By Efrat Koppel

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When I asked Theresa Abel and Kelli Hoppmann what four decades of friendship feels like, Theresa responded, “What is oxygen?” Their lasting relationship, defined by creative trust, collaboration, and motivation, has shaped two singular artistic practices and supported both women in actualizing full artist lives. Their story is evidence of what enduring friendship can make possible.

Theresa and Kelli are individually highly successful fine artists. They’re also best friends. What distinguishes their relationship is not only longevity, but the way they’ve grown up together as artists, shaping their bodies of work as well as their lives oriented around making. Collaboration isn’t a project; it’s a life structure.

The two met as co-workers at U Frame It in Madison. Theresa was 19, newly returned from studying in Florence. Kelli had just returned to Madison after living in New York for a few years. Both came from working-class families that were hands off enough to not push against them pursuing lives as artists. The two became fast friends. The early stages of their relationship were defined by a shared hustle to survive as working artists. “We were highly motivated, and we were young and excited, so we painted all the time,” says Theresa. “We’d work together and then hang out after work and just talk about our paintings and what we were doing.”

The two helped found local artist collective ArtBite, and Kelli would research Madison retail vacancies, cold-calling owners to see if ArtBite could hold a pop-up show in their spaces, often for just one night. The shows had huge crowds, and ArtBite left the spaces better than they found them, earning recommendations that led to more shows. “Oddly, never got a no,” says Kelli. Hosting the shows and selling art were formative experiences for Theresa, who would go on to found Abel Contemporary Gallery.

Theresa and Kelli also asked the U Frame It owner to display original artwork, including their own, instead of mass-produced posters. “We sold regularly,” says Theresa, noting that while income was meager, it was enough to continue making work.

Their first collaborative body of work, exhibited in the walk-in cooler space of Artisan Gallery in Paoli, emerged organically from the same scrappiness that defined the early years of their friendship. Its success led to an invitation to exhibit new work at Kohler Arts Center followed by further projects over the years, with the most recent collaborative show, Stones and Stoics, at Abel Contemporary Gallery in 2023.

“That’s one thing we’ve had our entire lives for these 40 years: a constant dialogue about our art,” says Theresa. “It weaves through every conversation we have.” Theresa then says to Kelli, “I probably have seen almost every painting you’ve ever painted.”

Theresa and Kelli’s closeness resists easy categorization. Both have other deep friendships, but this one is singular—what Kelli describes as “ditch-digging” together over decades. The depth of their friendship has produced a remarkably unique collaborative process, which emerges from this wordless understanding. One begins a sketch, transfers it to a panel, and starts painting before handing it to the other. The work moves back and forth, each artist engaging with it until it’s complete.

Over time, they’ve established the twins theme, which they often revisit both individually and as a team. Their collaborations are a meditation moving organically over stretches of years. In these works, each artist paints a face. Theresa and Kelli’s faces contain universes: vigilance and resignation, remorse and resolve, concern, wisdom. As viewers, their complexity pulls at our own.

The theme of twins carries into their other collaborations. In Vestments, inspired by Bauhaus design and David Bowie costuming, they built upon Theresa’s painted paper dolls using origami paper Kelli collected. Layered bodies and a crow’s head enter to remind us of our frailty and our need. Vestments finds the two artists relishing in pattern, evoking the geometry of Theresa and the vivid color schemes of Kelli. Their collaboration also allows for conversation across separate canvases.

After Kelli was commissioned to paint Kingfishers for a collector, Theresa decided to paint a reprise. Together, the dramatic pieces feel like a conversation about destiny, consequence, the future, and the limits of our control. The collector ended up purchasing both pieces.

For all of that, their individual practices are distinct. Theresa’s exploration of personal narrative and her Catholic upbringing through medieval religious iconography contrasts with Kelli’s allegorical figures interrogating power and humanity’s primal forces, making their ability to work fluidly together all the more remarkable.

Fans of each other’s work, Kelli says about Theresa’s The Stone Path, “It was a retrospective in one piece, so it was fascinating to see how she pieced together her life story in this one long singular panel. And it’s so beautiful. I’ve been watching her paint forever, and it seemed to be the realization of a lifetime of thoughts.”

About Kelli’s work, Theresa says, “Sometimes Kelli paints these multilayered narratives with many people, and they’re all conversing with each other and interacting. They can be arguments or cocktail parties, and those are really complex and spectacular. Then sometimes she makes paintings with only one or two figures on a stark background, and I think of them as sharp as a knife. And I love that because they’re like an exclamation point.”

For both artists, the most important story brought to the work is the viewer’s interpretation. They hold the primacy and value of allowing the viewer to relate in an unadulterated way. Theresa says, “The really exciting thing for visual art is it’s only a completed experience when someone else sees it.” Underlying all of this is a shared sense of art as service. Painting, for Kelli, is a way to hold up a mirror. She says, “Sometimes we can aspire to be better animals.”

Over 40 years of sustained attention, Theresa and Kelli demonstrate that collaboration is more than a method. It can be a way of making risk survivable and a form of care. Their partnership suggests that artistic life doesn’t have to be solitary to be rigorous, and that with friendship, commitment, and time, it’s possible to build something enduring and extraordinary.

Efrat Koppel is an arts writer and lifelong arts lover and practitioner. Efrat writes about local artists, creative process, and the role of place in shaping artistic identity.