Lynden Sculpture Garden Responds to COVID-19

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Photo courtesy of Lynden Sculpture Garden

Milwaukee County is well known for its public parks, one of America’s finest and most extensive green belts. At the northern fringe of Milwaukee County sits a unique park operating outside the County Park System. Formerly the estate of the Harry Lynde and Margaret Blakney Bradley, the 40-acre site is dotted with 50 modernist sculptures, most of them monumental in scale. It has been open to the public since 2010 and the site of many workshops and activities—until the pandemic triggered Gov. Evers’ Safer at Home order.

Lynden’s Executive Director Polly Morris answered some questions about the Garden’s importance.

Do you think Lynden Sculpture Garden offers something unique for Milwaukeeans during the pandemic?  

We are making a concerted effort to get a lot of content online for different audiences and on different platforms. As with our regular programming, we have been focused on sharing Lynden’s philosophy and approach to art, education, and community. While it’s not the same (at all) as visiting Lynden or participating in a large event like our HOME refugee celebration, we continue to be guided by the questions that interest us, whether they are about place, sculpture, the environment, the radical black imagination, or the role artists play in shaping civic dialogue.

We have been posting tours, which often include artists’ thoughts about their work, on our virtual hub, and this week we will begin to put our sculpture collection online. This will take some time, but in addition to including photos and basic info, we are adding audio from docents (sometimes more than one docent per sculpture, to give a variety of viewpoints); videos; artist interviews—all sorts of artist-related content. We hope this tides people over during this period of isolation, and that these virtual tours will prove useful when we emerge from the pandemic and people are walking the grounds again.

A second group we serve is families. We have been posting activities and projects that can be done at home, some for parents and children, others for kids on their own. While some of these are quite simple, others bear all the hallmarks of our educational work: they are cross-disciplinary, place-based, and focused on inquiry and process. We are usually asking children to work at the intersection of art and nature, or art and social studies or literacy.

We have long argued that Lynden’s place-based educational programs, such as field trips, are not about exposing children to an exotic locale quite distinct from those they inhabit in their daily lives; instead, we use Lynden’s land and collections to heighten awareness of place. We model how to explore place and understand one’s own place in the world (geographical, social, historical, interpersonal) in the world. So it seems natural for us to have children and their families out exploring their backyards and neighborhoods, or the history of their communities, using the skills and ways of thinking we teach here. These projects are all accessible on the virtual hub.

We are also running more intensive, interactive programs through Google Classroom. This is an extension of our weekly Art Drop-in program, which enables children (ages 2-4, 6-11, and 11 and up) to visit Lynden each week for informal art exploration. Over the years, we've attracted a group of children and teens who have grown up in Art Drop-in and embrace the opportunity to explore materials and pursue projects over several weeks; these young people have also formed communities that often work collectively as well as individually. We've been hearing a lot from them about the pleasure of having this community online during the pandemic. They especially appreciate the opportunity to post work in the classroom and share feedback. This is a closed platform, so people have to send a request to Jeremy Stepien to join.

Our Innovative Educators Institute has been a source of intensive, cross-disciplinary teacher professional development since 2014, with many participants extending their involvement beyond the original three-year commitment. The majority of our educators teach in MPS, and like all dedicated teachers, they have been finding ways to reach their students during the pandemic. Our job is to support them in these endeavors: by sharing successful projects on the hub for other teachers to see; by posting the kind of artist content that can spur activities and discussion (see, for example, the "Artist at Work" video series, in which artist LaNia Sproles keeps a video diary as she works her way through the challenges of her latest painting); and by working with our two teachers in residence, Sue Pezanoski Browne and Katie Hobday, to create a "Resource of the Week" for teachers in the field. The first resource, which was based on a survey of local teachers, weighed the pros and cons of different online platforms. We think of this as practical advice by teachers and for teachers teaching during the pandemic.

All of this material crosses over from one category to another—a drop-in activity might be based on one of our virtual tours, for instance; we think of these resources as more of a web than a neat set of buckets. Keep in mind that we are adding content all the time, so it’s worth checking back regularly or signing up for the e-alert list to be notified about additions.

Outside of the virtual hub, and in the absence of any hard information on when we may gather again, we have taken a few of our public programs online. On April 18 we will offer our next "Conversation on Displacement and the Arts" from 1-3 p.m. on Zoom.

These conversations emerged from our work with refugee communities, and this panel, which is moderated by Kim Khaira, includes artists Erick Ledesma and Della Wells, and activists May June Paw and Paul Vang. On May 23 Carl Bogner leads a virtual discussion group as part of the NEA’s Big Read, a collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center. We’ll be discussing Stephanie Burt’s poetry collection, “Advice from the Lights.”

Both of these events are free, but you do need to register in order to be admitted to the Zoom session.

At one point your gallery-building was closed but the grounds remained open (If I recall correctly). Have you shut the gates entirely during the pandemic?

We did have to close the gates once the safe at home order was issued, though during that brief period many people took advantage of the opportunity, despite often less than optimal weather. It is conceivable that we will back our way out of this pandemic in a similar way, with a period when the building is closed but the grounds are open. Of course, this means we have to waive admission. We were so delighted that individual visitors went home and sent in donations via Paypal, but in the long-term, waiving admission raises interesting questions about the survival of arts organizations like ours.

What has been the response to your virtual programs?

It’s early days, but we have logged nearly 3,000 views and more than 500 visitors to the virtual hub. We get appreciative emails from parents and students who are spending time in the virtual drop-in, and the numbers registered to participate have been growing. As one would hope, there are certain benefits to the online delivery system in terms of accessibility outside of studio hours—one teen was so enthusiastic about the online access that she hoped it would continue post-pandemic—and having the capability to invite the older students to offer direct feedback on the work of the younger participants, which they are doing. The feedback from teachers has been positive. Lynden’s a small place, and people who visit regularly know the staff, so we’ve gotten several warm messages from those who are following our Facebook series on what individual staff members are doing at home (other than working). And as a simple contribution to the community’s mental health, our land team has been posting—also on Facebook—photos and videos of wildlife encountered on their daily rounds. These are much appreciated.