The art scene in Milwaukee generates a disproportional energy from its curbs and its basements. It’s one its most admirable qualities, and in the few years of hosting out-of-towners at my own space, its authenticity and social vitality is something that gets noticed by everyone. Those committed to a life in art here tend to know each other, drink together, and for the most part support each other across various inter-artistic differences. Thinking about this might make a local booster want to swell with unconditional pride, but it’s also worth considering that in such a trying professional landscape, artists might be huddling for the same reason penguins do in the face of negative 100-degree Antarctic temperatures.
Still, Milwaukee’s huddling burden is in many ways preferable to the alternative—in nature and culture it’s generally easier to get warm than to get cool. Riverwest’s Gluon Gallery (2964 N. Holton St.) is one of those remote artistic outposts that makes one respect Milwaukee’s gritty, resourceful coolness. In a two-car stand-alone garage, Joe Acri and Sally Nicholson have been curating a rotating program of mostly two-person shows by emerging artists “in rapid succession.” It’s easy to put up drywall in a basement and hang paintings made by art school buddies and call it a gallery until the lease is up, but it’s much more difficult to generate an actual program with vision, breadth and relevance. Which they seem committed to do, with a dozen shows now under their belt.
The current exhibition of works by recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate Qualeasha Wood speaks to their ambitious reach. Wood’s work is big in personality and in scale. They’re a little snug in the 300-square foot garage space. Her six-by-four-foot, collage-based tapestries referencing Christian icon painting as an exploration of personal identity might benefit from some breathing room. But one should give credit for bringing ambitious work to us in the first place rather than hold lack of space against them. In the context of Gluon’s garage, Woods’ self-declared “Afrofuturist” work confronts more deliberately than it might in a larger gallery where the advantages of space would emphasize composition and materiality. By placing her own image in the exulted positions of martyrs, saints, and Virgins, she unleashes a cascade of undeniable and provocative implications about power, history, race and gender.
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Her two defiant and totally committed videos in “Just for Me” double down on issues of blackness and gender in a series emphatic monologues that boldly confess thoughts about everything from her physical appearance to notions of white guilt. And her outpourings ring true; they’re raw, bold and convictive, but they also leave one searching for universally normative handles to place on so many personal and descriptive declarations.
Wood’s show is full of the type of force and energy we could use in Milwaukee, a city whose idle pleasures tend to lean toward the traditional. Any and all diversity of form and content are worthwhile agitators here. I’m a diehard cultural agnostic and feel truly that the more strangeness and disruption we can add to our lives, the better (I used to tell New Yorkers they’d benefit from drinking more and deer hunting). Artists are disruptors, and so are venues at their best. We have those authentically weird and unique agents and platforms in spades in Milwaukee, only they’re harder to locate than the Fiserv Forum or Miller Park. With only a little work, however, disruption is yours.
