Milwaukee discusses creative placemaking

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This afternoon Turner Hall ballroom was packed with a diverse crowd. Business executives, philanthropists, architects, environmentalists, educators, politicians and—yes—artists of all stripes gathered for a forum and discussion of placemaking.

Placemaking can be defined in a variety of ways, according to Alice Carle of the Kresge Foundation. “But art needs to be at the table,” she added, with emphasis. Lyz Crane, Deputy Director of ArtPlace America went further. Creative placemaking is “anything where you are doing art to create a sense of place” or to “shape the future” of a place.

They should know. The Kresge Foundation and ArtPlace America are major funders of placemaking projects. In 2013 Milwaukee was the recipient of a substantial grant from ArtPlace America for Creational Trails: A Placemaking Experience.

Crane was quick to add that “everyone in the room,” not just the artists, had a stake in the process. She also made a point of distinguishing between using “creative” as an adjective and an adverb; a place can be made creative but placemaking is done creatively.

The diversity of the crowd was no accident. “Cross-disciplinary” and  “connectivity” were themes repeated by many of the panelists, who themselves represented many of the various disciplines required to engage in successful placemaking. The format had a pair from each discipline onstage at a time, one from Milwaukee and the other from out of town. In addition to the philanthropic community, there were elected officials, developers, community organizers, city planners, and leaders in higher education.

Between the pairs of panelists we were informed about a series of six local case studies that exemplify placemaking: America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Creational Trails, The Harmony Initiative, In:Site: Art on Fon du Lac Ave., Islands of Milwaukee, and Three Bridges Park/Menomonee Valley.

The panelists were well prepared and insightful, I thought. And from where I sat the audience seemed both attentive and engaged. The room was abuzz for quite a while afterwards. It will be interested to see what becomes of the energy generated.

Here are a few other snippets about placemaking that caught my attention.

Placemaking must be unique to the place and build on existing community assets. It must engage with the community authentically. The sectors of a community must “get out of their silos” and work together. Efforts by one sector can act as a catalyst for change in others.

The arts are essential because they help us to see things in new ways. Arts and culture also can bring together disparate segments of a community.

Neil Hoffman, president of MIAD, reminded the audience of what a risk it was to move the school to the Third Ward. At that time, he said, far from having its current trendy reputation, it was a “war zone” where students needed an escort to cross the street. He suggested that groups and institutions should change their perspective. The nearly reflexive question, “What do we need?” should be turned around: “What do we have to offer?”

When asked to provide an example of a successful project, alderman Michael Murphy cited the Menomonee Valley and said, “We’ve been doing creative placemaking for twenty years; we just didn’t know it was called that.”

The two developers on the panel, Milwaukee's Barry Mandel and Omar Blaik, from Philadelphia, PA, each described how the inclusion of arts added value to their developments. Arts and culture "bring vibrancy to cities,"said Mandel. Responding to the question, "What do people want from community?" Blaik replied, "People want human interaction." He added that the trend in the U.S. towards single use development is backwards; it leads to segregation. Mixed use developments that include the arts energize places and stimulate interaction.

I don’t remember who said it but pride was mentioned more than once. The arts do more than “activate” places; they give a city something to root for. Alderman Murphy asserted that even controversial art was good for the community. Some people love it, some may hate it, but art, he said, generates “passion."

Amen to that.

The forum was jointly sponsored by The Greater Milwaukee Committee, Mandel Group, Inc. and The Creative Alliance.

Milwaukee rocks on gallery night!

Lake in Catskill Mountains (Woman throws crutches), Joel Meyerowitz

January is a gamble in Milwaukee. We all know that below zero temperatures and blizzard conditions could have killed any desire to go out on a Friday evening. Gallery night also is a bit of a gamble. There are a great many venues from which to choose and wide variability in the types of art being proffered by them. The very success of the venture can lead to crushing crowds in a few of the more popular locations and more of a carnival atmosphere than one conducive to art appreciation.

