Milwaukee Day—taking place, inevitably, on April 14, i.e. 414—is a celebration of the city’s thriving culture through live music, museum activity and yoga at the Oriental. This year, Milwaukee Day coincides with the annual Kenilworth Open Studios (11 a.m.-3 p.m.), when students and faculty of UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts invite the public to see and sample their work, much of which is explicitly geared toward creating a better Milwaukee.
According to Tate Bunker, senior lecturer in the UWM Film Department, Milwaukee is an endlessly fertile film set for aspiring and established filmmakers. Bunker moved to Milwaukee to undertake graduate studies at UWM (“one of the top 25 film programs in the world” he asserts) and found the entire city to be a filmmaker’s paradise: “There’s an amazing community that I’ve not seen in other cities. Here I can crew up immediately and start working. And there are such great locations. If I want to shoot in a diner in New York City, it’ll cost $5,000. In Milwaukee they just hand you the key and ask how they can help.”
Concurrently with making his own films, Bunker assists the next generation of filmmakers in refining their vision and finding their voice. “My biggest class is ‘Zen and the Art of Filmmaking,’” he says, “which teaches Zen principles as methods of innovative filmmaking. I emphasize the idea of practice as a means of escaping ready-made ideas. This involves a lot of work, like finishing a film per week.”
Besides encouraging sheer quantity, Bunker presents his students with creative conundrums, designed to shake them free from habit and the anxiety of influence. “Our conscious self can be one of the biggest hindrances to doing original work, so my class explores automatic processes. For instance, instead of starting with a script, we’ll use a process—pulling themes from a hat, throwing darts at a map, scouting locations before we have a story. Introducing chance forces us to innovate instead of imitate, to discover a film as opposed to creating it.”
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During the Open Studios, Bunker and his cohort will be based in room 408, making a film in four hours. True to Bunker’s belief that relinquishing centralized control yields more interesting types of unity, the film will be, in the parlance of Surrealism, an “exquisite corpse”: “Without seeing each others’ work, four groups will make short films, which will be tied together to create the final film.” Bunker explains, “What creates continuity will be a set—which none of the groups will have seen before Milwaukee Day.” The finished film will be screened at the end of the Open Studios. Amid the flurry of production, half of room 408 will be a theater screening 10 of the best films from this semester. And for those interested in the aesthetics of Zen filmmaking, students will be on hand to wax philosophical.
Economics and Culture
Bunker and the burgeoning film scene bring both economic and cultural enrichment to Milwaukee. Other Peck School projects are differently geared toward engaging the community, especially its underserved and underrepresented groups. This is the mission of Kim Cosier, professor of art education and director of community engagement, Raoul Deal, senior lecturer in the department of visual art, and like-minded colleagues with the Kenilworth Gallery Community Engaged Arts Initiative. “The idea is that we support projects with the community instead of for the community,” Cosier says, “This initiative is a laboratory for imagining a better Milwaukee.”
The Initiative’s current project is a collaboration between the Community Engaged Arts program and Project Ujima, a violence-prevention program serving families and especially children whose lives have been affected by violent crime. When complete, the collaboration will yield a 3-by-50-foot banner of 22 vinyl-cut portraits of the artists from Project Ujima and UWM. Each portrait is supplemented with snippets of text hinting at the inner life of its subject; mantras such as “my past does not define me” or watchwords like “victorious” and “legacy.”
“This project has been an opportunity to work together on a common cause,” says Jermaine Belcher, team lead with Project Ujima, “The UWM art students get to work with the community and our kids have a voice to talk about how violence has impacted their lives and how they’ve overcome it. In reality, all of us are affected by this violence.”
Deal stresses the transformative potential of the project: “Community engagement projects introduce more diversity into the university environment and better reflect the demographics of Milwaukee. Our galleries have tended to emphasize art establishment artists, but I’m excited about projects that might lead Project Ujima kids to become artists. Can you imagine what that would do to the art establishment?!”
If Milwaukee Day celebrates the city as it is, the Kenilworth Open Studios imagines what Milwaukee could be. With more than 100 Peck School faculty members and graduate students, Kenilworth Open Studios holds many a promising vision for the future.
