Wisconsin People & Ideas – Winter/Spring 2021

Meet the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Red Cliff Fish Co. • Creating with Parkinson’s • First-Gen Art

An exploration of the complex and diverse origins of America’s guiding principle Join the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters for Roots of Democracy, a series of online discussions that explore the cultural and philosophical roots of American democracy. Scholars and experts from a range of disciplines offer conversational presentations that explore questions about inherent rights, responsibilities, participation, and the tensions between social good and individual freedom. Panelists will focus on democratic experiments in ancient Greece, Enlightenment philosophy, and several traditions of Indigenous governance.

Register for one or all of these online series discussions:

Turtle Island Confederacies: Relationships and Balance

Post-Contact Indigenous Governance Thursday, March 25, 2021 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Three experts in First Nations governance explore the conditions that gave rise to the Three Fires and Haudenosaunee confederacies.

Three experts in First Nations governance explore how Indigenous governments have responded to conflicts with the U.S. Government over sovereignty, territory, and citizenship.

Founding Narratives: The Evolution of Ancient Athenian and Early American Democracy

Balancing Individual Interests and the Common Good

Thursday, March 4, 2021 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Thursday, April 15, 2021 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

Two historians discuss the influence of Classical scholars and Enlightenment philosophers on the Constitutional Framers.

Series presenters come together to discuss the inherent tension in the U.S. Constitution between “the general welfare” and “the blessings of liberty.”

Thursday, February 11, 2021 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm

More information & registration at wisconsinacademy.org/roots Free with advance registration

Thanks to Academy donors, members, and the following Roots of Democracy series sponsors and partners: Brought to you by

With support from

Center for the Study of the A merican Constitution

The Roots of Democracy series is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Wisconsin. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

WISCONSIN ACADEMY STAFF Jane Elder • Executive Director Jody Clowes • Director, James Watrous Gallery Jessica James • Program Coordinator, Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives John Greenler • Director, Wisconsin Strategy Initiatives Matt Rezin • Building Manager & Membership Coordinator Amanda E. Shilling • Director of Development Jason A. Smith • Associate Director and Editor, Wisconsin People & Ideas Nikita Werner • Administrative & Strategic Projects Coordinator Ann Wilson • Business Manager OFFICERS OF THE BOARD Tom Luljak • President Tina Abert • President-elect Patricia Brady • Immediate Past President Richard Donkle • Treasurer Roberta Filicky-Peneski • Secretary Steven A. Ackerman • Vice President of Sciences Malcolm Brett • Vice President of Arts L. Jane Hamblen • Vice President of Letters Freda Harris • Foundation President STATEWIDE BOARD OF DIRECTORS Kimberly M. Blaeser, Burlington Frank D. Byrne, Monona Jane Elder, Madison Joe Heim, La Crosse B.J. Hollars, Eau Claire Catherine Gunther Kodat, Appleton Robert D. Mathieu, Madison Michael Morgan, Milwaukee Dipesh Navsaria, Madison Kevin Reilly, Verona Rafael Salas, Ripon Thomas W. Still, Madison Chan Stroman, Madison OFFICERS OF THE ACADEMY FOUNDATION Foundation Founder: Ira Baldwin (1895–1999) Freda Harris • Foundation President Andrew Richards • Foundation Vice President Richard Donkle • Foundation Treasurer Arjun Sanga • Foundation Secretary FOUNDATION DIRECTORS Tina Abert Mark J. Bradley Patricia Brady Kristen E. Carreira Jane Elder Jack Kussmaul Tom Luljak

Editor’s Note When I first began working at the Academy, I mistook her for a spirit.

I would catch just a glimpse of a small figure clad in a long fur coat gliding past the open doorway of the kitchen as I microwaved my leftovers. One day, with a mouthful of spaghetti, I encountered her in the hallway. “Hello, I’m Marieli Rowe,” she said, “You must be the new editor.”

From a clammy basement office in the Academy’s Steenbock Center, Marieli ran a nonprofit called the National Telemedia Council, which worked to provide children, parents, and educators with the tools to understand and navigate our media landscape. The NTC published its own magazine, The Journal of Media Literacy, of which Marieli was editor. During her occasional visits to the office, she and I would compare notes about media industry trends over the cookies from Clausen’s European Bakery she always seemed to have.

Over the years, I got to know this small-but-mighty woman, who, in her eighties and early nineties, was still brimming with curiosity and good ideas. Her fascination with media literacy as a necessary life skill began in the late-1950s, when she, her husband Jack, and their three young sons moved to Madison. As a parent, Marieli was astonished to find that children’s television programming consisted largely of shows that were product placements rather than educational programs. In the early 1960s, she joined the Wisconsin Association for Better Broadcasts, a group dedicated to helping people understand the new medium of television and its impact on youth. She later became WABB president and steered the organization in a national direction as the National Telemedia Council. For over 50 years with Marieli at the helm, the NTC held annual conferences and published The Journal of Media Literacy to keep educators informed of trends, best practices, and egregious offenses.

Over the years, Marieli came to be known as one of the “grandparents of media literacy.” Marieli’s approach to media was pure critical thinking shot through with a healthy dose of skepticism. And, in today’s crowded digital media environment, her admonition to “look, listen, think, and respond” is more relevant than ever. A student of history (as well as a mountain climber, world traveler, and so much more), Marieli was well aware of the power of the media to distort reality and mislead people. She was born Mary Dorothy Löwenstein in Bonn, Germany, in 1936, a city she fled with her family— first to Switzerland and, later, the United States—to escape the Nazis.

Marieli deeply understood that our cherished American values could only be properly exercised by a people who are well informed by truth. She saw media literacy as the tool to secure our democracy—and to combat societal extremism and political polarization.

The world needs more people like Marieli, who passed away last fall after a long battle with cancer. May she rest well, knowing that the spirit of her work lives on not only in The Journal of Media Literacy, which is going on its 68th year, but in the pages of the Academy’s magazine as well.

Patrick Stutz Photography

WISCONSIN ACADEMY

OF SCIENCES, ARTS & LETTERS

Jason A. Smith, Editor On the cover: Dasha Kelly Hamilton, 2020.

Photo by T.J. Lambert/Stages Photography

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CONTENTS 01 Editor’s Note 04 From the Director 05 Letters 06 Happenings Wisconsin Table

10 Fishing for Community Angelica Contreras, Oaxaqueña, 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 20 by 20 inches.

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Hope McLeod

Profile

16 Dasha Kelly Hamilton: Agent for Creative Change Joey Grihalva

Essay

24 Living into the Blind Spots Heather Swan

@ Watrous Gallery

34 Belonging: First-generation Artists in Wisconsin Jody Clowes

Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

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VOLUME 67 · NUMBER 1/2 WINTER/SPRING • 2021

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Anna Wren Waters

Wisconsin People & Ideas (ISSN 15589633) is the quarterly magazine of the nonprofit Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Wisconsin Academy members receive an annual subscription to this magazine.

Arthur Kdav, Final Painting (detail), 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 60 by 36 inches.

Since 1954, the Wisconsin Academy has published a magazine for people who are curious about our world and proud of Wisconsin ideas. Wisconsin People & Ideas features thoughtful stories about our people and culture, original creative writing and artwork, and informative articles about Wisconsin innovation. The magazine also hosts annual fiction and poetry contests that provide opportunity and encouragement for Wisconsin writers.

48 “Wiseacres” • 2nd-Place Contest Winner

Copyright © 2021 by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Postage is paid in Madison, Wisconsin.

Poetry

WISCONSIN PEOPLE & IDEAS

Fiction

Jennifer Morales

57 Poems • 2020 Contest Honorable Mentions

JASON A. SMITH editor

Ingrid Andersson, Sherry Blakeley, Elisabeth Harrahy, and Dawn Hogue

JEAN LANG copy editor

Book Reviews

CHARLOTTE FRASCONA cold reader

62 Seahorses: Poems, by Abayomi Animashaun Reviewed by James P. Roberts

JODY CLOWES arts editor

63 Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, edited by Chad Alan Goldberg

HUSTON DESIGN design & layout

Reviewed by Jeff Snowbarger

facebook.com/WisconsinAcademy

64 Homeland Elegies: A Novel, by Ayad Akhtar Reviewed by Gary Jones

twitter.com/WASAL instagram.com/WatrousGallery

Ideas that move the world forward Join the Wisconsin Academy and help us create a brighter future inspired by Wisconsin people and ideas.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/brighter to learn how.

Wisconsin Academy Offices 1922 University Avenue • Madison, WI 53726 ph 608-733-6633 • wisconsinacademy.org

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From the Director

Last fall, I had what our friends at public radio call a “driveway moment” (although mine was in the living room). I stopped what I was doing and listened intently to a television program featuring Danielle Allen, director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Allen was talking about how the United States has “disinvested” in civics education and social studies in recent decades. She offered a comparison that really nailed this point: “currently [we] spend $54 per year per kid of federal dollars on STEM education and only 5 cents per year per kid on civics.”

She acknowledged that expenditures on STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Math) education are needed. But, by letting investments in civics and social studies fade away, Allen said, “we have really ceased to lay the foundation in K–12 for young people to understand democracy, be motivated to participate in it, to have the skills and tools they need to participate effectively, and, as a result, enjoy participation.”

That fading was intentional, as Dave Zweifel of Madison’s Capital Times observed in a recent editorial. Some of the shift was to make room in the crowded curriculum for STEM education twenty years ago. The STEM push sought to address the United States’ loss of competitive edge in the global economy in these rapidly expanding fields. Zweifel noted that, through curriculum changes mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (in effect between 2002 to 2015), most states dropped their requirement for high school civics to just one semester. Some schools dropped it altogether.

Allen’s points kept surfacing in my mind as I considered recent on-the-street interviews I’d heard in which people couldn’t name the three branches of government or what they do. I thought of what I’d learned about the insurrectionists at the Capitol, people who claimed to be fighting for the American Constitution, wondering, Have you even read it? (We later learned that some of them didn’t bother to vote.)

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As human beings, we are hardwired to mistrust things we don’t understand. It’s easy to put things into one of two buckets: “us” or “them.” And I can appreciate the feelings of alienation people have when they feel the government doesn’t seem to represent them. So I can see how simple it is to blame and despise a vast and ambiguous concept called “government” if you don’t understand how it works— or your role in making it work.

Making our democracy work might be the biggest task before us as a nation. Allen stated that, “today, fewer than 30% under age 40 consider it important to live in a democracy.” There are many reasons people—and especially young people—may feel disaffected or alienated from governing institutions. While we can’t ask K–12 education to do all the heavy lifting, our schools can play a critical role in improving civics literacy, cultivating a deeper understanding of our complicated national history and its consequences, and developing skills in public decision making.

Perhaps it is time for a twenty-year national initiative on civics, along with its good friend, history. Yes, we still need investments in the sciences, arts, and other fields. But, without a strong public foundation in the workings of democracy, the advances in these fields, along with their promising social and cultural benefits, will be constrained by the democratic institutions that are supposed to help them flourish—and rejected by those who could benefit from them the most.

Jane Elder, Executive Director

Letters

News for Members BOARD ARRIVALS, DEPARTURES The Wisconsin Academy has new leadership as of January 2021. Tom Luljak (Milwaukee), who has served on the Board since 2014, will lead the organization for the next two years as President.

Tina Abert has been elected President-elect, and Patricia Brady will transition to Immediate-past President. The newly elected Board members-atlarge are: Thomas W. Still (Madison) and Rafael Salas (Ripon). The Board honored departing member Linda Ware at their most recent meeting.

Joining the Board in 2008, Ware has served in many leadership roles during her tenure, including President.

Letters I teach literacy to elementary English language learners, but I dedicate a portion of each weekend to arranging words for myself. For the past decade I had entered the Wisconsin People & Ideas poetry contest, hoping for an honorable mention award at best. It was a surreal moment when editor Jason A. Smith called in 2018 with the unexpected news that my poem, “Head, Thorax, Abdomen,” had won first place out of over 600 submissions from across the state. Though I was initially filled with doubt about reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison and presenting at a writer’s workshop at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, both experiences (which were part of winning first place) continue to impact my writing today. Whether I’m getting or giving revision suggestions, or getting an acceptance call for my submission to the forthcoming collection, Hope Is the Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance during a Pandemic, my gratitude for the poetry contest continues.

—Jenna Rindo, Pickett

2020 IMPACT REPORT AVAILABLE Learn about the Academy’s effort to grow leadership and share solutions for a better Wisconsin. Download our digital 2020 Impact Report, which covers programming from July 2019 through June 2020, at wisconsinacademy. org/2020ImpactReport.

I recently received the e-mail announcing that the Academy has decided to offer noncredit art and writing courses as another way of connecting with its mission through the arts. I have long advocated for the Academy to expand its ways of connecting and find this step encouraging. Thank you for taking the time to develop this new outreach program. I wish you much success with it.

—Kathleen Serley, Wausau

ROOTS OF DEMOCRACY SERIES The Academy is presenting a series of four online discussions that explore the cultural and philosophical roots of American democracy, from the democratic experiment in ancient Greece to the influence of Indigenous governing systems.

Visit wisconsinacademy.org/roots for more information and registration.

Just a note to commend Jane Elder for her words in the Summer/Fall issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas. It was especially interesting to get the full story on the Luddites. Also, thanks to editor Jason A. Smith for stating so clearly what has happened to the UW Extension. Good luck going into your 151st year.

—Karl Andersen & Carolyn Heidemann, Lake Mills

NEW ACADEMY COURSES This spring the Academy begins a pilot series of six noncredit Academy Courses in creative writing and the visual arts. The new courses are designed to bring people together for lifelong learning and personal enrichment. Learn more about our new course offerings and register at wisconsinacademy. org/courses. Academy members receive a 10% discount on registration fees.

KEEP IN TOUCH Do you have questions about membership or a comment you would like to leave? As we continue to work remotely, you can reach us at members@ wisconsinacademy.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Erratum In “Natural Climate Solutions” by Catie DeMets from the Summer/ Fall 2020 issue, we incorrectly quoted Abe Lenoch of 1,000 Friends of Wisconsin as saying “leaves absorb water molecules from their surfaces and water vapor from the air.” The types of trees found in Wisconsin mainly draw water from the soil through their roots and release water vapor through their leaves via a process called transpiration.

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HAPPENINGS

JMKAC

IN MEMORIAM

Ruth DeYoung Kohler II The Wisconsin Academy community was saddened by the news of Ruth Kohler’s death on November 14, 2020. Ruth was a long-time supporter of the Academy and its arts programming. She was named a Wisconsin Academy Fellow in 1989 for her monumental contributions to Wisconsin art, and she served on the Academy Board (then the Council) from 2001 to 2012 and as the Academy’s Vice President of Arts from 2001 to 2009. This was a transformative period for the Academy’s art program, as it expanded from the curation of a small gallery space in the Steenbock Center lobby to the establishment of the James Watrous Gallery at Overture Center for the Arts.

