project partner of A Wealth of Nature.
About Preserve Our Parks
Preserve Our Parks, Inc. is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of parks and green spaces. Our mission: To advocate for and promote Milwaukee area parks and open spaces and to strive to protect the tenets of Wisconsin’s Public Trust Doctrine.
For more than 25 years, we have been a leader in advocating for the protection of Milwaukee County park lands, halting many proposals to develop, privatize, or sell local parkland and lakefront spaces. More information about POP, including past accomplishments, is available at www.preserveourparks.org.