Photo courtesy of Portrait Society Gallery
Like other traumas, those of this pandemic are coming out in a surreal cascade of unexpected stages. I began with disbelief, followed by a snow-day-like sense of calm, then a highly productive mania…sadness, frustration, fear, disenchantment, boredom, and on-and-on like a scarf pulled maniacally from the motley lapel of a sinister clown. After seven weeks in the psychic funhouse, I sense the hysterical performer might be winding up his act. Some are facing outward again, aiming gazes to budding trees and crowning tulips, away from opiating reality TV, and possibly even toward the art world that was going on outside our homes just when we were being forced inside them.
Right on cue, the venues themselves are unveiling inventive ways to meet our waking eyes and minds with projects that make the most of limitations. This virtual effort was led initially by the educational community, who were mobilized promptly as children stayed home. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s Kohl’s Art Generation Studio moved online with a series of “Studio at-Home” projects, including one called “Shopping at Home” that cleverly urged children to shop their own pantries to make art in the vein of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. I did one myself with a can of clams that had been in my pantry for too long. My own children have gravitated to the “Mini Masters” program offered by the Museum of Wisconsin Art, whose projects are supplemented with videos of Youth Education Coordinator Jordan Gibbon leading storytelling sessions punctuated by related art projects. She’s well-paced, calming, and organized, offering an on-line warmth that substitutes admirably for the personal relationships children require and expect.
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3-D Experiences
For adults, many of the museums in the area have put their exhibitions and collections on-line as virtual 3-D experiences. MAM has a show featuring 19th century academic paintings, and another on the utopian Byrdcliffe community and the Arts and the Crafts artifacts it yielded. The Haggerty Museum of Art also has its current exhibitions available virtually, including “Toward the Texture of Knowing,” which is worth checking out remotely. The Grohmann Museum has taken a slightly less VR approach, with a multi-media exhibition highlighting masterworks from their collection. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and The Warehouse Milwaukee have also opted for the virtual reality treatment, and the experiences they’ve created are remarkably user friendly and convincing as virtual walkthroughs. Enough to make one wonder to what degree and nature these emergency technologies will continue after the social public world returns.
The most vulnerable and unpredictable sector of our local art world might be the commercial galleries. They don’t have the luxury of endowments, development teams, or NEA grants to float them in tough times. In most cases they need our direct support to survive. I’m happy to report that they too are developing unique programming to accommodate and thrive in innovative ways. Tory Folliard Gallery will soon launch an exhibition/project, called “Pollinators” with the help of gallery artist Jason Rohlf, who will use his social media savvy to engineer something unlike what you’d be able to see inside the gallery. Deb Brehmer at Portrait Society for her part has created a curated weekly on-line drawing series called “PSG on Paper,” with a new featured artist every week—this week’s is the incarcerated artist M. Winston—complete with thoughtful feedback by other local artists. The Portrait Society Gallery website features chewy commentary on Winston by Emily Belknap, Rafael Francisco Salas, and David Niec.
Perhaps most laudable of all the local efforts to pay it all forward and keep it afloat is a project by Josh Hintz of VAR Gallery to use the 3-D technology—the same used by the museums mentioned earlier—to create virtual experiences as a free service to local galleries. As of now Hintz has brought shows at Alice Wilds, Hawthorn Contemporary, Var West, Walker’s Point Center for the Arts and Real Tinsel to virtual life. He has plans to do the same with Portrait Society soon, as well as a number of others.
Help for Artists
Other agents of good will have provided valuable information and services to the art community. Executive Director of Lynden Sculpture Garden, Polly Morris, who was the subject of a feature in these pages recently, has not only shored up virtual programming at Lynden, but has also been a dispatcher of knowledge and resources to the local artist community in the days since this crisis descended. Art has always been a particularly monkish pursuit full of positive externalities that strengthen the social sphere without always helping the artists themselves. And they are suffering considerably at the moment.
Several institutions have stepped up to give aid. Imagine MKE moved early to create The Artist Relief Fund, which to date has raised nearly 150,000 dollars to distribute to qualifying artists. In other displays of support, gener8tor recently held an emergency one-week virtual program for artists affected by the COVID-19 outbreak as an extension of its Fellowship art program offered through a partnership with the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact and other donors in the community. Hopefully these efforts will lead the way to greater and greater gestures, inspiring us all to continue engaging, virtually for now, and supporting the local art community any way we can as it copes and rebuilds along with the rest of us.
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