Ruth saw the arts as a driver of positive social change, upholding the pillars of diversity, inclusiveness, and community involvement, and she was a tireless champion for under-recognized artists and art forms. She believed passionately that the arts—in all its iterations—reveal who we are as a people: past, present, and future. Through her work she promoted equitable and inclusive access to the arts in her local community, her home state of Wisconsin, and on national and international levels.

Ruth DeYoung Kohler II was born on October 24, 1941, to Herbert V. Kohler Sr. and Ruth DeYoung Kohler. She graduated from Ferry Hall School in Lake Forest, Illinois, in 1959.

After earning a BA in Art and Art History at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and pursuing further studies at University of Wisconsin and the University of Hamburg, Ruth spent a year in Wisconsin teaching art in Beloit public schools. She then joined the faculty at the University of Alberta–Calgary, Canada, where she founded the printmaking program. That was followed by more than a year in Spain working as an artist and exploring the region’s vernacular and Paleolithic art.

Upon her return to the United States, she took a volunteer position at the newly opened John Michael Kohler Art Center in 1968. She quickly became assistant director, a

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position she held until 1972, when she became JMKAC’s director. Through her guidance, JMKAC grew from a local arts center to an institution that received international accolades for its skill at presenting contemporary and performing art, the work of vernacular artists, and the work of art-environment builders.

During her tenure as JMKAC’s director, Ruth focused attention on artist-built environments. Through landmark exhibitions held in partnership with the Kohler Foundation Inc., Ruth worked to change the way art environments are perceived and valued by the arts world and the public. Under her direction, the JMKAC collection grew to include over 25,000 works by more than thirty art-environment builders, including such important Wisconsin figures as Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Mary Nohl, and James Tellen.

Under Ruth’s leadership, artist-built environments were not the only area for which the John Michael Kohler Arts Center received world-wide attention. Ruth collaborated with Herbert V. Kohler Jr., her brother and current Kohler Company executive chairman, to develop one of the most remarkable alliances of art and industry in the United States.

Established in 1974, the Arts/Industry residency program has brought hundreds of artists together with the skilled laborers of the Kohler Company pottery and foundry to develop their interest in materials and understanding of industrial processes. Participating artists are exposed to a wide body of technical knowledge that enables and encourages them to explore new ways of thinking and working.

More than four decades after the first artists stepped onto the pottery factory floor, nearly five hundred Arts/Industry residents have benefited from her visionary idea that artists and industrial craftspeople can find commonality in the exchange of creative ideas and technical expertise.

In 2016, Ruth stepped away from the directorship of JMKAC to concentrate on making the Art Preserve a reality.

Situated on 38 acres just west of downtown Sheboygan, the Art Preserve is to be the world’s first museum devoted to artist-built environments. The 56,000-square-foot building incorporates materials—such as wood, concrete, and glass— favored by many creators of art environments, and provides exhibition space and visible storage for the more than 25,000 works in JMKAC’s world-renowned collection. In her new role as director of special initiatives, she worked with JMKAC’s board of directors, staff, and a design firm from Denver, Colorado, called Trés Birds to develop plans for the new facility. Construction began in 2018, and in June 2021 the Art Preserve—Ruth’s vision of a center devoted entirely to artist-built environments—will welcome its first visitors.

At the time she left the directorship of JMKAC, Ruth was honored by the board of directors, who named her Director Emerita. This lifelong title is a testament to her tremendous

HAPPENINGS

F E L L O W S R E C E N T LY L O S T contribution to the fields of art environments and selftaught and folk art as well as contemporary art—and to her great success in guiding JMKAC to become the renowned institution it is today.

Her contributions to arts across Wisconsin and the U.S. are numerous and include serving as member and chair of the Wisconsin Arts Board, as well as serving on the National Endowment for the Arts as a Visual Artists Organization panel member and site evaluator. Ruth created the Preservation Committee of the Kohler Foundation Inc. and established the philosophy and protocols for identifying selftaught and environment builders in need of protection and conservation. Ruth also served on the Kohler Foundation Inc. board from 1969 to 2019 and as the Foundation’s President from 1999 to 2006. She was also a major shareholder in the privately held Kohler Company, headquartered in Kohler.

Among the many awards and honors Ruth received are: Honorary Fellow, American Craft Council, New York; Governor’s Award for the Arts, Wisconsin; Visionary Award, American Craft Museum, New York; Visionary Leadership Award, Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Illinois; Visionary Lifetime Achievement Award, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Visionary Award, American Folk Art Museum, New York; and honorary doctorates from various institutions of higher learning.

Ruth will be remembered by her family and friends not only for her many contributions to the arts and the community but also for her engaging 1000-watt smile, her keen sense of humor, and her love of a well-crafted sentence.

Ruth had a gift for connecting with young and old—not just through appreciating art, but through creating art as well, whether it was plastering a piñata for a birthday, decorating an Easter egg, or crafting the perfect Christmas card.

Ruth was an illustrator in every sense of the word, imbuing the lives of those close to her with indescribable color and detail. She will be missed.

Shirley Abrahamson (1982), the first woman on the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the longest-serving justice in state history. A sage and witty jurist, Abrahamson will be remembered as a trailblazer who broke down barriers for women in the legal field and as a dedicated public servant who worked tirelessly and compassionately to serve the people of Wisconsin.

Robert Byron Bird (1982), a respected professor for over 60 years in the Chemical Engineering Department at UW–Madison known for his research, books, and papers on non-Newtonian fluids. Bird, who spoke eight languages, lectured and taught internationally and received numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science in 1987, presented by President Ronald Reagan.

Sister Esther Heffernan (2002), a long-serving professor of Social Science at Edgewood College and widely respected leader in the areas of peace, social justice, and prison reform. Sister Esther will be remembered for her important research of, and published works on, the history of women and prisons, the development of the American penal system, and co-correctional policies in American prisons.

James R. Johnson (1985), a pioneer in materials science and engineering. Johnson had over 50 U.S. patents to his name and was widely published. He taught as adjunct professor at UW–Stout, and was a long-time member and eventual president of the American Ceramic Society.

Johnson served as President of the Wisconsin Academy Board (then the Council) in 1988 and on the Wisconsin Academy Foundation from 1992 to 1998.

Thanks to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the Kohler Trust for Preservation, and the Kohler Foundation Inc. for their generous contributions to this memorial tribute.

Clockwise from top left: Shirley Abrahamson, Robert Byron Bird, Sister Esther Heffernan, James R. Johnson

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happenings

W I S C O N S I N P O ETRY A NTH O L O GY

Richard Wunsch

FELLOWS I N TH E N EWS

Kathy Kelsey Foley On November 8, 2020, Kathy Kelsey Foley (2014), director of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, received the Association of Midwest Museum’s Distinguished Career Award. The AMM annually recognizes individuals with over ten years in the museum industry who have made significant contributions to the industry and are leaders in career achievement and best practices. According to AMM executive director Charity Counts, Foley stood out as a leader for “her dedication to organizational growth and staff development, as well as museum advocacy.” Citing such initiatives as the annual Birds in Art exhibition and cultural programming for those with memory loss through the SPARK! Alliance, Counts marveled at how Foley and her team “transformed a small museum in a small city into a community anchor.”

The National Academy of Construction elected Tom Boldt (2018) as a member of its class of 2020. Boldt, CEO of the Appleton-based Boldt Construction company, was formally inducted on Oct. 29 during the NAC annual meeting and recognized as a “longtime visionary and committed leader in sustainable building and continuous improvement who is dedicated to providing safety and value to the communities served.” Election criteria for NAC include leadership, exceptional service, a continued commitment to making a contribution, past recognition by peers for innovation, and being recognized as “best of the best.” Boldt, the fourth generation of his family to lead the 131-year-old company, is one of Wisconsin’s early supporters of green construction and is known for his commitment to sustainable building and continuous improvement in the design, engineering, and construction industries.

The eighth novel by Jerry Apps (2012), Settlers Valley, will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in March 2021. In this eminently readable book, Apps delves into the heart of small-town America. Reckoning with timely problems and opinions that divide us, he shows us the power in restoring our relationships with nature and our communities.

The novel is one of more than forty fiction and nonfiction books about life in the Upper Midwest that Apps, perhaps Wisconsin’s most prolific author, has written over the years.

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No other book captures the diversity and lyrical complexity of the Wisconsin poetry community like Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, a new anthology edited by Margaret Rozga and Angela C. Trudell Vasquez. The anthology features works by all nine Wisconsin Poets Laureate poems (including the recently crowned Dasha Kelly Hamilton), as well as selections from outstanding poets from the Wisconsin poetry community at large, some of whom serve or have served as local poets laureate: Nancy Rafal (Door County), Esteban Colon (Kenosha), Lisa Vihos (Sheboygan), and Lucy Tyrell (Bayfield). Other names in the collection might not be so familiar, and, for a few poets, it is the first time their work appears in publication, reflecting Rozga and Vasquez’s vision of a collection that represents the geographic and cultural diversity of the state.

The anthology, which takes is name from a line in a poem

by U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (“When beloved Sun rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge”), began when Rozga proposed to fellow poet and Madison College design professor Wendy Vardaman a project on the subject of doors.

“We saw a Wisconsin poetry anthology as one of several ways to open a door to ‘fresh knowledge’ of the breadth and depth of Wisconsin,” says editor Rozga.

After a submission process that garnered far more than expected poems, the manuscript grew into a 100-page collection with four sections containing over fifty poems that consider doors—both literal and figurative—through memories of the past, struggles of the present, and hopes for the future.

Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems can be purchased from Woodland Pattern Book Center and Boswell Books in Milwaukee or ordered online at artnightbooks.com. Sales of the anthology support the Wisconsin Poet Laureate.

All Creatures Great and Small

Poldark

Finding Your Roots

Nature

Now you can stream more of your favorite PBS shows including Masterpiece, Finding Your Roots, NOVA, Nature, Ken Burns, and many more — online and in the PBS Video app with PBS Wisconsin Passport.

Learn how to sign up or activate your membership at pbswisconsin.org/passport.

Wisconsin Table

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Wisconsin Table

FISHING FOR COMMUNITY

BY H O PE M CLEO D

O

n a typical November morning during herring season, Brian Bainbridge hops on board his

commercial fishing boat at 5:00 am, hits the lights, and fires up the engine. Crew members emerge from the darkness, one at a time, to take up their positions on the deck. They check their cold-weather gear, their gill nets, and their life-saving devices before heading out into the blue-black dawn of Lake Superior.

Commercial Red Cliff Band fishermen like Junior Gurnoe (left) make their living from the waters of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world.

Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

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Fishermen like Bainbridge and his crew, who are all members of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, know the dangers of this capricious inland sea: The wind and biting cold. How out of nowhere, especially in late fall, fifteen-foot waves can suddenly swell and swallow an entire boat. If all goes well, they return to the mainland with large plastic bins of herring to sell to one of the processing plants in Bayfield County. In years past, the fishermen sold mostly to wholesalers like Bodin Fisheries. Today they have another option: the new Red Cliff Fish Company, a tribally owned and operated, zero-waste processing plant and retail shop on the Red Cliff Reservation just north of Bayfield.

The Red Cliff Fish Company processes and sells a variety of wild-caught fish from Lake Superior, including lake herring, whitefish, lake trout, and walleye. Fall is herring season and so, on this November day at the fish company, it’s all hands on deck—the deck being a 3,500-square-foot building with a processing plant, office space, commercial kitchen, and retail shop. By the end of the month they will have processed 360,000 pounds of herring, exceeding all predictions and exhausting the small staff and group of volunteers.

Indeed, a feasibility study the company paid for with a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Business Development program predicted 150,000 pounds as a reasonable goal for their first herring season. But Justin Maki, assistant manager for the Red Cliff Fish Company, says he “made a goal to double that” while still respecting sustainable fishery levels. Maki’s ambition and experience, derived from his nearly six-year stint as master smokehouse technician at Bodin Fisheries, have helped the tribe with this new endeavor. “I’m a firm believer that if that fish is still swimming,” Maki says with a grin, “I’m going to try and get it to your plate before it stops.”

Of course, it’s not just Maki who is responsible for doubling production. That distinction is shared with the tribal fishermen who bring in the catch as well as Red Cliff Fish Company employees, tribal council members and volunteers, and a plethora of Red Cliff governmental agencies who have worked hard to ensure the success of the company.

“It’s a community venture as opposed to a private commercial venture,” says Rick Peterson, the chairman for the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Peterson says that the community approach starts with supporting tribal commercial fishermen, independent contractors whose livelihoods depend on getting a fair price for their catch.

Red Cliff commercial fishermen have long worked the waters of Lake Superior. In recent years, they have been responsible for harvesting nearly 11% of all Great Lakes lake trout, 17% of lake herring (or cisco), and 6% of whitefish. But, until now, there was no processing capacity on the reservation. With the new Red Cliff Fish Company, fishermen can rely on the processing as well as the retail networks and distribution capabilities of the company to ensure they get a fair price for their efforts.

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Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

Wisconsin Table

Hoop houses at Mino Bimaadiziiwin Tribal Farm shelter seedlings from spring time frost and accelerate summer growth. In the Ojibwe language, mino bimaadiziiwin means “return to the good life.”

In fall 2020, Red Cliff Fish Company was paying 85 cents a pound for herring, 20 cents more than other processing plants in the region. To get an idea of how this benefits the fishermen, consider this: There are 33 registered Red Cliff commercial fishing boat license holders who bring in an average of 600,000 pounds of fish per year. For them, that extra 20 cents adds up to around $120,000, or an average of $3,636 more per boat.

On a typical weekday during fall herring season, fishermen drop off their bins full of gleaming fish at Duffy’s Dock, which the company helped expand to accommodate ten commercial fishing boats. As soon as company manager Daisy Perez-Defoe gets word that the boats are coming in—usually between 11:00 am and 7:00 pm—she and two other full-time employees, a school of part-timers hired for herring season, and a clutch of volunteers from the Red Cliff Treaty Natural Resources Division scurry down to the dock.

They use forklifts to haul the fish from the dock to the plant and then weigh and process them as quickly and safely as possible.

Lake herring that are pre-ordered “in the round”—whole, with skin on and bones in—are cleaned, packaged, and placed on a company truck for immediate delivery. Next, the roe, or eggs, of the remaining herring are carefully removed and saved for later sale to a client who jars them and sells them as a specialty product to Swedish customers. Whether skin-on and deboned, or deboned without skins, the roe-less fish are prepared for restaurants, such as Legendary Waters Resort & Casino and Maggie’s Restaurant in Bayfield and Harvest in Madison, as well as for Second Harvest food pantry in Minneapolis. The remaining fish are either sent to the smoker, vacuum-sealed in environmentally friendly packaging and frozen, or carefully laid out in the refrigerated glass case of the company’s small storefront.

