A Year in the Menomonee Valley on exhibit at WPCA

You're invited!

 

Please join me for

Eddee Daniel: A Year in the Valley
Witnessing Menomonee Valley Revitalization

May 29 - July 11

Opening reception: Friday, May 29, 5-9 pm.

Walker's Point Center for the Arts
839 South 5th Street
Milwaukee, WI

The exhibition will feature photography and stories from my 2014 tenure as the Menomonee Valley Partners' inaugural Artist in Residence.

The Menomonee Valley, once blighted and shunned, is in the midst of a dramatic and well-orchestrated transformation and has become a nationally renowned model for sustainable urban redevelopment. It was an honor and a joy to have had the opportunity to observe and document part of that transformation. I hope you'll come to see the results.

In addition to the opening reception, there will be a panel discussion on Thursday, June 18, 6–9 pm. Representatives from Menomonee Valley Partners, Milwaukee Riverkeeper, Urban Ecology
Center, Sixteenth Street Community Health Center and the Harbor District will join me to discuss Menomonee Valley revitalization – its history, ongoing development and future plans.

For more information about the exhibit go to WPCA.

For a lot more information about my year in the Menomonee Valley, including photographs, essays, and stories, go to the website that I created for the purpose.

Midwest photo show at Walker’s Point opens December 6

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You are invited! I hope you’ll join me there.

The 7th Annual Midwest Juried Photo Exhibition, sponsored by Milwaukee’s Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA) will be held at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, 839 S. 5^th St. Milwaukee.

December 6, 2013 – January 18, 2014



Opening Reception: 
Friday, December 6^th,  5 – 9pm


Gallery talk and award presentations by Juror Karen Irvine at 7pm



Closing Reception:
Winter Gallery Night, Friday, January 17^th, 5 – 9pm

The regional exhibition includes the work of 37 photographers from Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa.

I am happy to announce that I’m one of the 37 photographers and here is a sneak preview of my print.

“Horizon” is from a series called Synecdoche: the fragment that represents the whole.

Synecdoche is a literary device in which the part represents the whole. ("All hands on deck!" refers to the whole sailor, not just the hands.) My images are meant to be visual examples of synecdoche, which I use metaphorically. My subjects are the complex and often paradoxical relationships that I perceive between nature and architecture, or natural and human features in the landscape. My approach, using the part to represent the whole, symbolizes the fragmentation we experience in our everyday environment.

The juror is Karen Irvine, Curator and Associate Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago.

Her bio, from CoPA: Karen Irvine has organized over forty exhibitions of contemporary photography at the MoCP and other institutions and written essays for numerous artist monographs and magazines. Irvine is a part-time instructor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. She received an MFA in photography from FAMU, Prague, Czech Republic, and an MA in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CoPA at Walker's Point Center for the Arts

Milwaukee's Coalition of Photographic Arts (CoPA) organizes an annual juried show that is open to photographers from throughout Wisconsin and several surrounding states. The current show is at Walker's Point Center for the Arts. Juror's Graeme Reid and Annemarie Sawkins picked a diverse selection of 40 images from 266 submitted. The work ranged in style from photojournalistic to abstract.

Onrush by Bernard Newman

At the reception last night Graeme Reid, saying he spoke for both jurors, extolled the overall quality of the work as well as the quality of presentation. I agree. While many of the photographers and some of the images represented in the show were familiar, it also was good to discover a few who were not.

Although I enjoyed many of the works in the exhibit, my personal favorites were a pair of prints from a series called "Duplex" by Madisonian Ken Oppriecht. I am attracted to them on several levels. Technically masterful and conceptually intriguing, they take their mundane subjects into creative and metaphorical directions that suggest a critique of contemporary culture.

from Duplex by Ken Oppriecht

(Full disclosure: I am both a founding member and a current member of CoPA. However, I am not included in the exhibit.)

Vanishing Points at Walker's Point Center for the Arts

I finally got to see the current show at the Walker's Point Center for the Arts. I expected to like it and was not disappointed. Two painters and a photographer share a passion for urban environments in large scale works that complement each other nicely. I personally found Mark Slankard, the photographer, to be the most compelling. His images from Turkey were revelatory, layered with meaning, and beautiful.

