Lois Bielefeld has always been interested in portraits. Ever since she took up photography as a young Milwaukeean and moved to New York to pursue it as a career, her artistic works have been what she calls “conceptual portraits” — works assembled in a series, centered around the habits and traits all people share.

She moved back from New York in 2010, relocating for her day job as a Kohl’s photographer, and most of her subjects since have been in the Wisconsin area. For her latest project, she’s going much further afield: the tiny, landlocked Western European nation of Luxembourg.

The adventure comes as a fellowship sponsored by the Museum of Wisconsin Art, and Bielefeld is the program’s first artist-in-residence. The annual, 10-week residency includes travel fare, a monthly stipend and housing in Bourglinster, a converted castle 15 minutes north of Luxembourg City, where Bielefeld will have the opportunity to live and work surrounded by Luxembourg culture. 

It’s an honor she says she never anticipated receiving, especially after having been able to watch the judging process for Milwaukee’s Mary L. Nohl Fellowship the year after she won that in 2012. “That was a huge reality check,” she says, reflecting on the 200-odd entries submitted to that prize’s jury. “I knew there were amazing artists here, but I didn’t know to what level. … I in no way thought I would ever get the fellowship.”

Bielefeld’s works, photographs blown up to a large scale, stand out as particularly striking and intimate examples of portraiture. And she’s recently expanded beyond photography with projects that investigate sexuality and gender roles. One, Ladies Out, is a documentary film that premiered in 2014, depicting a community of Milwaukee lesbians over 40 who get together on a monthly basis to go dancing and socialize.

Her latest show, Androgyny, at Portrait Society Gallery (which represents Bielefeld), follows that trend. The exhibit, which runs through March 14 is primarily composed of solo portraits, depicting adults and children who present androgynously to the world at large. But while taking their photos, Bielefeld also asked her subjects a series of questions about themselves and their life experiences, which she recorded and turned into a single, six-hour audio piece. When setting up her installation, Bielefeld built a non-functioning public bathroom with gendered entrances, acknowledging the space as one where non-gender-conforming individuals are most frequently challenged and forcing her audience to feel some of that tension.

“To me, interactive art has always been the most memorable,” she says. “It just engages you on a different level. If you can get somebody thinking beyond just looking at something … every aspect of the bathroom is very thought-out to have it hit you.”

But due to the limitations of being abroad, Bielefeld says, she anticipates her residency project will stick to photographic mediums, like her earlier work. Her first series, The Bedroom, presents its subjects in their own rooms, suggesting the contents are a reflection of their characters. “I’ve always loved seeing people’s bedrooms, even as a little kid,” she says. “It really says a lot about a person.”

Weeknight Dinners, an ongoing project she started as part of her Nohl Fellowship work, touches on similar themes. In each, Bielefeld captures a single family unit on an average day of the week, eating the food they normally would.

That series, she says, is how she plans to segue into Luxembourg society during her fellowship. Wisconsin is home to a number of small Luxembourg-American communities, most notably in Belgium, Wisconsin, and Bielefeld traveled there to take dinner portraits of Luxembourg-American families. She hopes to take an additional 12 while overseas, “both because I’m just curious how their eating habits are different than ours, but also to immerse myself in the culture and really get connected.”

Bielefeld says those families have also proven helpful in educating her about what Luxembourg culture is like. She’s already learned about the significance of St. Nicholas and his feast day over Santa Claus and Christmas, and about ethnic dishes like mustripen, a blood sausage native to the region. She even says she’s beginning to get a sense of a sort of Luxembourg character trait: a warm disposition inexplicably mixed with a distinctly private nature.

Details like that, and what she learns upon arrival, are what will help her figure out what to do after the first few weeks, once she’s become more acclimated to the region. Or so she hopes. It’s a nervous anticipation, she says, preparing for the fellowship, but she’s optimistic it’ll provide her with the nudge she needs to grow as an artist. “I’m really looking forward to how people do things differently elsewhere,” she says, “And hopefully making a compelling body of work out of it.”

Whatever Bielefeld creates is slated for exhibition at MOWA sometime next year, but that isn’t her concern at this point. She’s only thinking about the frames of photographs, and what snapshots of Luxembourg she’s going to put in them.