Perez-Defoe oversees the retail end of the company. Like many people in the Red Cliff community, she wants this venture to succeed. “We’re hoping that within the year the Red Cliff Fish Company name and product will be [seen] throughout the United

Wisconsin Table

All photos this page: Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa

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States,” says Perez-Defoe, noting that she plans to partner “with a variety of native food producers from all over the U.S.—California, Colorado, and North Dakota—to bring in products that pair well with fish,” such as olive oil and corn meal. She also plans to sell whole fish and specialty products like smoked herring spread to food co-ops in the region.

After the day’s fish processing is completed, the remains are collected and taken to Mino Bimaadiziiwin Tribal Farm, where it’s churned into compost. The compost, which is the final product of Red Cliff Fish Company’s zero-waste process, “will go into the garden beds of the community farm … to grow nutritious, healthy food for the community,” says ecologist Gabrielle Vanbergen.

As the deputy administrator of the Red Cliff Treaty Natural Resources Division, Vanbergen managed the initial seed money for the construction of the zero-waste facility and its composting trials.

The money came from the 2018 Keepseagle v. Vilsack settlement, in which the U.S. Department of Agriculture was successfully sued for discrimination against minority farmers and ranchers dating back to the mid-1900s.

While the tribe invested heavily in the company, the project was pushed through the finish line by grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which supported road construction and the expansion of Duffy’s Dock, and from the Administration for Native Americans within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which provided staff wages to help get the business started.

Vanbergen notes that several non-tribal members were crucial to the project’s success, including her predecessor Chad Abel, who wrote several of the grants, as well as James Thannum, an employee of the Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission, who helped with the grants and trained many Red Cliff fishermen and company staff on food safety procedures and advised on equipment purchases.

From her perspective as an ecologist, Vanbergen says she can “look at the whole cycle” and really understand how the Red Cliff Fish Company allows the tribe to “help with managing the resources of the lake and also with harvesting the resources.” She ticks off the benefits, noting how the tribe is “able to provide a livable wage to the fishermen bringing that harvest in—and to make that harvest available to the community at an affordable price, [promoting] the food sovereignty of this community.”

For Vanbergen, Perez-Defoe, Maki, and everyone else at the Red Cliff Fish Company, the concept of food sovereignty, of being able to control where your food comes from, is inexorably tied to sustainability. Members of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa have been fishing these waters for hundreds of years. As such, the tribe takes tremendous pride in and responsibility for preserving the lake’s resources.

“Sustainability is a huge, huge, issue,” says Red Cliff Band chairman Peterson. “As Native Americans going back generations, the last thing we want to do is see the resources depleted.”

For this reason, the tribe annually engages in a three-way agreement with their neighbors to the south, the Bad River Band of Chippewa, and with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to monitor the health and size of fish populations in

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Lake Superior. Each partner employs biologists to gather vital information. Collectively they analyze the data and use it to set up a management plan that benefits everyone: the fish, the environment, and the recreational and commercial fishermen. Though the DNR sets up annual harvest quotas based on the data, it’s the tribes that actually regulate the harvest in Lake Superior and prevent overfishing of commercial species. Tribal fishermen who sell their fish to Red Cliff Fish Company must follow these regulations, thus contributing to the overall sustainability of the lake’s resources for generations to come.

Red Cliff Fish Company’s business model views the fiscal and cultural health of the tribe as key indicators of the company’s success. That health and success are evident in the processing plant that enables tribal fishermen to do work that their ancestors have done for generations while simultaneously remaining true to their values as protectors of the lake’s resources.

Success is also seen in the tribe’s generosity. Traditionally, the Chippewa value hospitality and the sharing of food, as demonstrated at community feasts and pow wows that offer heaping servings of wild rice, fresh corn, chicken, and fish to all who attend, whether members of the tribe or not. Like these events, the Red Cliff Fish Company is already becoming a bridge between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.

“During the pandemic when everything was shut down, we were able to give our community members over a ton of white fish, and we donated [three hundred pounds] to a couple of food banks off the reservation,” says Peterson, with a gleam of pride in his eye.

Peterson has a right to be proud of a community investment that is paying off in more ways than one. Over ten years in the making, the Red Cliff Fish Company is helping the tribe achieve a multitude of goals, including increasing local food control, maximizing the fisheries’ economic potential, preserving Red Cliff ’s commercial fishing tradition, and perpetuating the tribe’s legacy of living in harmony with the environment.

Hope McLeod is an award-winning journalist, poet, and songwriter who lives in Washburn. She’s penned two books: The Place We Begin, a collection of poetry, and Have I Got a Story for You, a compilation of her best newspaper stories.

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Dasha Kelly Hamilton: Agent for Creative Change

BY J O EY G RI HALVA

D

asha Kelly Hamilton is on a mission. She is leading a poetry workshop in Port Louis, the capital city

of Mauritius, a tropical island about 1,200 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa. Sunlight pours into a narrow room as a group of young people listen to Dasha tell a story about how, as a child, she wanted to change her name. She tugs at her dress as if she were nine years old again. It’s an endearing gesture. Dasha has a magnetic presence, graceful yet piercing. The students lean in closer.

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton stands in front of The Rebirthing of the Earth Mother, a mural artist Tia Richardson created in 2018 for an exterior wall of the Historic Garfield Apartments (originally Garfield Street School) in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

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T.J. Lambert/Stages Photography

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Ocean Water The ocean pushes back Alive and vigorous The heritage of habitat leans against expectation Muscles its due respect Without regard Without warning Without reorienting the ones with swimming pool perspectives Limitations of consistent temperatures and painted cement walls The ocean rumbles its sovereignty Full weight of freedom on my skin

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

She’s been here about a month, sent to Mauritius as an Arts Envoy by the U.S. Embassy. The purpose of today’s workshop is to reflect on the meaning of names. She asks each student to consider their own legacy. “What will people think in the future,” she asks, pointing to each soul in the sun-drenched room, “when they hear your name?”

One day an embassy staffer offers to send Dasha to a culinary school on the island. The staffer had read in Dasha’s biography that she is a “connoisseur of carrot cake,” so the offer seemed appropriate. Not one to miss an opportunity, Dasha agrees and soon finds herself in the school library researching the history of carrot cake, and then cake in general. It is at that moment that Dasha is visited by an idea for a performance—part presentation, part demonstration, part discussion—that explores the complicated legacy of race and class in America through the seemingly simple process of making a cake.

After she returns to the United States from Mauritius, Dasha refines the idea during a residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. Her performance, Makin’ Cake with Dasha

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Kelly, debuts on November 16, 2017, at the Kohler Theatre. On stage, two chefs measure and mix ingredients alongside Dasha, who presents a palette of cake-related stories and images that illustrate the foundations of exclusion and inequity in America.

“What [cakes] have in common is the story of access, the story of elitism and class, which ties into the story of race,” says Dasha.

“The performance is not here to sweeten or soften the edges of the conversation, but to pull people in through a portal they don’t expect.” At the end of each performance, there is a reception featuring baked goods from local producers. Audience members and performers mix and mingle over paper plates heavy with thick slices of cake.

Subsequent successful productions of Makin’ Cake at a few other venues ensued until the global pandemic ground the show’s momentum to a halt. Fortunately, the show has been picked up by a national talent agency and is being booked in venues across America for 2022 and beyond. Dasha concedes that it is probably best that Makin’ Cake is on hold. To say her plate is full right now would be an understatement.

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In 2021, Dasha will not only serve as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, the statewide emissary for poetry and creativity, but also finish the second year of her two-year appointment as Milwaukee Poet Laureate. In addition, Dasha is one of ten recipients of a Rubinger Fellowship. This national recognition is awarded by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation to “change agents” working on innovative solutions to community development. As a Rubinger Fellow, Dasha is developing a scalable, replicable “Neighborhood Creatives-In-Residence” program that can be used by cities to expand creative networks and deepen community engagement and issue advocacy.

Dasha’s extraordinary talents have taken her all over the world, from Botswana to Beirut, Los Angeles to Nebraska, even on camera for the final season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Dasha possesses a remarkable ability to leverage people power and the creative process to uplift both our spirits and our society. To do this, she draws on a career that spans multiple services and sectors and has culminated with her new title as Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Of course, it isn’t the first—nor will it be the last—title Dasha will earn.

All the travel and juggling of projects comes naturally to Dasha.

She grew up a self-described “Army brat,” expanding her worldview in classrooms around the globe. “Childhood for me is this family unit of four being in a new place,” she recalls, “like those plastic toys you can plop onto different scenery.” The Jones family tour began in Milwaukee, where Dasha’s parents, Rodrick and Daphne, were born and raised. They met at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. When Dasha was four, Rodrick was commissioned by the U.S. Army. The family bounced from base to base: Georgia, South Korea, Indiana, Germany, Hawaii, Illinois.

As a child, Dasha spent much of her time playing games with her sister, Tamu, and writing. It wasn’t until college, when she was working as a tutor, that she came to appreciate writing as a gift.

“Explaining to someone that what they thought and what they wrote weren’t even close, it was baffling. It was my first writerly experience of explaining to someone how to try to get those things to align,” she recalls.

Yet, in her early years, writing as a profession wasn’t even on her radar. Inspired by the 1976 television movie Sybil, Dasha planned on becoming a psychologist when she grew up. Though she abandoned the pursuit in college, Dasha maintains her fascination with the inner lives of people and has learned to explore them in various ways.

In her early twenties, Dasha found herself in Chicago with a Master’s degree in marketing communications and a job at a boutique nightclub. She booked talent and organized events, which gave her the experience and confidence she would need when she opened her own entertainment venue a decade later. In the interim, she moved to Milwaukee and became the director of the Black Achievers program at the Northside YMCA. Through running this college-readiness program, Dasha acquired not only the skills she would need to operate her own nonprofit organization but also an appreciation for the perspectives of young people.

One night after work at the Northside Y, she and a group of friends went to a corner bar in Milwaukee called The Main Event. The place had a small stage, and, on it, she saw a young woman reading poems.

In conversation, Dasha is animated, ardent about finding just the right word to communicate precisely what she means.

She’d seen poetry performed on a stage in Chicago, but it didn’t grab her the way it did that night at The Main Event. “It was intimate, there were probably fifty people that night,” she says, recalling the energy of the room. “It was electric, watching people just read their stories. Having been introduced to poetry the way that I had, the way many people have been, I wasn’t able to see it as a living thing. But this was someone saying words they wrote—words that mattered to them.”

In 2000, Dasha opened Mecca Nightclub on Milwaukee’s north side. Inspired by what she saw and felt at The Main Event, Dasha added the Still Waters Open Mic Poetry Night to Mecca’s calendar of events. Over time, the attracted poets from around the country.

The series evolved organically into Still Waters Collective, a collaborative effort to provide resources to Milwaukee-area writers and cultivate raw creative talent. Busy with the YMCA and Still Waters during the day, and running Mecca at night, Dasha still found time to self-publish her debut novel, All Fall Down, a story about how mental illness can alter a friendship.

When a friend who taught at a local school asked Dasha to help bring more poetry into her third-grade classroom, Dasha began to consider the impact spoken word might have on young children.

Upon meeting her group of third-grade students, though, Dasha quickly realized her approach as a teaching artist would be nontraditional. “This was not about teaching poetry. It was not about teaching writing,” she recalls. “It was entirely about giving these young people access to how great they already are.”

Dasha’s teaching experience led her to shift the mission of Still Waters to focus on cultivating the three Cs—community, capacity, and confidence—in young people. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, Dasha and her Still Waters team began working with Milwaukee-area schools to deliver a constellation of workshops, after-school projects, and events tailored for young people with an interest in cultivating their own voice, ideas, individuality, and agency. Some of the most popular Still Waters-hosted events were poetry-based: the Milwaukee High School Slam League and Voltage, a monthly spoken-word series. These events gave teens a chance to earn a spot on Wisconsin’s team for Brave New Voices, an international youth poetry slam festival where the poetry readings are also dramatic performances.

Many of the students maintained their connection to Still Waters after graduating. So when Dasha wanted to grow the nonprofit, she tapped into the network of alumni and asked them to mentor younger teens. “I needed people who could create space and be

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Pat Robinson

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Dasha Kelly Hamilton leads a production of Makin’ Cake at the 2019 Milwaukee Fringe Festival.

expansive,” says Dasha, recalling how she recruited young adults to become coaches for the various high school poetry slam teams.

The alumni-to-coach program evolved into a fellowship that helps recent graduates with life skills and “reentry into these grownup streets,” as Dasha puts it. “Here’s how you translate those really passionate feelings and opinions you had at seventeen, when maybe you didn’t believe you knew what you were talking about. But now at nineteen, twenty, how are you going to be in the world?”

In many ways, Dasha’s work through Still Waters, and now as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is about getting more creatives out in the world and in places where you might not typically find them.

“It’s [more than] just being called on when you need a dancer for your thing or a poet for your grand opening; it’s about having artists embedded in the planning of projects, in programs, in residencies— valued for more than simply the stuff that we create.”

In conversation, Dasha is animated, ardent about finding just the right word to communicate precisely what she means. When descriptions won’t suffice, she deploys clever metaphors. While discussing a recent project that involved weekly phone calls to “under-connected” elders to fight off pandemic isolation, Dasha attempts to describe how comfortable the seniors were with talking about themselves and being creative. “No, ‘open’ isn’t honest. ‘Open’ isn’t what they were at all. It’s like ice cubes in a tray that are almost done, but you can see that they’re not all the way frozen, you can still see the bubbles.”

Dasha’s poems retain this conversational feeling and draw heavily on imagery. They span from the intimate, sometimes confessional, to the grand sweep of cultural observation and, occasionally, pointed criticism.

“I often describe my poems as capturing feelings between glass, like a scientist. Here is this little sliver and this is what I see,” says

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Dasha. In her 2018 poem “Family Night,” she explores human interconnectedness and the ways in which identity sometimes gets in the way of it: We lay down our best attempts at Aligning ourselves, random and divined Our tiles slide one over the other Puzzling our perspectives Into crossword intersections of a truth Your pain His persecution My pride Her privilege Poet. Teacher. Mentor. Maker. It has taken Dasha decades to find a fitting title for her role. “Saying that I’m a writer didn’t hold the fact that I’m also a facilitator, which didn’t hold the fact that I’m also a performer, which didn’t hold the fact that I also do strategy, and on and on,” she says.

A few years back, Dasha heard the term “change agent” used to introduce a speaker at an event. It resonated with her. “It’s the alchemy of saying a thing, or building a network, or inserting yourself in a conversation that’s going to alter something; someone’s opinion, someone’s will, the temperature of a room.” While she might not always have the solution, Dasha notes that she has “unique tools and talents that inspire solution-focused ideas.”