Ruin with New Development, Mark Slankard

The descriptions below are from the WPCA website. The show runs through May 5. I recommend it.

Industrial Structure - Port of Milwaukee, Michael Banning

Michael Banning, a painter from Chicago, Morgan Craig, a painter from Philadelphia, PA and Mark Slankard, a photographer from Rocky River, Ohio, will be taking a look at urban environments from the perspective of growth and decay.

A building is a construct containing culture, identity and history within an architectural space.  Banning, Craig and Slankard approach architecture viscerally, allowing the viewer to experience the positive and negative spaces that time, weather and human activity has created in the urban landscapes portrayed.

Banning’s realistic paintings evoke historical markers, capturing a moment in the life of a building; containing dates, names, times; lacking individual figures, but incorporating a human presence.

In Craig’s large-scale paintings, one or two colors often dominate, setting a tone to the abandoned scenery.  Objects painted in saturated yellows seem to absorb the light, while warm, soft ochres and cool, diluted cerulean blues provide the emptiness of the environments with a certain vibrancy, a remnant of the energy the spaces once possessed.

Slankard’s imagery of an expanding suburban Turkey creates dissonance between completed structures, partial constructions, and the natural landscape.  It’s as if the whole environment feels incomplete: the photographs appear fragmented, each building seeming to possess its own space, as distinct from the grass, trees and sky that surround it.

Untitled, Morgan Craig

Images courtesy Walker's Point Center for the Arts.

Waste Land and two local exhibits of art with a social conscience

Another busy weekend on the art scene. Botanical blockbuster at the Milwaukee Art Museum, of course. (See previous post.) While that was fun – and a great way to attract a crowd to see great art – I also enjoyed a couple more modest exhibits of work with a social conscience.

Friday evening I started out at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts for the opening of “Carlos Cortez and Allied Artists.” Cortez, who died in 2005, was a prolific printmaker and indefatigable advocate for immigrants, the working class, and social justice. In addition to his personal activism, he influenced the work of many who followed, some of whom pay tribute in this exhibit. The exhibit organizers must be very pleased with the unexpected topicality of this show, given recent events in Madison. It runs through May 14.

Next I stopped at Gallery 2622 in Wauwatosa where Marianne Huebner, an art therapist at Children’s Hospital, is exhibiting her own work in a series of large mixed media paintings. Unlike most artists, whose efforts to express themselves in ever more novel ways often lead to self-indulgent excess, art therapists choose to use art as a tool for healing others. Art is created for the benefit of people in some kind of distress. The show runs through April 30 and the gallery will be open for the Westside Art Walk, a good time to check it out.

When I got home it was still early, so I popped in my Netflix DVD of the Oscar-nominated documentary Waste Land. It documents a project by Vik Muniz that takes art that can help others to a new scale, literally.

Zumbi is a picker. He lives in a favela (slum) near Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill, in Rio de Janeiro. Every day he joins an army of 2,500 who pick recyclable materials from the garbage. It is hard, smelly, dangerous work. Zumbi is also a philosopher. He rescues – and reads – books that have been discarded. He’s read Nietzsche and Machiavelli. He sees similarities between the medieval fiefdoms of Machiavelli’s princes and the turf wars, gangs, and drug lords of Rio’s favelas.  Zumbi dreams of creating a library for the community of pickers.

Waste Land tells the story of Zumbi and other pickers whose lives are transformed by an artist who grew up in a favela in Brazil and who wants to give back. Vik Muniz is now a very successful artist in New York with an international reputation. He has long made art from unconventional materials. Inspired by the landfill, he befriends the pickers and makes enormous portraits using them as subjects and their work – the recyclables gleaned from Gramacho – as his art materials. The results astonish everyone and transform Muniz as much as the people who become his collaborators as well as his subjects.

