Janelle Gramling is a Milwaukee-based artist, designer, educator, and founder of Tooth + Nail Studio & Gallery. Her multidisciplinary practice spans ceramics, fiber, sculpture, fashion, and design, rooted in a lifelong obsession with materials, making, and building creative communities.

From 2005 to 2012, Gramling ran Little Ocean, an independent design label producing jewelry and clothing from vintage and reclaimed materials. She also co-founded and co-managed Fasten, a Milwaukee designer cooperative and boutique that brought together more than 50 local makers through retail, exhibitions, workshops, and fashion shows. After stepping away from fashion, she expanded into fiber arts, teaching herself weaving, fiber sculpture, natural dyeing, shibori, and quilting. In 2012, she began working in ceramics, developing an evolving practice that brings clay, fiber, and found materials into conversation.

Gramling was awarded a 2020 Mary Nohl Fellowship in the Established Artist category. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums, featured in national publications including Milwaukee Magazine and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and sold through independent boutiques and national retailers including West Elm and Anthropologie. She has created custom and collaborative work for interior designers, art directors, and art consultants across the U.S. and abroad, with clients including luxury hotels, restaurants, and private collectors, and has completed public art projects through Artists Working in Education.

In 2024, Gramling founded Tooth + Nail Studio & Gallery, an artist-run ceramics studio, gallery, and creative space in Milwaukee. The studio grew from her longstanding belief that making art is not only an individual practice, but a way to build relationships, share knowledge, and create belonging. Tooth + Nail offers ceramics classes, workshops, memberships, exhibitions, artist residencies, and community programming, creating space for artists at every level to work, teach, experiment, and connect.

Gramling has spent her adult life building things—in addition to her creative businesses and artistic practice, she has raised four children and restored two historic homes. Today, Tooth + Nail brings those threads together, expanding her work from artist and designer into creative director, educator, curator, and community-builder. It is the latest expression of a career spent making things, creating opportunities for other people to make things, and challenging the boundaries between art, commerce, education, and community.

Solo Exhibitions

2016 Symbiotic, Urban Ecology Center, Milwaukee, WI

Two-Person and Group Exhibitions

2023 Wisconsin Visual Artists Perspectives 2023 Exhibition, Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts, Fond du Lac, WI

2022 Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship Exhibition, Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI

2022 30x30x30 Exhibition, Var Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2020 Final Exhibit: MARN Mentors 2019/2020 Season, Between Two Galleries, Milwaukee, WI

2020 Wisconsin Artist Biennial, Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, WI

2019 Persistent Object, Between Two Galleries, Milwaukee, WI

2019 Final Exhibit: MARN Mentors 2018/2019 Season, Redline Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2018 Forward 2018: A Survey of Wisconsin Art Now, Charles Allis Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI

2018 Objects of Desire, Var Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2018 Working Pots III, James May Gallery, Algoma, WI

2017 Gift, Jazz Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2017 New North, Light Grey Art Lab, Minneapolis, MN

2017 30x30x30, Var Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2017 Amora, Hot Pop Gallery, Milwaukee, WI

2016 Waysides, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI

2016 Patchwork, Honeypie Cafe, Milwaukee, WI

2016 My Candle Burns at Both Ends, Hot Pop Gallery, Milwaukee, WI