As she learned more about what being a “change agent” entailed, she discovered how it was associated with those engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, including the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. When Dasha contributed an essay in the 2017 collection The Whiskey of

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Hope Is a Bruise Paintball pellets batter shoulders and thighs at 190 miles per hour I count the purplish bruises and smile at the post vision of us toasting laughing, being vibrantly alive The woman who pierced my nose Rushed outside afterwards for a cigarette Whether my nostril or her nerves were to blame We both survived an ordeal that day I don’t think of the sweat on her lip or the tears on my cheek when my jeweled Black nose disrupts canonical spaces Agony delineates child bearing from child rearing Pain is the anticipated toll: the impossible stretch of skin and orifice, wrenching of organs, the pinch and nip of nursing I received no pamphlets about the pangs of panic and impotence The deep marrow rupture when their ache explodes beyond your reach A formation of police fired rubber bullets at my child 200 feet per second in defense of hatred and spiteful ignorance She raged back in protest until her throat rasped, her heels blistered and she shattered into sobs once safe in our home, in my arms They gassed and maced my baby. She marched again the next day.

And the next and the next and the next and the next Hope is a bruise, a nervous smoke and an unrelenting calvary

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

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Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent, she felt strongly about adding “creative” to the term “change agent,” and later adopted it as her own.

“Being creative means you’re alive,” she says, noting that it can be good to allow “some space between creativity and artistry to create a more expanded appreciation for the impact of creativity as a gift, as a tool, as a strategy, and as a resource.”

Dasha says that creativity is just what is needed for Americans to better understand the impact institutionalized racism and implicit bias have on people of color. Here in Wisconsin, for instance, the criminal justice system has been particularly pernicious. In Milwaukee, neighborhoods in the 53206 zip code—which are predominantly African-American—have the highest rate of incarceration in the entire nation. One out of every nine African-American adults in Wisconsin is disenfranchised due to their criminal record, compared to one out of every fifty Wisconsin voters overall. The statistics are grim, but our solutions don’t have to be.

As the state’s poet laureate, Dasha plans to employ poetry to expand a dialogue about incarceration, community, and returning citizens through A Line Meant, a playfully worded project with a serious goal. The project will revolve around an anonymous poetry exchange between Wisconsin residents and poets incarcerated in Wisconsin prisons. In addition to developing and managing the necessary infrastructure to make the project happen, Dasha will create new, blended poems inspired by the exchange.

“A Line Meant will be a subversive way to have a conversation about the role of prisons; a reminder that these are sons and fathers and sisters and moms and teenagers. Some of them are absolutely wrong, but all of them are people,” says Dasha.

The poetry exchange is being designed with the restrictive parameters of the pandemic in mind. Like most of us, Dasha mourns the loss of safe, social gathering. She longs for the feeling of a room on fire with ideas, emotion, and fellowship. She is also grateful for what the pandemic has given us: space and time to reflect, reassess, and reimagine. Yet these are not new aspects of her practice. They have been essential ingredients to Dasha’s growth and success, as important as love is to the making of a cake.

Joey Grihalva is a writer and teacher at Milwaukee High School of the Arts. His first book, Images of America: Milwaukee Jazz, was published in 2019. His forthcoming book, The Milwaukeean, explores issues of trauma, healing, and creativity.

It centers around Kellen “Klassik” Abston, an accomplished musician and one of the many young people Dasha Kelly Hamilton helped shepherd into “these grownup streets.”

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SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 AND BEYOND

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ESSAY

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ESSAY

LIVING INTO THE BLIND SPOTS

BY H EATH ER SWAN

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame …

Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

T

he news came just as I was about to walk into a classroom full of students. An emergency room

doctor explained in a calm voice that my father had fallen and broken his jaw. He was conscious and talking, but they were concerned because a CT scan had shown evidence of bleeding in his brain. They didn’t know how bad it was, but they would be rushing him to the UW Hospital in Madison. There, he would be seen by specialists. I steadied my voice and asked the doctor if I could speak to him.

Arthur Kdav, Self-portrait, 1972. Silkscreen print. Photo by Heather Swan

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My father’s voice when he spoke was a tightrope stretched between two trees. “I tripped taking out the trash. My brain is bleeding, Heath,” he said over the phone. And then his voice faltered, and he forced out, “I love you.” I choked out an echo. An awareness that I might not see him again sent a chill through my body, like stepping out of a house into the February air with no coat.

In the momentary silence that followed, I remembered something from when I was in labor with my first child. After more than 24 hours at the hospital, I was not progressing. Then, for a variety of reasons, all my vitals dropped: they were losing both me and the baby. I was rushed down a hallway toward an emergency Cesarean-section. I remember my only hope was that they could save my child. Just before we passed through the metal doors to the operating room, I saw my dad’s face above me, his eyes clear and direct.

He could see I had given up. “I’ll see you in twenty minutes,” he said firmly, like a command.

There, in the hallway of the school, holding on to the wall to keep my balance, my voice rose into my throat as I said into the phone, “I’ll see you when you get to Madison.”

I recall my early childhood as one filled with nature and art. Both of my parents were artists—my father, a painter, and my mother, a potter. My family gardened and raised chickens on a little plot of land in in the middle of the woods near a prairie, far from any important museums. We often visited local galleries and openings, the studios of other artists. Most evenings we played music, told stories, or read the poetry and art books that lined our shelves.

I grew up knowing artists the way some people grow up knowing baseball players; I recognized their signatures of style, subject, and line. I could identify works by Western masters like Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo, but also those by Van Gogh, Monet, Albright, and others who explored the way paint could be applied. Those who broke with tradition in subject matter and form like Cézanne, O’Keefe, and Hopper were just as familiar to me as painters who had moved past representation: Rauschenberg, Pollack, and Stella. I don’t remember my parents ever asking me to memorize these things.

Because of my parents, I knew art was important. It did things, said things that other kinds of activities simply could not.

When I was six years old, we visited the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was able to view these familiar paintings in real life. All of a sudden I could see the dimensionality of the paint, the actual sizes of the pieces, feel the emotion in the sweep of the brushstrokes.

Chagall’s stained-glass America Windows especially captivated me: the colorful floating animals and people seemed more real to my young mind than the careful urban renderings of the Ashcan School or the life-like portraits of Rembrandt.

I never thought to share my knowledge of art with anyone.

None of my friends talked about art, and the subject rarely came up at school beyond the simple drawings or paintings we were asked to make in class. But, because of my parents, I knew art was important. It did things, said things that other kinds of activities simply could not.

When I arrived in the ER at the UW Hospital, I found my dad in a neck brace that dwarfed his small body. There was still blood on his unshaven jaw, and he was covered with electrodes hooked to machines. I held my hand on his forehead, where his skin seemed unusually fragile and thin. We are not hand-holders. Our hugs are a quick squeeze at the end of a visit. But I kept my hand there on his head, hoping to somehow hold his fierce spirit inside him.

Trauma doctors, neurologists, bone specialists, various residents and RNs visited my dad, each with a different task. Thankfully, the bleeding in his brain had subsided. He seemed not to have any neurological damage. But he needed to undergo a surgical procedure that would require wiring his jaw shut for three to four weeks.

This concerned the doctors because he was already thin, somewhere between 95 and 100 pounds, and he would need a liquid diet.

Another complicating factor in his recovery would be his Parkinson’s disease, which at this stage had begun to affect his ability to get around, to care for himself. The disease, they said, likely contributed to his fall.

A disease of the central nervous system, Parkinson’s in its early stages causes involuntary muscle movements. It affects fine motor skills, walking, balance, and, eventually, swallowing and speaking.

Facial expressions are slowly diminished. For those who have it, the aperture of physicality slowly and steadily closes over time, shrinking one’s engagement with the material world.

In an interview with Jane Pauley, the actor Michael J. Fox discussed his personal experience with Parkinson’s disease. Fox was considering the twenty-year journey that led him to establish the Michael J. Fox Foundation to raise funds for a cure for Parkinson’s. Pauley had asked Fox how it felt to get the diagnosis, to hear words like degenerative, progressive, and no cure. “All that stuff is now irrelevant to me,” Fox had said. “I am not about measuring how long something will last or how long I can do this. It’s pointless. It’s just another thing that you face and you carry on.”

As my father underwent surgery, I waited in the hospital with hundreds of other people seated in uncomfortable chairs in

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strangely lit rooms with televisions droning on about new cars, weight loss products, or the stock market. Some researched diseases on their phones, some tried to make small talk, some sat by bedsides, silently praying.

The anesthesiologist saw me sitting outside the surgical suite when the surgery was over. He looked at me, making an assessment, and said, “You seem like a quiet person.” I followed him to the post-op room and sat down next to my dad. The room was dim, and I could just make out my dad’s name on the plastic band that hung from his thin wrist: Keith Davis. While I waited for him to wake up, I watched the machines all around him. It seemed so appropriate somehow that his life was being represented in colored lines: red representing his heart, green representing his breath.

He finally forced his way through the spiderwebs of anesthesia, exhaling in moans as he awoke. I spoke to him quietly. Hi, Dad. I’m here. You’re okay. You made it. When he opened his eyes and saw me, he lifted one hand and pantomimed writing. I pulled an envelope and pen out of my bag and placed them in his hand. Writing was always a slow and mindful task since Parkinson’s had set in. With more than the usual painstaking care, he wrote in shaky script: Sing the lullaby.

The lullaby was a wordless Native American song a friend had taught me that felt to me a bit like prayer. I sang it to my daughter every night. Once when my father was visiting, he heard me sing it and then asked me to sing it into his answering machine. He thought it was beautiful, not my singing, really, but the earnestness and simplicity of the song. What he wanted after the ordeal was not pain medication, but music. When I began to sing, very quietly, there in the sterile post-op room, amid all of the medical staff, his face contorted and tears streamed out of his eyes.

Thank you everyone, was the second thing he wrote.

Heather Swan

ESSAY

Arthur Kdav, Coffee Pot, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 16 by 20 inches.

My father painted under the name Arthur Kdav. His earliest works show evidence of his exploration of color and line, the possibilities of paint and form. In his hands, familiar things— coffee pot, stream, rocking chair, or tree—seemed to reveal their essence, something like what I imagine the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have called inscape. My father painted with broad brush strokes that provide just enough visual information to let the viewer know what the subject was, leaving the rest to imagination. In this way he painted not so much the thing, but the spirit of the thing. The planes of color in the spaces around these familiar things hinted at his movement towards abstraction.

While he felt a great affinity for the German expressionists, in his opinion the abstract expressionists better challenged his thinking about the limits of representation, and his paintings continuously danced between visual narrative and the pure experience of color.

He always said he admired Rothko’s ability to invite the viewer into an emotional state merely with patches of color.

My father’s intent was to paint the blind spots, the things we as humans might not usually think about or articulate, the things that remain a mystery. By the time I was old enough to really consider what he was doing, even the recognizable images in his paintings had become cloaked in symbolism. He then began welding together

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steel bar structures that looked like undulating plants or wings or waves over which he stretched canvas. He said he no longer wanted to be confined to a picture frame.

The bed and the chair in dad’s hospital room had sensors that alerted the nurse’s station when he stood up. He was a “fall risk” and needed to have a medically trained person in attendance when he got up for any reason, whether to stretch or go to the bathroom.

My father values privacy more than most people I know. We often mention something a friend’s mother once said about our family: They are so private that they probably change their minds behind closed doors.

My dad didn’t tell anyone when he noticed the first signs of his disease. The Parkinson’s first crept into his right arm, which occasionally “acted dumb” he later said, not doing what he asked. At the time, he was living alone in a studio he had built in a wooded area surrounded by farms in Iowa County. There was no running water, so every day he carried a bucket to and from a spring half a mile away. He slept on a mattress on a large wooden platform he’d built and spent most of his time painting in the main room, which had two glass-door walls that flooded the space with forest-filtered light. It was beautiful, but very isolated. After his Massey-Ferguson tractor lost its brakes, and he rolled backwards down a hill and into a tree, I began to encourage him to move to Mineral Point, which eventually he did.

When the disease truly began to affect my father’s hands, he gave up welding and returned to two-dimensional painting. When the state prohibited him from driving, he bought a three-wheel bicycle with a large basket for runs to the store. When a fork required too much precision, he began using a soup spoon. When he had trouble mixing paints, he took up painting on paper with paint markers.

When his voice gave out, he sang songs during the day to keep his vocal cords loose.

Certain things surprised him, though. He called me one morning to celebrate the fact that he could still crack an egg. When he visited my house, he would occasionally plunk out notes on my piano, one finger at a time, of pieces he’d written when he had control over his hands.

My paternal grandfather was born and raised in India. He was sent to the U.S. to attend a Christian college when he was eighteen years old. He stayed here, got a job and a house, met a girl and got married.

He carved and polished gem stones in his basement, attended meetings of a “spiritual society” to which he wore a turban, sang to my father songs he knew in Telugu. He was dedicated to my father and my grandmother, who was Episcopalian and had grown up in a family of nine children. Her mother had died when she was quite young, and poverty plagued what was left of her childhood. She told my young father stories of gathering coal by the railroad track, of often going to bed hungry. Despite her difficult childhood, she educated herself and eventually landed a job working for a lawyer.

My grandparents had only one child.

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Arthur Kdav, (title unknown), 1990. Acrylic, canvas, and steel.

My father’s creativity led him to breaking rules early in life. At age ten, he and a friend rigged up a homemade telegraph system by stringing wires between their two houses, using city electrical lines for scaffolding. The city immediately shut down this system (clearly a fire hazard) when they got wind of it. At twelve, he and another friend built a raft out of an oil drum, old tires, and wood scraps and launched it in a pond in a local park. A passing policeman seized the boat and lectured them about trespassing.

By college age, he became interested in understanding the mysteries of the universe. So he took classes in physics and in art, eventually poring himself into painting and printmaking. And he read lots of Thoreau, especially Walden: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.

The day after my father graduated from Knox College in central Illinois, he packed everything he needed into his car—mostly paints and his dog-eared copies of Walden and Leaves of Grass— and set off on a pilgrimage to Walden Pond. His arrival at Thoreau’s former home just outside of Concord, Massachusetts, was less than wonderful. It was not the pristine wild space my father had dreamed about. There was a snack shack where you could buy hot dogs and souvenirs; signs and tourists were everywhere.

At the gift shop, he told the shopkeeper that he had come to the East Coast to make his living as a painter. The shopkeeper told him to go to Marblehead. There were painters there. Good ones. And for some reason, perhaps fate, my father took the advice. He moved to Marblehead, rented a shack to use as a studio, and began making

Anna Wren Waters

Heather Swan

Heather Swan

ESSAY

Top: Arthur Kdav, Only Moments ... A Lifetime, 1999. Acrylic, canvas, steel, 1999.