Last night, however, the stars must have been in alignment. Everything seemed to click, at least for me. I hope it did for you as well, if you went out. Every gallery my wife and I visited had healthy but not bruising crowds along with a wealth of wonderful art from the well established to the unfamiliar. The remarkable 40° temps earlier in the day left a balmy feeling that helped keep my spirits lifted between venues.

If Milwaukee is indeed one of the top 12 “art places” in the U.S., as recently reported, then gallery night was supportive evidence. (I attended a listening session on Monday hosted by ArtPlace, the consortium of foundations, gov’t. agencies, and banks that awarded the designation. The designation specified East Town and the Third Ward rather than Milwaukee as a whole, which neglects the overall fabric of a city that supports those arts districts as well as overlooking other significant places to find art in the area. But, mea culpa, I spent most of gallery night in East Town and the Third Ward!)

I don’t have time to do more than provide a taste of what we saw last night. Almost everything we saw was just opening and is ongoing, so check them out at your leisure.

We started with the trio of new shows at the Haggerty Museumof Art. Dark Blue: The Water as Protagonist sprawls through several of the galleries. As the name indicates, everything in this show of both contemporary and vintage photography relates somehow to water. Like the subject, it is a tenuous, fluid connection that assembles and juxtaposes conceptual with documentary, monumentality with banality. We raised our eyebrows now and then, but agreed that overall it’s a strong show. (And, hey, it includes my favorite Misrach image. How cool is that?! The Meyerowitz image at the top is also from this show.)

Swamp and Pipeline, Richard Misrach

Compressed within the tight space of a side gallery, local photographer Kevin Miyazaki has created a kind of chapel devoted to Lake Michigan. In a two-week period, Miyazaki drove 1,800 miles and circled the lake. One wall features portraits of people he met along the way and the facing wall is a grid of lake views in which the horizons are precisely aligned. The result is a surprising mediation on the not-so-subtle variations in color and texture of the water and sky. The two sides of the room suggest the interconnectedness of the human and natural aspects of the environment. 

Perimeter, Kevin Miyazaki

Gallery M at the Intercontinental Hotel is hosting the finalists in the Pfister Hotel’s artist in residency for the coming year. Once again there are a few surprising choices among the contenders and it will be interesting to see who is selected.

After that we headed to the Third Ward and lucked into one of precious few free parking spaces on the street, not far from Translator, a design firm that is hosting a show called Art in Unexpected Places. The work in this show was all done by participants in the Alzheimer’s Association’s Memories in the Making program. The watercolors are unpretentious and fresh. Each is accompanied by a short story about its creator. It is a fitting reminder not only that life is short and memory unpredictable, but that genuine art doesn’t have to be about marketplace values. 

Although we had other places on our to-see list, we ended up spending the rest of the evening in the Marshall Building, which was humming from top to bottom. Quick hits, descending from the top:

Plaid Tuba, the arts incubator created and led by Reginald Baylor, has moved from its first floor digs to an expanded suite of studios on the sixth floor. If any place can “manufacture creativity” as its motto insists, this is a good candidate.

Every year in January the Portrait Society Gallery commissions a local artist to create a “Winter Chapel.” This year Kevin Giese has installed a grove of hollow birch bark tree trunks culled from the northwoods near Bayfield, stripped and then carefully stitched back together. It provided a magical, quiet interlude in the midst of the clamoring crowds.

Sculptor James Toth has returned to the art scene after a long stint as Director of Exhibits at Betty Brinn Children’s Museum. His evocative abstractions made of polished “cementitious” materials with the appearance of marble grace a pop-up gallery on the third floor.

Along with the regular fare in The Fine Art Gallery and Gallery 218, always worth a peek, Blutstein Brondino Fine Art is hosting artworks by the Grand Avenue Club. The club provides services for adults who have experienced mental illness and displays its members’ art regularly on its own walls at 210 E. Michigan Street. It’s nice to see it acknowledged by a commercial gallery. Kudos to BBFA!

Last but not least, Elaine Erickson has anointed two long time members of CoPA (Coalition of Photographic Arts) with her first ever show of photography, called Eye of the Beholder. George Sanquist and Yong-ran Zhu are an appropriate match, each following the tradition of classic black and white silver gelatin printing process, which has become far from common in this digital age.