The inhuman scale of Gramacho is replaced by the individual lives of Isis, Tiao, Zumbi, and others who become monumental works of art. Along the way Muniz has to struggle with the impact he is having on them, whether it is ethical and sustainable.

To learn more, go to Waste Land. And put it on your Netflix queue.

Day of the Dead at Latino Arts and Walker’s Point

As promised, I recently visited the exhibit of ofrendas at the Latino Arts Gallery in the United Community Center. Then I also visited a very similar exhibit at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (WPCA). Although Halloween is today, the exhibits continue. I recommend them both for their devotion to the theme and the diversity of their installations.

Unfortunately, I missed the parade. But, here is my Halloween and Dia de los Muertos postcard/album from my visits. The descriptions are excerpted from exhibition text panels.

At the Latino Arts Gallery:


“Al pie de la tumba” by Emiliano Lake-Herrera

“This is a visual anthem to the intense nostalgia one experiences with the loss of a loved one.”

"La santa muerte" by Jose Chavez.
For some in Mexico the angel of death is sent by God to take you to Him. Considered a cult, la santa muerte is not sanctioned by the church, but is very much a part of Mexican lore.

Untitled mixed media painting by Luis de la Torre

Luis says he grew up Mexican in the U.S. and his work reveals “two cultures, two histories, and two distinct worlds fused together into a single enigmatic hallucination.”


 “Remember Aztecs” by students at Bruce Guadalupe Elementary School

 “Fronteras/Borders” by Ximena Soza

“Many cross the borders of the world. For some this is a nice dream; for others it is a nightmare.”

At the Walker's Point Center for the Arts:


 Although I missed the parade, I did get to hear these attractive skeletons play a lively tune, along with other performances, for the opening at WPCA. 

 Rosario Cabrera: the first female Mexican painter

Ofrenda dedicated to Cabrera made by the after-school Hands-On class at WPCA.


 Ximena Soza and Christian Munoz

Ofrenda “dedicated to the Chilean miners that for generations have opened the womb of the earth, to those who never left the mine and lived between the dirt and the metal until they died...” and “to the 33 miners who lived in the depth of the Atacama desert for 70 days and were able to be reborn…” and “to their children and grandchildren, so that they don’t have to die in any other mine to remind us that human dignity is worth more than…any metal.”


 Jose Chavez

This detail of Jose’s marvelous installation in the WPCA storefront resonated with me for what I hope is an obvious reason!

“Grandmother’s Kitchen” by Lisa Formanek and Dara Larson

“…Dedicated to the memory and importance of …the grandmother as nurturer, teacher, and keeper of family recipes….” This elaborate and intricate altar was also meant to be interactive. Visitors were invited to enter their own grandmothers’ special recipes into a handmade book. I did.

I offer these photos to provide a taste of the significance and beauty of these installations. But the images don’t do them justice. I hope you will visit and enjoy them in person.

The Day of the Dead continues through Nov. 19 at Latino Arts
and through Nov. 23 at Walker's Point Center for the Arts.
And don't forget, it also runs through Dec. 13 at the National Museum of Mexican Arts. To see my previous post about that excellent exhibit click here.

Unofficial gallery night this Friday in Milwaukee

Officially, gallery night (and day) comes around four times a year. I enjoy gallery night, especially when the weather is good. It’s great to rub shoulders with so many folks out to see art—and in some of the busier locations I often literally do rub shoulders; it has gotten that popular. But there’s a down side to gallery night, and it’s due largely to its popularity. The art seems to be taking a back seat to the socializing.

I’m all for socializing, especially with people who like art. It beats sitting home alone—and it’s good for one’s mental health as well.

On the other hand, if you want to see art, this Friday is shaping up to be a mini gallery night, judging from the surprising number of openings. Not being an official gallery night, you’re less likely to run into the pure socialites and more likely to run into to pure art lovers.

Here are my picks for Friday, Sep. 10. There are others, but one can only do so much and I hope I make it to all of these. Unfortunately, they are all over the map! (Which will make it hard to get to them all, but is also nice to note.)