Right: Arthur Kdav, American Dreams, 1995. Acrylic, canvas, steel.

Above: A 1995 photo of the artist in Lake Geneva, Illinois.

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ESSAY

All photos by Heather Swan

Below: Arthur Kdav, Untitled, 2015.

Acrylic on canvas, 72 by 24 inches.

Top right: Arthur Kdav, Untitled, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 24 by 18 inches.

Bottom right: The artist in 2020 at the art store in Madison, Wisconsin.

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ESSAY

In a way, my father lived out Thoreau’s manifesto more fully than did Thoreau himself (who, after all, had family nearby to help him out). When my mother and father married, they bought a cheap parcel of land in the country and slowly built their house. They grew their own vegetables, hauled water from a well, and cut wood to heat the house in the winter. My father built a kiln for my mother, and the two made art and music, and had children whom they intended to raise free from the trappings of materialism and the influence of television. For a time, it worked well, until my father felt he needed to explore another path. My parents were married for seven years.

At the height of his art career, companies, organizations, and homeowners from all over the country paid him to design and compose massive sculptural paintings for their spaces. One painting, made for a building on the UW–Whitewater campus, is 27-feet long. Another, designed for the Maricopa County Building in Arizona, wraps around a corner of the second story balcony above the main entrance. During this time, he also produced smaller pieces that found their way into galleries across Wisconsin, and his work was represented by galleries in Chicago, Sarasota, Atlanta, and St. Louis.

In between his work on commissions, travel, and personal projects, my father also purchased and renovated a number of buildings, all while being a father to his two younger daughters and a husband to his second wife. This marriage did not last, either.

Once, glancing through one of my father’s books called Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke, I noticed he had underlined a sentence: “It seems to me that ‘the ultimate intuitions and insights’ will only approach one who lives in his work and remains there.”

Before the surgery, a doctor had come in to ask my dad a few questions: If you go into cardiac arrest, do you want to be resuscitated?

“Yes.” If you need a feeding tube, would you want it?

“Yes.” Can you remember the words we told you to remember?

“Apple, penny, table.”

Heather Swan

sails for a sailboat maker. After a few months in Marblehead, introducing himself to artists, painting, and learning to sail, he met my aunt. One afternoon, while visiting my aunt at my grandmother’s house, he heard my grandmother read a letter from my mother, whose prose described in great detail her experience of jumping out of an airplane in Colorado. As the story goes, my father fell in love with her then. Within a year they were married.

Years ago, I visited Walden Pond on a whim. I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, and stepped into the shallow water. I had not come expecting any moment of enlightenment, but suddenly a profound gratitude overtook me. This water, this place had inspired Thoreau to write the words that would cause my father to leave his family behind and come here, determined to “live deep and suck out the marrow of life.” Had Thoreau not written those words, I never would have been born.

Arthur Kdav, Untitled (detail), 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 65 by 20 inches.

As the doctor scribbled his notes on the chart, I asked the nurse about what comes after the surgery. She said that my dad would be free to go home after a couple of days, that there is no law in our state that requires him to remain in the hospital or a nursing home unless he is seen as mentally unfit to live alone.

I later mentioned this conversation to my dad, whose memory is often better than mine. He confessed that when he was coming out of the anesthesia, and I was not in the room, he thought he had been captured by some kind of cult and that the nurses were planning to drug him. I looked hard at him.

“Apple, penny, table,” he said to me with steady eyes.

Over the several days dad recuperated in the hospital, I struggled to keep my mind sharp. I needed to understand all of the information that the doctors were telling me so I could make good decisions about his care. Also, as the oldest, I had to report back to my three sisters what was happening.

The nurses would come and go, asking me questions.

So, he lives alone?

“Yes.” Does he have any stairs in his home?

“Yes.” Does he have trouble keeping on weight?

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ESSAY

“Yes” I didn’t understand why they kept asking me the same questions until one nurse said to me gently, but bluntly: The doctors are recommending that he not go home immediately and that he probably should not continue to live alone. He is at risk for another fall. Care facilities are available in the area.

I knew dad really wanted to go home, to his studio. I also knew that my dad knew he really needed the kind of physical therapy and nutrition regimen that could only be found at a rehabilitation center. Eventually, he agreed to go. But for no longer than a week, he insisted.

During one of the harshest winters in my memory, I brought my friend Samar with me to visit my father at his studio in Mineral Point. We all had experienced the weight of the winter, the short days and bitter wind scouring away our sanity. When Samar and I stepped into the gallery portion of his place, we stood spellbound.

My father had painted at least ten tall pieces that radiated so much joy, with colors we had nearly forgotten existed. There he was suffering with his disease, alone, during that horribly cold winter, and what he painted was lightness and hope. My dad told us he painted what he didn’t have in his life.

The little community of medical professionals that formed around my dad wanted him to be safe. There were many discussions about quality of life. The nurses at the rehab center scolded him for walking with a friend—that is, without a trained medical person—to the large bird cage full of canaries down the hall from his room.

There was a print of a pastel drawing hanging in the room where they sent my dad for rehab. It was small, maybe 12-by-18 inches. The clearly competent artist had used an impressionist method to create a picnic table in dappled sunlight. Tiny scribbles of deep-yellow pastel spoke of late afternoon; the deep greens of the branches above the blue-white table cloth transported me to the hazy shade of summer days. I pointed at it, knowing my father had been looking at it for several days. “It’s nice to think about summer and being outside,” I said.

“Being here is like being in jail,” he replied.

Five days after they took him to the rehab center, my sister the librarian picked him up, stopped at a store to buy a blender, and took him home. She left him with a clean kitchen and stacks of Tupperware full of soup she had made. My sister from California sent him cases of Boost and new bedding. My sister the school teacher came the following week and helped him set up his computer downstairs so we could continue to exchange e-mails without his having to climb to the second floor.

Matisse was well known for his relentless work ethic. “Work,” he would say, “cures everything.” For my father, too, having a meaningful life meant working, making, doing. All winter he built fires in

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his wood stove to keep his studio warm. He cooked all of his simple meals, took his trash to the curb, shoveled his walk when it snowed.

He read books about art, made charcoal drawings in the hours when he had the most control over his hands. Soon the weather would allow him to walk outside amidst the hollyhocks, day lilies, and plum trees that filled his small garden. He could still live deliberately, even with all of his limitations.

Of course, not everyone can make the choice not to live in a nursing home. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, there are roughly 1.3 million elderly people living in nursing care facilities in the United States. Some like the sense of community and safety these places can provide. Some have memory issues and require constant observation. Some are very sick and need continuous care.

But my father still has the choice, and he has chosen the risk of independence. There is no way to know what challenges his future holds. There are dangers of course, unknowns. But he is willing to live into the blind spots.

“What I do is me: for that I came,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

After visiting my dad at his quiet studio in Mineral Point, I say goodbye and hug him. I know another accident could happen. There is no certainty, ever. I look back at him before getting into my car. He stands in the doorway, his body like a Giacometti, long-limbed with penetrating eyes, leaning at a precarious angle. Then he reaches up with one hand, fingers spread wide in a jubilant wave, joy emanating from every cell.

On August 27, 2020, Keith Davis died after a fall in his studio. He painted until his final days.

Heather Swan’s nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Minding Nature, and Terrain.

Her book, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press, 2017) won the 2017 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A collection of her poems, A Kinship with Ash, was published by Terrapin Books in 2020. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Steven J. Erickson, 2017

@ Watrous Gallery

Internationally renowned coffin maker Eric Adjetey Anang is part of a vanguard of immigrant and first-generation American artists who call Wisconsin home.

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@ Watrous Gallery

BELONGING: FIRST-GENERATION ARTISTS IN WISCONSIN

BY J O DY CLOWES

I’ve been working with Wisconsin artists at the James Watrous Gallery for over a decade, and I am continually impressed by how many prominent artists in our state are first-generation immigrants. For this issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas, we asked six of these artists to tell us a little bit about their experiences, and to describe how moving to the United States affected their artwork and their careers.

Interdisciplinary artist Nirmal Raja describes how difficult it can be to find what she calls an “authentic voice,” one that can effectively convey an immigrant’s dual perspective to a broad audience. Raja explores borders, memory, and the idea of belonging in her art, often weaving culturally specific touchstones together with more universal imagery. Translation, another important theme in Raja’s work, is also a major focus for Nina Ghanbarzadeh, whose intricate drawings are literally created with words, built up letter by letter to create visual compositions of transcribed Persian poetry or of her own writings in either Farsi or English. While anyone can appreciate Ghanbarzadeh’s drawings visually, only those who can read them can fully understand the deeper meanings behind the drawings.

Mixed-media artist Angelica Contreras draws upon her Mexican heritage for inspiration, especially the traditional folk arts that celebrate holidays and the cycles of birth and death. Working as an interpreter in Madison’s immigrant

community has encouraged Contreras to embrace her Mexican-American identity even more fully, and has infused her art practice with a sense of responsibility for communicating her native culture. Xiaohong Zhang feels a similarly strong desire to elevate paper-cutting, which is a folk art in China. She describes the tight confines of academic art training in China, where working across disciplines or outside the “fine arts” receives little support. Zhang’s artwork fuses Chinese folk traditions and motifs with digital editing techniques and motion-capture video, and often addresses issues of social and environmental justice which would be subject to censorship in China.

A renowned maker of “design coffins,” Ghanian artist Eric Adjetey Anang has found that working in the U.S. affords him a different kind of artistic freedom. Splitting his time between his workshop in Ghana and his studio in Madison, Anang creates fanciful wooden coffins that have been recognized as sculpture by museums and galleries and collectors around the world. For Rina Yoon, leaving Korea was necessary in order to pursue an artistic career. While the imagery in her prints often touches on memory and identity, it’s only in recent years that she has drawn upon her cultural heritage, working with Korean handmade paper and infusing her art with concepts from Buddhism as a way of gradually making peace with her experience of displacement.

While the James Watrous Gallery remains closed due to safety concerns surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, we will continue to keep readers connected to Wisconsin art and artists through the magazine and other means.

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Steven J. Erickson, 2017

@ Watrous Gallery

During a residency at Iowa State University, Anang worked with students to create this corn-shaped coffin, which was auctioned off to raise money for an Iowa State University Engineers Without Borders trip to Ghana to help build a dam in the small village of Ullo.

ERIC ADJETEY ANANG Madison

I’ve been doing coffin-building workshops and residencies around the world for several years, but my family is in Madison and being artist-in-residence at Madison’s Thurber Park right now is helping to establish me in the U.S. My studio in Ghana, the Kane Kwei workshop, is still making design coffins known as Abebuu Adekai, which translates as “boxes full of proverbs.” I was in Ghana much longer than usual this year, almost seven months because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions, but normally I stay there six-toeight weeks at a time.

At my workshop in Ghana, the pressure is more intense. My clients often order design coffins related to their profession, and they are meant for burial. So, I use a soft wood, and since I am often working within a very tight timeline, I don’t need to put in all that much detail. I might have five assistants or apprentices working with me. For commission pieces, the deadlines could be just one or two weeks away, and I have to come up with a whole new piece within that time. I often have five to seven coffins to prepare within two weeks, so I always have to keep working as fast as I can.

But there are stresses in both situations. Here in Madison, it’s stressful because I have to find a side job, because the residency and studio work alone won’t pay all the bills. So I am probably spending three days a week in the studio here and three to four days at a side job.

While here, I am usually working for museums, galleries, and private collectors. In the case of collectors, the coffins are made for someone who is still alive and wants to display it as sculpture.

So I need to bring the detail out and use more durable materials. But I have the flexibility to do projects on my own, with nobody deciding for me how it should be. Even if they have a specific request, I contribute my authority about how we are going to do it, and when. It gives me the opportunity to develop new ideas.

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Steven J. Erickson, 2017

Steven J. Erickson, 2017

@ Watrous Gallery

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@ Watrous Gallery

ANGELICA CONTRERAS Madison

Although I was born in Whittier, California, I spent most of my life in Guadalajara, Jalisco, and moved to Madison about five years ago. I’ve learned that something happens when you leave your country of origin: you are confronted with your own identity. In terms of nationality, my identity was Mexican. But when I came to the U.S., I realized that I was labeled in many other ways—some I could control, some I could not. My current work talks about these layers of identity and how they are always shifting in time.

In Mexico my artwork incorporated themes of multiculturalism. But it had a much more personal focus, touching on childhood, family, and loss. I understand now why there are a lot of Chicano art centers that showcase our culture and its folk traditions. I find our folk arts beautiful and at times unsettling, because they reference the cycles both of death and life. They reflect the cosmovision [the collection of worldviews shared by the Indigenous pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica] of a community. I have gained more and more respect for traditional artisans and their process, and they have been of great inspiration for my personal work.

I work for the Madison Metropolitan School District as a translator/interpreter, and being confronted with the situations and realities of the immigrant community has made me refocus my practice to create visibility and dialogue within these communities. I feel a responsibility to show first, second, and third generations how valuable our traditions, arts, and culture are, and also to acknowledge those aspects that we need to change. They need to understand that there is great power in knowing where you come from.

Left: Doña María, 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 20 by 20 inches.

Right: Chicana, 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 20 by 20 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Angelica Contreras, The Keeper (El guardian), 2020. Mixed media on canvas, 40 by 30 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Nina Ghanbarzadeh, Grandfather’s Brown Chair, 2018. Archival pen on paper, 52 by 38 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Detail from Bones are used in Persian Khatam (Marquetry), 2019. Pencil, gouache, and acrylic on Stonehenge paper, 22½ by 30 inches.

NINA GHANBARZADEH Milwaukee

I moved to the United States from Iran with my husband in 2001. But my art practice didn’t really take off until 2015, after I received a BFA from UW–Milwaukee and completed a two-year residency at [visual art incubator and gallery] RedLine Milwaukee. I learned how to run my studio practice by trial and error, asking a lot of questions, attending lectures, and pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

Immigrating as an adult, I found the sudden change of culture, people, and environment a confusing experience. If I had stayed in Iran, I would not have questioned my identity or searched for a sense of belonging. People who move to another country might feel nostalgic; you don’t know where you belong anymore. You become a stranger in your birthplace after a while, and yet you don’t feel a sense of belonging here. In time you learn to stop translating in your head and just voice your thoughts in English. But what happens to the sensibility of the language you left behind? That cannot be translated.

All these thoughts are manifested in the making of art. For me, this experience started with drawing or painting familiar objects and subjects from Iran, and then, eventually, turned into writing in my mother-tongue as a way of communication. In my written works, sometimes I borrow from Persian poetry or write my own thoughts. In my drawings, I try to build a bridge through visual language between me and my viewers. That is why the written phrases in my drawings are not visible at a distance. I do not want legibility to get in the way of looking at the compositions. But as one gets closer, the words start to be revealed. We might not be able to read a different language, but we understand lines, dots, shapes, and colors. My goal is to create works that are understood visually. But if one is interested in reading them literally, the titles are the translations of the written phrases.

