Standing on a downtown street corner among the rising office towers in a modern urban metropolis can seem a socially alienating setting. The hive in its most dutiful and diligent state: delivery trucks idling; smokers texting vigorously behind windbreaks; heeled professional shoes clomping determinedly; people savoring lunches alone with the enthusiasm of prisoners doing exercising in the yard. But with some imagination, the same scene can be exhilaratingly enriched—so much energy and so many individuals impossibly forcing public necessity and private desire into a single space, like a churning social lava lamp.
These might not be the most obvious conditions in which to deliver or discover art, but that may also make them the best. This is the strategy that Sculpture Milwaukee has banked on. In other words, it has chosen to show art next to banks rather than in the places we most expect to find it. Dozens of delightfully out-of-place sculptures dot the urban terrain along Wisconsin Avenue, from Sixth Street all the way east to O’Donnell Park Plaza. There, Mark di Suvero’s The Calling seems to glower at Robert Indiana’s iconic Love sculpture from across the street. It is a fitting way to mark the terminus of Sculpture Milwaukee; a little love in the shadow of Milwaukee’s most iron-handed public sculpture.
The curated program features emerging artists, international superstars and a couple local practitioners. The works are scattered on sidewalks, breezeways and plazas down the avenue. The most pressing decision, once one is committed to the walk, is whether it’s more rewarding to meander down the street without guidance or to use Sculpture Milwaukee’s GPS-equipped app as your personal Sherpa. One could argue that taking purposeful detours through the city, as an artful way to keep it fresh and spontaneous, would make the most sense. Though the most sensible way of all would be to live out an alternate life as an actuary for Northwestern Mutual, never having engaged with public art, walk out for a lunchtime chicken wrap and stumble serendipitously across Kiki Smith’s Seer (Alice II). But that is a blissful ignorance no one reading this is fortunate enough to have. As Barnett Newman famously said, “Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds.”
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Even for those who have been debriefed about what’s on the street, the artwork can offer surprises. I couldn’t place John Henry’s work in my mind as I pushed off from Mel Kendrick’s comment on organic and geometric form, Marker #2. I don’t remember exactly what I was looking for, but it wasn’t the lively counterpoint to the aforementioned di Suvero sculpture. Which is what I got. Slightly smaller than The Calling at 25 feet high, its smaller scale allows it to engage the viewer at body level, which helps to animate and activate the piece.
A few blocks down, Yoan Capote’s 2013 piece, Nostalgia, delivers an unexpected moment that plays well in its busy street corner setting. A cast replica of the artist’s own suitcase with an open front begs viewers to peer inside, but the opportunity is met with an actual wall of bricks. It is referring, perhaps, to travel restrictions from the artist’s native Cuba, or maybe it’s just a little bit of language-based surreal humor. Whatever the imagery means is less important here than how the work encourages interaction with it on the street. Many of the sculptures on the tour are more inert than Nostalgia. This isn’t to say that those works aren’t compelling, just that, in some cases, the opportunity to explore the surroundings and passersby even more thoroughly is there.
There are many more works worth mentioning, but to describe them in this case is to spoil potential surprises. The surprise party here is as important as the gifts themselves. Those surprises last for only two more weeks (through Sunday, Oct. 21), when this iteration of Sculpture Milwaukee concludes its second-year run, and the creative team of Russell Bowman and Marilu Knode begin to think about 2019. We can only imagine what they will bring in. It’s yet another chance to savor the rarest of opportunities: To view our sculptural pantheon outside of its prescribed temples and watch them moonlight on the city streets, rub shoulders, pound pavement and nine-to-five with the rest of us.
