A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art (Cedarburg Art Museum), by Thomas D. Lidtke and Annemarie Sawkins

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A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art

Wisconsin has been a state for more than 170 years and was home for thousands of years before that to indigenous people. In every period, Wisconsin’s inhabitants included people working with stone, clay, wood or pigment, making things—including objects defined in our epoch as art.

A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art is a bulky coffee table-scale book that covers it all in 470 pages—everything from a fluted stone point (c. 11,000 BCE) to a fantastical scrap metal sculpture by Tom Every (1983-2020). The breadth threatens to become unwieldy, yet A Creative Place holds together as a comprehensive cross-section of the creativity that occurred within Wisconsin’s borders as well as significant artists who left the state (Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Steichen).

A Creative Place is primarily the work of Wisconsin art historians Thomas D. Lidtke and Annemarie Sawkins. Writing in clear prose, without unnecessary recourse to artspeak or jargon, they produced a plausible panorama of times past and current, placing Wisconsin art in the context of national social and cultural trends. Also examined is the role of arts funding, art museums and galleries and artist collectives.

Some of the art represented in A Creative Place reflects Wisconsin’s natural and built landscape; more prominently, Wisconsin’s artists manifested the influence of global movements, whether impressionism, social realism or abstraction. There was never a homogenous Wisconsin Art but always a pluralism derived in part from the many cultures that took root here. If the German art academies where many Wisconsin artists studied was a prevalent source in the 19th century, the German academic influence coexisted with many varieties of American folk art and the emergence of new pictorial forms made possible by photography.

The book is beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated by the art it describes. A Creative Place can be enjoyed serendipitously, one compelling image after another, or read for its ongoing narrative.