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@ Watrous Gallery

NIRMAL RAJA Milwaukee

When I first moved here from Asia, I struggled to find a visual language that spoke to a Western audience. After all, this is where I now live. When I introduced Indian elements, it was hard to escape the trap of re-objectifying the exotic East. It is a challenge for anyone who grew up elsewhere to navigate and find an authentic voice, avoiding the pitfalls of exoticism on one hand, and, on the other, communicating to an audience with a different history and vantage point. I resolve this struggle by approaching my practice as a means to ask what makes us human, and using my work as a bridge to form connections across cultures.

Having a global perspective, one that acknowledges and respects different cultures, is important in this divided world. I transform culturally specific thoughts, materials, and objects in the studio to make them resonate across cultures; collaborate with other artists; and examine the local with a global lens. I was able to navigate a dual identity for a long time until the 2016 elections. Suddenly, I began to feel alienated in an increasingly xenophobic world. The only way I could get past this hurdle was to use my practice as an exercise of citizenship, to make work that challenges the status quo or creates alternative spaces of empathy and connection. So in recent years my subject matter has become more socio-political, and I have expanded my repertoire to include video performances and photography collaborations as well as other new, experimental ways of working.

I simply would not have been an artist if I had remained in India. I grew up in a conservative family, and an artistic life would not have been possible there. I really appreciate the opportunities of free expression this country has given me, and I am very grateful for it.

Detail from Fault Lines, Fault Lines: North Korea / South Korea, India / Pakistan, Syria / Turkey, Gaza Strip, Mexico / USA. Five fabric panels of embroidery on silk organza, 21 by 48 inches each.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Nirmal Raja, Blurred Boundaries, 2019, Site specific installation of screen printed and hand cut hanji (Korean paper) and maps.

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@ Watrous Gallery

RINA YOON Milwaukee

I came to the U.S. at the age of seventeen, so that I could continue to study art. I took a chance, which in a way was a rebellious act. It was also a hopeful one.

I doubt I would have become an artist if I had stayed in Korea. The idea of success is paramount there. As a woman artist without influential connections, I would have faced an uphill challenge. A more likely path to success would have been medicine, law, or finance. It would have been far more difficult there than here to buck that formula. After all, in Korea a collective self is more valued than an individual self. Even as a teenager, I felt pressure to conform to societal expectations. Yet I resisted the idea of having to follow. So when at the age of seventeen I wanted to make my own decisions, I felt like an outsider in my own culture. As the creative life depends to a large degree on thinking and acting in an unconventional way, I needed to get out and find my own path. My life in the U.S. wasn’t always easy, and I had to overcome a lot of challenges. But I always felt that I had choices that were my own.

In graduate school I began questioning my identity on many levels. A natural place to start was my status as an immigrant. I soon realized that a sense of belonging was not only lacking for me here in America but in Korea as well. I understood that I would have to invent my own home within my work. This meant reconciling with the past and creating a sense of belonging that was defined neither by geography nor by family.

A turning point in my art occurred ten years ago when I revisited Korea. During my stay I learned about traditional Korean paper practices and Buddhist teachings. Since then, working with Hanji (Korean handmade paper) has become my central interest, while at the same time I explore ideas of connectedness by letting go—as Buddhism teaches—of fixed concepts and definitive forms. My recent work with paper coils is a good example. In this work I explore the idea of a kind of expansive embodiment, where earth forms and human shapes are woven together. For me, the practice of art has led me to my real home.

Yellow River-1, 2019. Laser engraving on paper, intaglio, hand-coiled paper, 72 by 24 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Rina Yoon, Little Rivers-3, 2019. Intaglio, hand-coiled paper, ink, 30 by 20 inches.

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@ Watrous Gallery

XIAOHONG ZHANG Whitewater

I was traditionally trained in academic art forms like Chinese brush painting, Western-style drawing, painting, and graphic design during the early 1990s. I entered the MFA program at Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, where I immersed myself in Western digital techniques and contemporary art. After graduation, I decided to stay in the U.S., and, in 2002, I received a faculty teaching job at UW–Whitewater.

I had always wanted to find a way to give the Chinese folk art of paper-cutting, traditionally done by housewives, the recognition it deserved. Over the past twenty years, I have reimagined the representation of this folk art by blending my contemporary digital techniques with traditional art forms, motifs, and symbols. The academic world in China is still divided into disciplines like graphic art, oil painting, drawing, sculpture, and so on. If I had remained there, I might have had no opportunities to do this work, much of which interrogates historical, social, and political themes from a Chinese perspective. For example, Brave the New World shows the contrast between the rich and poor in China. My Spring Water series refers to environmental issues, and my recent series, titled Tumult, refers to social and political issues in the U.S. I may have missed out on the opportunities that my generation of Chinese artists had as the art market opened up, as well as the social and economic changes brought about by China’s reform. But I never regretted my choice to stay in Wisconsin. To me, the American dream means rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality, and I have the freedom to speak and create my artworks here.

Spring Water series (detail), 2018–2019.

3-D modeling, dimensions variable.

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@ Watrous Gallery

Xiaohong Zhang with research assistant Kyle Grzyb, Tumult, 2020. 2-D illustration, dimensions variable.

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Fiction

2020

WISEACRES

BY J EN N I FER M O RALES

T

he woman stands in a yellow sundress and sandals, snow circling her blue ankles. It’s January in

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and she’s out on the street halfnaked. She’s not one of the beggars that Dan’s father, Buck, had told him to expect. She’s not asking for money.

“Put a little bit of change in your front pocket,” Buck had said as Dan was leaving home. “You got three days in town for the expo. Shake a little loose every day, but no more than a couple, like, five bucks total. Got it?”

In Buck’s eyes he saw doubt. “A dollar or two a day, no more. Don’t be soft, Danny.”

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Fiction

Dan’s whole, miserable job at the building trades expo was handing out little keychains promoting their family business—Johansen Ladder Incorporated—and answering questions about bulk order discounts. He couldn’t understand how his dad always came home from the expo all fired up. The chaos and noise of the vendor hall wiped Dan out and emptied his head of sense. Each morning, he left the convention center for a smoke and gave up a five to the first raggedy man who looked like he really needed it.

But the woman in the sundress isn’t asking for money. She doesn’t shiver or give any other sign of being cold as she goes through her routine: Wait for someone to approach. Lean in to say something to them. Wait. Give—or don’t give—a flower from the battered, five-gallon spackle bucket that hangs from her wrist.

It’s Wednesday, the middle day of the expo. Dan’s standing there smoking, trying to guess whether the next person will get a flower. He gets it wrong three times in a row—the first guy got a flower and Dan totally figured he wouldn’t, then the old lady comes up and Dan thinks, she’s definitely getting a flower, but she doesn’t, and so on. Dan gives up and turns to watch the buses go hissing through the slush on Wisconsin Avenue. He knows she’s got to be nuts, but eventually his curiosity gets the better of him. He grinds out his butt and strides over there, hitching up his new jeans as he goes.

She looks to be in her early 20s, young as his little sister. Her short hair is the color of coffee and it gleams, concentrating the weak rays of winter sun.

“Cold enough for ya?” Dan says, though he knows the question is stupid. Her bare white arms are speckled with gooseflesh.

She studies him with eyes the color of corn in early June. “Of course it’s cold. But tell me this: What brings you joy?”

Her face is steady, seamless, giving no signal to him that this is some kind of joke. Her eyes have more depth to them than Dan would have guessed. Up close, the pale green goes mossy.

Her insistent gaze reminds him of the look his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Halvorsen, always gave him, one that said, I bet you can figure this out on your own. Back then, he just wanted Mrs. Halvorsen to tell him the right answer. She knew it already, so what was the point in risking being wrong?

“I said, ‘What brings you joy?’” The woman is holding a purple carnation out just beyond Dan’s reach.

His hand twitches in his pocket and he imagines himself grabbing the flower. He doesn’t understand what she is asking him. He’s heard of these people, street artists. There aren’t any of them back home.

“Joy?” Dan hears himself say, puzzled, his teeth catching on the J as if he only recently learned English. He shakes his head, rousing himself out of her spell. “What’s joy?”

Her hand lowers, dropping the purple flower back into the bucket. She looks away, toward the next supplicant, a weather-beaten man in a ripped jacket.

“I’ll tell you all about joy, sweetheart,” the man says. “I can tell you some stories for damn sure.”

Dan goes back inside. He hands out ladder keychains. He answers questions about volume discounts, about small business certification for municipal procurement. Later that night, he goes out for dinner at the 5 O’Clock Steakhouse with a sealants vendor and a guy from the carpenters’ union. He tries three different kinds of whiskey.

Wiseacres. Dan’s father warned him he’d meet a lot of them in the city.

“These hoity-toity types who think they know everything. Who think they’re funny about it, too. Think they’re getting one over on ya.”

That woman must think she’s funny. Out in the slush, asking people about joy. Does she think she’s some kind of expert?

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He looks for her the next day. Every smoke break—six of them—he strides the circumference of the convention center, two city blocks squared. His calves ache from the walking, the wet cold stiffening his jeans. But she’s not there.

H

e tried asking people, back home.

At the Legion, catching the Packers game with his friend Tom, Dan asked him.

“What brings you joy, man?” His throat caught on the question. It had taken him until halftime to get up the nerve.

Tom tipped his shaggy head back to pour in the last of the basket of pretzels. “It would give me some goddamn joy if they put Aaron Rodgers back in right now. If they kept their defense up, he wouldn’t even be out with his goddamn collar bone broke in half.”

Dan looked at the screen across the bar—one of eight in the small room, all tuned to the game. The Pack was down by eleven. Would seeing Rodgers run out to the field right now really bring Tom joy?

“No, joy, man.”

Tom looked at him out of the corner of his eye and then back to the screen. He hunched his shoulders. “What’s that?”

Dan couldn’t say. On the way home, he hit Walmart to look it up in a dictionary: The emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.

Just to be sure, he looked up “keen”—finely sharpened, as an edge; so shaped as to cut or pierce substances readily—and “elation”—a feeling or state of great joy or pride; exultant gladness; high spirits.

High spirits or pleasure, sharp as a knife edge. When was the last time Dan felt that? Or the first? Where did Dan have room for that in the trailer he shared with his dad?

They had a real house once, before his mom got sick, a sturdy old brick one with the original oak woodwork and a stained-glass window in the front. On a sunny day it felt like living in a church. As a kid, Dan liked to lie in the planes of color, washing his hands in blue, orange, red. If he lay there long enough, the colors would travel the length of his body, a kaleidoscope transforming him a hair, an inch of denim, at a time.

When his mom got diagnosed, his dad struggled mightily to keep them CH LO E BENJAM I N all in health insurance. But the insurance company came up with some excuse to jack up the company’s coverage, and they all lost it—Mom, Dad, A thought-provoking meditation on Dan, his sister away at college, the five hired guys in the shop. They just the possibility of the sublime within the didn’t want to pay for her care.

Buck emptied their savings and Dan took a second job. Even with all mundane, featuring pitch-perfect details that, they had to sell the house and downsize to the trailer. Dan knew and a brilliant ending. that’s what finally killed her: knowing she was leaving them both broke and exhausted and, at the end, alone together in that cramped and humbling space. He saw it in her eyes.

Not that Dan thought he was better than anybody else here, although their trailer was the nicest one in the park. Buck wanted his wife to have some comforts, some beauty still. He had some Amish build a wraparound porch, and he had hung a glider swing to look out on the valley. At the foot of the porch he planted a fat row of pink roses.

J U D G E’S N OTES

D

ad, do you ever think about joy?” Dan asked, a couple weeks after the expo. He had dreamed the night before of the green-eyed woman, her flowers.

“Your mother? Of course, you idiot. I was married to her for thirty years. What do you think?”

In all his musing on the word, it never clicked that Joy was his mom’s name. Joy Ellen Johansen, born Joy Ellen Wilder. Of course, Dan always called her “Mom.” “Right. Besides that, though. I mean, the feeling joy.”

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“Damned if I know,” Buck said. “She used to try to tell me that in low times I should look to her, that she would always be my joy.” He shifted in his recliner, lifting up one buttock as if it hurt. It must hurt, Dan thought, him sitting there all day recovering from his heart attack while he knew things were going to shit at the shop.

His mom had held their lives together, at home and work, with threads invisible as a spider web. She was the connector. Dan recalled the mysterious trace of her hands as she taught him to tie his shoes, his eyes straining to capture each movement so that he could replay them in his head and emerge one day from his room, triumphant, his shoes tied.

“And your joy since—since Mom passed away?”

Buck grimaced, as though Dan had released a bad smell into the room. After a minute he waved his son away, “Ah, forget about that.”

From the shop office, Dan watched the guys working the line, gluing yellow plastic caps on the feet of Johansen’s cheapest model.

Under their heavy filter masks—the ones that left red lines on their sweaty faces when they pulled them off at lunch—did any of them feel the sharp knife edge of joy? Sure, they joked around with each other in the breakroom—Dan used to be part of those jokes—but it was never anything deep. Now he couldn’t even remember what was so funny.

Without his dad in the office, Dan had more to do but less attention for any of it. Lori, the admin, had to remind him before she left at 4:15 each day of something he forgot, some OSHA report, some paperwork Buck would need for the audit come spring.

The rough-paneled walls made the narrow, rectangular room feel smaller than it was. There remained an empty desk where Joy used to sit and smoke and type up the reports on the computer. The place still smelled like her Virginia Slims. Nobody was allowed to smoke in the office anymore.

He knew his dad expected him to take over the business when he retired—still a good ten or fifteen years off, Dan hoped—and he knew he should be grateful for it. But these weeks in charge while Buck recuperated left him agitated. Maybe he didn’t want his dad’s life, his business. Sometimes, after Lori and everyone had left, he felt like setting the place on fire.

He looks for her the next day. Every smoke break—six of them—he strides the circumference of the convention center, two city blocks squared.

D

an made up a reason to go back to the city every couple of months after the expo: His buddy won tickets from Rock 97.5 to a concert at The Riverside. He was going to a Brewers game with a high school friend who was working in Milwaukee now. There was a blowout sale at a sporting goods store in the burbs and he was in the market for a new hunting rifle.

He enjoyed the challenge of coming up with new and semi-plausible excuses. Sometimes he would actually do the things he said he was going to do—go to the game, buy the rifle—and it seemed like maybe he was becoming someone else in those transactions, someone more interesting.

His girlfriend, Mickey, got suspicious of his sudden interest in visiting the city. “Why’re you going there so much? And why can’t I ever come along? You got another girl?”