Walker’s Point Center for the Arts is having its annual membership show opening. Their website is down for some reason, but you can still get the info and address by clicking here.

Alverno College is showing Pause to See: A Photographic Journey through Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand and Ecuador by Suzanne Garr. Sounds to me like she’s covering a lot of territory there. Click here for info.

Cardinal Stritch University is hosting the “90-day lawn ornament” by Gary John Gresl. The title itself is intriguing but for anyone who knows Gary’s penchant for intricate and provocative assemblages, this sounds like a must-see. Click here for info.

There is always something happening in the Marshall Building in the Third Ward. Light Ideas Gallery is opening "The Freetimers Book of Light"—a group photography show to benefit AWE (Artists Working in Education), a great program to support! Click here for info.

If the Latino Arts Gallery at the United Community Center is not on your list of regulars, I recommend you add it. The show that opens Friday is Luis Barragán Legacy. Barragán is one of Mexico's most important architects and probably THE most important modernist. The image below is from this show. Oh, and you don't want to be late for this opening - the UCC puts out the best appetisers and they go fast! Click here for info.

Let me know where you’ll be going and I’ll try to bump into you there. (gently.)

Walker's Point Center for the Arts scores with photo show about refugees in Milwaukee

Here, There, and Elsewhere: Refugee Families in Milwaukee, a photo-documentary, opened on July 23 at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts. Unfortunately, I was elsewhere myself then. But I knew I was going to like this one and made a point of going to see it recently.

I was not disappointed. This is one of the most important photography shows by local artists I’ve seen in Milwaukee in a long time. And you could even take out the “by local artists” and it still would be. The artists are John Ruebartsch and Sally Kuzma and their collaboration has produced a body of work about immigrant communities in Milwaukee that has the imprimatur of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. (So, I’m not the only one.)

The opening of the exhibit was followed by a panel presentation (which, sadly, I also missed) by Jasmine Alinder, Assoc. Professor of History at UWM, Chia Youyee Vang, also an Assoc. Professor of History at UWM—and herself a refugee from Laos—and John Gurda, Milwaukee’s eminent historian. Here are excerpts from what each had to say about this work.

Jasmine Alinder: The photographs honor and respect subjects’ claims to self-presentation and reflect the project creators’ desires to tell the stories of these people in a manner that portrays their humanity and does not exploit their differences. The photographer, John Ruebartsch, is himself an immigrant. The Milwaukee Refugee project brings together his interest in photographic documentation, and the formal concerns of light, composition, and rich color, with his desire to examine social issues and his own status as a naturalized citizen of the U.S.

Chia Youyee Vang: Migration is as old as humankind, though the factors that prompt people to move vary. Whether pushed out by war, famine, or oppression, or pulled by the promise of economic opportunity or freedom, displaced people may take months, years, or entire lifetimes to make sense of their situation. Migration across national borders can be particularly traumatic, especially if there is little chance of returning home. The photographs in Here, There, and Elsewhere show the experiences of some of these people whose journeys away from far-off wars or conflicts have led them to Milwaukee.

John Gurda: They have come, these newest of the new Milwaukeeans, from places that most of us would have trouble finding on a map—from Burma, Somalia, Laos, Sudan, Vietnam…. As unfamiliar as they may seem to residents of longer tenure, the families pictured in Here, There, and Elsewhere mark a compelling return to one of the community’s oldest traditions. Just as the U.S. is a nation of nations, Milwaukee has long been a city of newcomers. [This exhibit] is therefore not a revelation but a return. What we see in these carefully made photographs is private lives on public view. …We see in their dark eyes…the telling blend of hope, fear, and determination that has always defined the American people.

The complete remarks from which these excerpts were taken are available in a catalogue of the exhibit at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts.

There are too many good images in this show to have a favorite, but this one is right at the top. It is a wonderful combination of staged formal wedding portrait and decisive moment. The bride, as usual, is the center of attention, but, atypically, she has no interest in the photographic proceedings. The cultural cues are also mixed, ambiguous, within a precisely framed composition.

Don’t wait too long to see this one; it closes Aug. 28.