To calm her, he took Mickey with him once. They toured the Harley Davidson Museum, played blackjack at Potawatomi, and strolled along the lake. She watched him watch the streets.

“Who are you looking for?” Mickey asked, exasperation in her blue eyes. They were drinking bloodies and eating overpriced eggs at some industrial place in the Third Ward that the guy at the desk of their hotel said was good. In fact, the portions were small and everything was covered in cilantro.

“Nobody in particular. Just people watching, I guess. That’s what you do when you come to a place like this, right?”

“I guess.” She paused in salting her eggs to study him. “You’ve just been, I don’t know, distracted a lot lately.”

“Do you ever feel joy, Mick?”

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It was coming on the anniversary of the day they met—three years ago, at a mutual friend’s birthday cookout. Soon after that, Dan’s mom got sick. Mickey had stood by him through her illness and death. He was thankful for that kindness, but had they shared any moments that counted as joy? He couldn’t say.

“You’re getting weird.” She flicked a piece of cilantro onto the edge of her plate, then swabbed it off with her napkin. “And I don’t like weird.”

“I’m serious.” He tried to laugh off her irritation. “Come on, Mick, just answer: When was the last time you felt joy?”

“Joy? You mean, like, happiness?”

“It’s different than that. Happiness is like a long-term thing. Joy is …” He tried to think of an example she might relate to. “Like, when you’re a kid and you and your friends rake together this huge pile of leaves and you jump into it. That feeling.”

“I never liked that feeling. The leaves get down your shirt and there’s ants and spiders and—no.” She shuddered and scratched her back, as if something were crawling there.

“Well, something else then. I don’t know—sledding. That feeling when you go over the edge of the hill and you can’t stop and it’s like you’re flying?”

“Doesn’t anything grownups do count as joy?”

“Grownups sled.” He shrugged. “Maybe we should get a toboggan this winter. Or some tubes.”

“Maybe we should get married. People always look happy on their wedding day.” She squeezed his hand, but the smirk on her face confirmed that the suggestion was sarcastic.

Her sarcasm wounded him. The thought of proposing had crossed his mind once or twice. He loved her, loved the way she made him feel—desired, useful, steady—but it never seemed like the right moment. Now he wondered if his hesitation was rooted in something deeper than that.

“I’m not talking about happy, Mick. Joyful. Joy isn’t happiness.”

He thought back to the dictionary definition. “It’s sharp, quick.

Something so good it cuts you open.”

“I don’t want to be cut open.” She tossed her napkin on the table and crossed her arms over her chest. “You know, I don’t understand anything that’s going on right now.”

Walking along the lakefront, admiring the tree-covered bluffs and the clean-swept beaches, the silvered apartment windows catching the sun, he was no one anybody recognized.

Somehow this made him feel more himself.

O

n his next trip, Dan traveled alone, telling Mickey that he had to go to the city for business. She didn’t seem surprised. Since their weekend in Milwaukee, something between them had shifted.

Speeding down I-94, he loved the moment when the downtown suddenly revealed itself, each towering building full of people living lives so different from his. He craved the hours of anonymity in the city. Walking along the lakefront, admiring the tree-covered bluffs and the clean-swept beaches, the silvered apartment windows catching the sun, he was no one anybody recognized. Somehow this made him feel more himself.

That Friday evening, he wandered through the desolate mall on Wisconsin Avenue. At a tourist information kiosk, he picked up a brochure for Gallery Night. Forty galleries would be holding open houses in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown. The skin on his forearms prickled. Of course the green-eyed woman would be there, somewhere, among the other artists.

He had dinner at a café near his motel. While he ate his hamburger, he pored over the brochure, reading the descriptions of the art on display and circling the spaces with the most promise. Two locations said they were featuring performance art, one in the Third Ward and one in Walker’s Point. He planned to start with those. Performance art was what the woman was doing, right?

He climbed to the first gallery, up a blinding, fluorescent-lit staircase lined in mosaics of broken glass, and found himself among a hundred people in a space built for fifty at most.

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More mosaics hung on the walls, all of them composed of clear glass and mirror. A disco ball suspended from the ceiling spun the room’s white light into a slow, nauseating swirl.

“Glass of wine?” A woman dressed all in cream passed him a plastic cup. “Is this your first time at Art Den?” Dan nodded.

“Well, welcome.” The woman’s huge teeth dominated her smile. “This is my gallery.”

“Thanks.” Dan didn’t generally drink wine, but he downed the yellow liquid in two gulps.

He wished it was beer.

“The mosaics are by Hyun-Ok Kowalski. She’s a genius. The light. The refraction. Don’t you think?” The toothy woman looked Dan up and down. She swept her satiny gray hair from her face, rattling an armful of acrylic bracelets. She was dressed to match the room. “You’re from out of town, aren’t you?”

“Viroqua.”

“Oh, now that’s a ways. Farm country. I initially read the Carhartt jacket and plaid shirt as ironic. Guess not.” She snapped her fingers, as if striking out.

“This is just what I wear.” He crushed the empty plastic cup in his hands. “I’m not trying to make a statement or anything like that.”

“Let me tell you something.” She grabbed his elbow and pulled him closer as though she was going to let him in on a secret. “Everyone, darling—absolutely everyone—is trying to make a statement.”

“I don’t think so. I’m not.” He thought of the street artist and her flowers. “And I met this woman once who only asked a question. She would just stand on the street and ask people, ‘What brings you joy?’ She wasn’t making a statement. Just asking a question.”

“Are you talking about Aurora?” She furrowed her brow. “Darling, you make my very point.

Aurora asking people that same question over and over, knowing that so many will fail to answer it, is a statement. It’s art.” Dan could hear the disapproval of him, his farm-country jacket—worn for real dirty work, not for show—in the way she bit down on the word “art.”

“And what’s the statement she—Aurora—is trying to make?” Discovering the woman’s name gave him a flush of unexpected power. Certainly he would find her now, knowing her name.

“That people will fail. That they can’t name a single thing that brings them joy. I thought I saw her on the bill tonight at Protean.” The woman rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe she’s still doing that same shtick. Please.”

“I guess I’m heading over to Protean, then.” Dan had thought it was pronounced “protein.”

He handed the gallery owner his mangled wine cup.

“Well, tell Aurora I say hi.” She was looking over his shoulder. Her face brightened and Dan turned to see a well-dressed couple step over the threshold into the crowded room.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said, squeezing his arm. “Because what brings me real joy is drunk art patrons with money in their pockets.” The toothy woman moved away, slipping between the bodies like a shark through seaweed. “Edgar! Marcy! I am absolutely ecstatic to see you here.”

P

rotean was the gallery in Walker’s Point that he had circled in the brochure, the other one with performances that night. It seemed like some kind of sign to him that, all on his own, he had narrowed the list down to two possibilities and he had found her. As he drove the couple of miles, his GPS shepherding him through the murky streets, he wondered what it would be like to see her again. In his mind Aurora had become larger than life, a riddling angel with some essential knowledge he could gain if only he could follow her instruction.

He had been following it, questioning himself and those around him, and he felt a door opening as a result. Where it led, he didn’t yet know, but it was opening. He shivered in his jacket, although the early September air was warm.

In contrast with the Art Den’s blaring whiteness, Protean’s raw space was dim. The two rooms off to the right of the main gallery flickered with video displays. The gallery to the left featured a series of paintings illuminated by spotlights, leaving the rest of the room in

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shadow. The main gallery, a high-ceilinged room with exposed pipes gurgling overhead, was ringed by six small stages.

On five of the stages, a single light highlighted a chair or a prop of some kind, the artist either gone already or yet to arrive. On the stage in the far corner, a groaning man lifted something dark and boxy above his head. Dan wedged himself into the crowd of twenty or so watching him pick up an ancient cathode ray-type TV set, hoist it above his head and grunt, then set it slowly down again. The TV was plugged in, tuned to static. The man’s sweat dripped onto the set each time he placed it at his feet and his movements grew slower with every lift, the grunting resolving into a growl.

Dan turned to the rapt girl next to him. She seemed to be in her late teens and wore a brown leather vest over a lime green tank top and a purple-sequined ballerina skirt.

“What’s this about?” he asked. Dressed like that, she couldn’t possibly make him feel stupid for not getting it.

Without turning her head, she said, “I think maybe it’s a commentary on the influence of media? The way our minds are so full of it all the time? Hold on a sec.” She pulled her phone from her vest pocket and snapped a picture of the sweating man in all-out weightlifter grimace. “Crystal’s going to love this.” She pressed a few buttons, then dropped the phone back into her pocket.

“Did Aurora perform yet?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. This is the first performance, I think. Who’s Aurora? What does she do?”

“She’s—well, I don’t know. You’ll just have to see it, I guess.” Dan began moving away, suddenly wanting to keep the power of Aurora’s art to himself. “Good to talk to you.”

He wandered into one of the video galleries, where a black-andwhite film in the style of a 1960s home movie played against the wall: a man and a woman in hippie clothes packing and unpacking a picnic basket in constant loop. The moment the woman placed the last thermos in the basket, the film reversed and she was taking it out again. His mom was never a hippie, but she used to sigh sometimes that life was like this: the hamper refilling with laundry just soon as she had emptied it.

As his eyes adjusted to the shadows and the flickering video, he began to make out the faces in the room.

He sees her then. Aurora is leaned up against the wall to his right, arms crossed over her chest. This time she’s dressed for the season, in a tweed skirt and tights, a light sweater with rhinestone buttons.

In the other room, the TV lifter’s animal growl has become a roar that breaks through the silence of the picnic video.

Dan crosses the room and says, “Do you think that guy’s okay?” He can’t believe he’s faceto-face with her again, after all these months.

Aurora shrugs. “I saw him warming up. He always stops before he breaks anything.”

“Good. That’s a relief.” Dan forgets what he’s relieved about before his mouth is even closed. He can only stare. In this light her eyes look gray.

“Do we know each other?”

“Not really. We met once. In January, outside the convention center downtown. You didn’t give me a flower.”

She laughs, then looks around the room. A couple of the video-watchers turn in their direction.

“Then you must not have deserved one.” Her laugh is taunting.

“I do now.”

“What?”

“Deserve one. A flower. I know what brings me joy.”

She pats the small pockets of her skirt. “Fresh out, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t need the flower. I just wanted to tell you. And ask you something.”

In his mind Aurora had become larger than life, a riddling angel with some essential knowledge he could gain if only he could follow her instruction.

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A husky man in a corduroy coat shushes them and Aurora jerks her head toward the door.

Dan follows her back into the main gallery.

“What do you want to know?” Aurora checks her watch, a thin, silver band. “I’m on in ten minutes.”

Dan hopes the smile on his face is as he feels it—inviting, not smug—but he can’t help feeling pleased with himself. “I want to know, what brings you joy?”

She laughs out loud now, her head thrown back, her long arms sweeping toward the ceiling and crashing down onto her thighs. “All this time, no one’s bothered to ask me that.”

“Really?” Dan feels victorious. He’s done something no one else has.

Her mouth falls open. “You know I’m kidding, right? Even the kid who cashiers at Walgreens asks me what brings you joy every time I go in there to buy tampons.”

He doesn’t want Aurora to see the disappointment in his face, so he turns toward the TV man’s stage. A member of the audience has climbed up to help him lift, another squatting on the floor to spot him on the release. What do they think they’re accomplishing, extending this guy’s routine?

“I’m sorry. I’m being a smartass.” Aurora pats Dan’s shoulder. “Tell me your answer. What brings you joy?”

He shrugs off the weight of her hand, her gaze. “No, I don’t think I’ll tell you after all.”

“I said I was sorry.” A darkness crosses her face and she pulls on the sleeves of her sweater.

“I’m on in a minute. I should go get ready.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“What?”

“What brings you joy.”

He makes record time on the trip home. As he speeds along the midnight landscape, he imagines that there must be someone out there worth telling.

Jennifer Morales is a poet, fiction writer, and performance artist based in rural Wisconsin.

Her short story collection, Meet Me Halfway: Mi l wa u ke e St o r i e s ( U W Pre s s , 2 0 1 5) , wa s Wisconsin Center for the Book’s 2016 “Book of the Year.” Recent publications include “Cousins,” a short story in Milwaukee Noir (Akashic, 2019) and “The Boy Without a Bike” in Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Akashic, 2019).

She is the president of the board of the Driftless Writing Center in Viroqua.

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FICTION & POETRY CONTESTS

s r e t i r w n i s Wiscon ublication, p , s e z i r p win !

0 0 5 $ o t p and u

Contests Open January 15 entry fees:

Fiction = $20.00

Per story; multiple submissions accepted.

Academy Members receive a 25% discount.

Poetry = $10.00

Up to three poems; multiple submissions accepted.

Academy Members receive a 20% discount. entry deadline:

March 15, 2021

enter online:

wisconsinacademy.org/contests Get the attention your writing deserves through our fiction and poetry contests! Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine hosts annual writing contests for Wisconsin residents age 18 and over that provide cash, prizes, and publication. First-place winners in the Wisconsin People & Ideas fiction and poetry contests each receive $500 and one-week artist residencies at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts in Mineral Point. Second-place winners receive $250 and third-place winners receive $100. First- through thirdplace winning stories and poems are published in print and online issues of Wisconsin People & Ideas, and all award-winning writers are invited to read their work at a special Wisconsin Book Festival event.

Thanks to our 2021contest sponsors: 56

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WISCONSIN

BOOK

F E S T I VA L

Poetry

New Wisconsin Poetry Honorable Mention Poems from our 2020 Poetry Contest

At the Birth of a Third Daughter, on the Eve of World War, my grandfather refused to look at her or come in from the barn.

In that old country, deep within my newborn mother, in my invisible ovary home, I must have learned that hope is complicated.

Did my someday-son learn it too, when the New World obstetrician strapped my braided mother down, told her shut up, cut the pulsing umbilical cord and slapped me into air?

America was in Vietnam, wars at home, Silent Spring took the world by storm and soon, I was marching for peace in the arms of a loving father.

I must have learned that hope is not for the fainthearted.

The summer I turned 50 and my child became a teen, wildfires burned where they hadn’t burned before, schools were locked down, seas were rising up, crops were under water, waves of mothers flooded borders, while along the corded trumpet vine in the garden, planted by you the year our son was born in the bed upstairs, ruby-throated hummingbirds returned to a fanfare of open-throated flowers— the whirring birds small as ovaries braved storms, seas, borders for this plaited sweet perennial pulsing: Nectar!

Ingrid Andersson’s poems have been nominated for Best of the Net (2020) and a Pushcart Prize (2018). In 2019 she received an Editor’s Choice Prize from Eastern Iowa Review, and her work has appeared in Midwest Review and Minerva Rising, among other publications.

Ingrid Andersson

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Poetry

Bleu Blew Azul Solid as fish shimmer leaping from the sky to regain its ground, its Rock River, its Seine.

This blue this morning is mere garments de mes mémoires faibles.

It is glass cracking inward indifferent to the downwashing yellow.

It doesn’t think I am weaker, I am being overtaken.

I am elemental.

I am the shard of New Mexico sky above the chimney rock.

Es un casco del cielo de New Mexico sobre un butte.

The blue that Is. Here’s a plate of foreign sky caught, honored, and released.

The blue belongs. The blue must fly.

Bleu, blew, azul.

Sherry Blakeley

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Sherry Blakeley lives in Beloit, in close proximity to her husband, the artist David Lundahl. The two co-produced the book, Poems & Polaroids. A former journalist, Blakeley is also the author of the Auction House Mystery Series of books, which is set in small-town Wisconsin.

Poetry

I Want to Speak of Want of the need for lyric whispers and fingertips behind my ear like a distant melody of dappled water that flows where tulips open their soft petals spreading like a morning yawn of the weight of the stones that left my body imprinted my bones branded my hands a delicate muzzle of my desire as it sinks into the peat of this fen with its torturously slow fade and decay and of you my muse forever and always light years away light years away

Elisabeth Harrahy’s poems appear in Bramble, The Café Review, Constellations, Ghost City Review, Gyroscope Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Plainsongs, 3rd Wednesday Review, Zone 3, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Biology at UW–Whitewater.

Elisabeth Harrahy

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Brown Study First cited in the sixteenth century (specifically in a book called Dice-Play), the expression [brown study]—which describes a state of intense, sometimes melancholy reverie, really seems to have hit its stride in the nineteenth.

—From “Golden Brown,” by Sadie Stein, in The Paris Review Today we say we’re blue. Though down in the dumps is also true, where brown reigns, landfills full in the process of decay.

We’re young when we ask about others’ favorite color or their favorite food. Simple questions compared with “who, from history, would you most like to meet?”

For the record, mine is brown, the mud of all colors.

Status: non-color. Called drab, dun, dull—brown is far from dismal. That’s gray’s fame. Excluded from color wheels, brown thrives in subtlety on a blue planet.

Gold lives in brown, in the weave and hand of fabric, in the burnished seed, in the grain of sand. Lion’s mane.

Hazel. Topaz. Amber. Fossil. Monk’s hood. Sable fur.

Mink pelt. A child’s first chestnut lock.

Brown understates itself, hues too ordinary for Pantone’s color of the year. It’s the water from swished brushes poured down the drain, primary becomes primal— the earth where we place our feet.

We plant. We pave. We build. But cracks expand, birds peck, and brown finds its way to the sky.

In spring, brown reminds us it’s alive. Georgia’s bare terra cotta vies with afternoon sun. Motes rise from vast fields and travel for miles to alight upon the early sparkle of lakes or adventure on to rafting rivers, before resting for a time on umber banks.

By summer brown is everywhere: roofs and porch floors.

We sweep dust that settles as soon as we turn away.

Dry winds blow summer brown through chinks— dust storms swirl in the southwest. Cracked mud flats buzz with copper wings. Sulfur earth bubbles in bronze.

Brown is life’s first and last color, tadpole emerging from primordial ooze, lifespan turned to wood, bark, earth. Human evolution.

We all go back to brown.

Under snow, brown wrestles to be noticed, until sun exposes chocolate furrows stark against white. Soil clings to evaporation, travels invisibly in January wind until it settles elsewhere, cocoa powder on meringue drifts in highway ditches.

Dawn Hogue’s novel, A Hollow Bone, was published by Water’s Edge Press (2017), and her poetry has appeared in the anthology Through This Door as well as in Stoneboat Literary Journal, Inscape Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 Hal Prize for Poetry.

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An Early

WARNING

Sandra McLellan’s research is leveraging wastewater as an early-warning system for COVID-19 infection trends. It might not be the first place you’d think of looking to gauge a community’s health, but the work could provide crucial help in turning back this pandemic and preventing future ones.

uwm.edu/uwmresearch

REVIEWS

Seahorses: Poems

by Abayomi Animashaun Black Lawrence Press, 75 pages, $16.95 Reviewed by James P. Roberts

As with his two previous poetry collections, Sailing To Ithaca and The Giving Of Pears, Abayomi Animashaun’s Seahorses does not hesitate to present stark truths in real-world settings.

Seahorses begins with a poem titled “Aubade” in which Animashaun transforms the expected song of morning into a recital of suffering, replete with “children caged like hens— / many without bread—” who fall victim to the greed of political forces they do not understand. The visceral poem sets the stage for a collection that explores the immigrant experience from multiple perspectives, with a focus on the shifting identities of both the oppressed and their oppressors.

Reflecting on his early upbringing in Lagos, Nigeria, and later arrival in America, Animashaun writes of finding “God’s will / in a new paradise.” But for an immigrant, this paradise can be a purgatory, as in the poem “White Rooms,” a place where “your face must turn white” to survive. In “After Coming Home from the Detainment Camp,” Animashaun presents the view of a guard who is just doing his job, a man whose identity is a mask he wears to protect his family: “When the house is silent / You oil your gun.”

In “Collateral Damage,” one of the most chilling and evocative poems in Seahorses, Animashaun imagines how genocide might look through the eyes of “the old revolutionaries” who gather to convivially drink “from the same small cup” of unsweetened tea, these men who say “nothing of the thousand infants / Whose burnt and severed heads / They counted and proudly hung on spikes.”

The second part of Seahorses explores biblical (“Jesus’ Day Job,” “Standing in the Ruins of Gomorrah”) and popular literary tropes such as the Wizard of Oz, to question what constitutes reality and what is merely enticing fantasy: So what If this man’s Yellow brick road Is not yellow And is no road.

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The journey for all of us, Animashaun seems to say, comes to the same end by “Taking down this picture / Of the person you once were.”

After passing through these dark nights of the soul, the reader’s pilgrimage concludes on rising notes of acceptance and the possibility of transcending our instincts toward tribalism. Animashaun’s poem “Communion” allows that, though there may be vast differences of opinions and beliefs, “after years of talking over each other / we can finally sit on the porch” sharing “a simple meal of stale bread and salted fish.”

From first page to last, Abayomi Animashaun’s Seahorses is a collection of harrowing and enlightening poems that readers will not soon forget.

James P. Roberts is the author of fifteen books in the fields of fantasy and science fiction, poetry, literary biography, and baseball history. His latest poetry collection, One Hundred Breaths (August 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2020 Portage Press Poetry Book Contest. He lives in Madison, where he is actively involved in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and loves to haunt Little Free Libraries.

REVIEWS

Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea Edited by Chad Alan Goldberg University of Wisconsin Press, 296 pages, $44.95 Reviewed by Jeff Snowbarger

Few things have shaped our state more than the Wisconsin Idea, a more-than-century-old commitment of the University of Wisconsin to serve the state’s citizens. To this day, the fingerprints of the Wisconsin Idea are clearly visible on Wisconsin’s education, economy, politics, culture, and environment. Despite this, many still wonder, “What the heck is the Wisconsin Idea?”

A new title from the University of Wisconsin Press, Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, seeks to answer to this question through a series of essays written by contemporary practitioners of the Wisconsin Idea. Edited by UW–Madison sociology professor Chad Alan Goldberg, the volume features essays by standout presenters from a course and public lecture series developed by Goldberg ’s former Department of Sociology colleague Patrick Brenzel, “Forward? The Wisconsin Idea, Past & Present.”

Goldberg begins with an exploration of the origins and evolution of the Idea, providing a clear definition: The Wisconsin Idea “refers to the historic mission of the University of Wisconsin to serve democracy, in part by sharing expert knowledge with state government to inform and improve public policy, and in part by research and outreach activities to enrich the lives and promote the well-being of the people, all of which requires a robust commitment to academic freedom.” At its core, Goldberg argues, the Idea is the belief that education and collaboration are the keys to a vibrant democracy that benefits all citizens, rather than just a privileged few.

Subsequent essays by Brenzel and Idea proponents such as Jane L. Collins, Lewis A. Friedman, Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen, and R. Richard Wagner add more color and texture to Goldberg’s argument.

Conservation biologist Curt Meine’s essay on the state’s conservation legacy showcases the way Idea advocates, such as Aldo Leopold and Senator Gaylord Nelson, worked alongside citizens to conserve our shared natural resources. Here we see the Wisconsin Idea inspiring a democratic collaboration in service of the public good.

Likewise, human ecology researcher Karen Bogenschneider shares an essay that traces how ideas “sifted and winnowed” at the university informed effective state policy over many years. She warns, however, that increasing political polarization has jeopardized this working relationship.

Historian J. David Hoeveler contributes an essay on John Bascom, an early and influential president of the University of Wisconsin, and his contribution to the moral and intellectual underpinnings of the Idea. Hoeveler illustrates the way some politicians and university administrators over the years have sought to redefine the Idea—to the detriment of the UW System as well as Wisconsin

residents. In Katherine J. Cramer’s essay, we see how these blows against the Idea culminated in an attempt by the Walker Administration to replace the UW System’s stated mission, to “improve the human condition,” with a brutish mandate to “bolster the economy.”

Readers of Goldberg’s collection might come away convinced that the Wisconsin Idea is as imperiled as the democracy it seeks to improve. However, in addition to highlighting the accomplishments of influential proponents, Education for Democracy envisions a Wisconsin Idea that reaches out to historically ignored citizens such as women, Native and African Americans, LGBT communities, and those on the economic fringe. This forward-looking Idea is exemplified in Emily Auerbach’s Odyssey Project, which she describes as “a free, two-semester, six-credit humanities course designed to empower adults at the poverty level to overcome adversity and achieve dreams through higher education.”

Like so many cultural ideals, the vitality of the Wisconsin Idea is inexorably tied to our belief in it. Long-time arts administrator, Maryo Gard Ewell, captures the past and future energy of the Wisconsin Idea by concluding her essay with a poem by her father, the indefatigable arts advocate and educator Robert Gard: That here, in our place We are contributing to the maturity Of a great nation.

If you try, you can indeed Alter the face and the heart Of America.

Jeff Snowbarger was featured in Tin House as their New Voice in Fiction, and Best American Short Stories 2010 declared his story “Bitter Fruit” one of the year’s notable publications. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he received the Truman Capote Fellowship. Snowbarger is an Associate Professor of English at UW–Stevens Point.

WINTER · SPRING 2021

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REVIEWS

Homeland Elegies: A Novel

by Ayad Akhtar Little, Brown & Company, 345 pages, $28.00 Reviewed by Gary Jones

Ayad Akhtar first came to my attention when I wrote a feature for Peninsula Pulse on Door County’s Big Read selection, American Dervish. This was Akhtar’s 2012 coming-of-age novel about the Pakistani-American son of Muslim immigrants living in Milwaukee.

Years later I attended the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s productions of several of his plays, including the Pulitzer-prize winning Disgraced.

Homeland Elegies, Akhtar’s latest novel, like his first, blends fact and fiction as he tells of his boyhood in Brookfield and his developing literary career. The book offers a picaresque autobiographical journey that focuses on the simultaneous sense of belonging and dispossession that immigrants and their first-generation children face in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent trial balloons of Muslim bans and border walls.

Akhtar’s novel reveals how his cardiologist father became an advocate for the proverbial American Dream, unlike his wife, who missed their native Pakistan. His father succeeded in his career and gloried in the opportunities he enjoyed, including an invitation to serve as personal physician to a young Donald Trump. After the 2016 election, he became an ardent supporter of Trump’s presidency. The author, at odds with his Trump-supporting father, remains skeptical of American society, critical of flaws inherent in this country, including inequities in the healthcare system, unfair economic standards, religious intolerance, and discriminatory immigration standards.

Akhtar finds that his celebrity as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter does not protect him from harsh judgments based on his appearance. An altercation that Akhtar and his father experienced with a local citizen in a Wisconsin small town serves as a prime example. Because of state cuts in public library funding, Akhtar would visit local libraries to make financial donations in support of their work. One day, before visiting the Wonewoc Library, he and his father stopped at a nearby convenience store where a concealed-carry self-appointed patriot ordered them to “Go home!”

He saw me notice his gun, and he smiled: “Can’t wait when we build that wall to keep you critters out.” What I felt in that moment was brief, but I won’t ever forget it. The sight of the gun, the visceral threat and primal fear it triggered, the elemental

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urge to protect myself, the asymmetry of our power in that moment—all of it combined to set something ablaze inside me I’d never experienced before. I wanted to kill him. But the immediate awareness of just how powerless I was to do so threw me back onto myself in a way that eats at me to this day, almost two years later.

The contradictory sense of both belonging and dispossession that informs Akhtar’s life and work serves as a two-edged sword, bringing him both fame and frustration. Those who have read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents will find parallels to Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. Wilkerson includes powerful personal narratives in her book, revealing that the status she has achieved does not shield her from discrimination. Where she takes a sociological approach, Akhtar uses fictional autobiography to return readers again and again to an understanding of how the playing field has never been level for people of color in this country.

The title—Homeland Elegies—poses a question that immigrants face regarding the nature of home, which should encourage introspection in us all. The answer revealed in the book, despite the author’s critical assessment of American society, may come as a surprise to readers.

Author and poet Gary Jones summers in Door County and winters in Platteville where for a time he taught at UW–Platteville after a long career as a high school English instructor. In 2019 the Wisconsin Historical Society Press published his book Ridge Stories, a work that earned first place in the 2020 Midwest Independent Publishers Association biography category.

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The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters is pleased to offer a spring 2021 series of online Academy Courses in creative writing and the visual arts. Academy Courses are designed to bring people together for lifelong learning and personal enrichment. Our expert instructors cultivate an intimate atmosphere for learning and discussion for creative people at all levels of experience.

Join Us

INDEPENDENT STUDY: INTERMEDIATE TO ADVANCED OIL AND ACRYLIC PAINTING Instructor: Mary Diman Fridays, March 5–May 14 Time to be scheduled with instructor SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION Instructor: Jacki Whisenant Saturdays, March 20–May 8 9:00 am–11:00 am POETRY WRITING WORKSHOP Instructor: Angela Voras-Hills Mondays, March 22–May 10 6:00 pm–8:00 pm

WRITING TRUE STORIES Instructor: Marja Mills Tuesdays, March 23–May 11 6:00 pm–8:00 pm WRITING IMAGINATIVE, EMOTIVE & ENGAGING FICTION Instructor: Lucy Sanna Wednesdays, March 24–May 12 6:00 pm–8:00 pm FOUNDATIONS IN CLASSICAL DRAWING Instructor: Philip Salamone Tuesdays, April 6–May 25 6:30 pm–9:00 pm

Learn more and register at wisconsinacademy.org/courses