Amy, your friendly neighborhood managing editor, likes dogs, coffee and sleeping in late. A native of Detroit and the daughter of a meat magnate, she moved to Milwaukee in 2006 and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything.
Bobby Ciraldo and Andrew Swant of Special Entertainment: two of the gazillions of filmmakers who had money thrown at them yesterday. Just kidding!
Yesterday, UWM's Peck School of the Arts announced grantees of the 2008 Mary L. Nohl Fellowships, and to our collective surprise here at VS HQ, fully five of the seven awards went to ... filmmakers. In a town increasingly notorious for its thriving film community, it's tempting to see this as a kind of coup d'etat.
The press release follows, and I'm sure we'll hear lots from VITAL Source bloggers and the wider Milwaukee arts commentary world about the jury's decisions. Last year there was controversy when it was suggested that not enough women were represented in the show; will the arts community feel this year that the scales have been tipped too unfairly toward artists working in film and new media? And will the gender issue come up this year as well, as once again, only two of the nine selected artists are ladies?
Excerpts from the press release, including artist bios, follow. Each established artist receives a grant of $15,000; emerging artists receive $5,000. The 2007 Nohl Awards show is currently on exhibit at Inova/Kenilworth and will be up until January 18, and I highly recommend a visit - the show is fabulous.
Congratulations to all y'all!
MARY L. NOHL FUND FELLOWSHIPS FOR INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS AWARDED
Funded by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund and administered by the UWM Peck School of the Arts in collaboration with Visual Arts Milwaukee! (VAM!), the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists provide unrestricted funds for artists to create new work or complete work in progress. The program is open to practicing artists residing in the four-county area (Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington counties). The Mary L. Nohl Fund also supports a Suitcase Fund for exporting work by local artists beyond the four-county area.
The panel of jurors included Valerie J. Mercer, the first curator of African American art and head of the General Motors Center for African American Art at The Detroit Institute of Arts; Laurel Reuter, director and chief curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art; and Eva González-Sancho, director of the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain - Région Bourgogne (FRAC Bourgogne) in Dijon, France. The panelists were in Milwaukee October 30-November 1 reviewing work samples and artists’ statements and visiting the studios of the six finalists in the Established Artist category.
Established Artists BRENT BUDSBERG & SHANA McCAW
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg have collaborated for the past seven years constructing site-specific sculptural installations and performances. Their recent work focuses on realistic architectural miniatures utilizing narrative and mood to transform a site. Both are also founding members of the WhiteBoxPainters, a performance art group specializing in public projects. McCaw was born in Dubuque, IA and received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1999. She currently teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Cardinal Stritch University. Budsberg was born in Wausau, WI and earned a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2000. He is a 3-D lab supervisor at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, a carpenter, a musician, and has also built numerous set pieces for the theatre/film industry. McCaw and Budsberg’s recent exhibitions include Escapisms at Galerie Sans Nom in Moncton, NB, Canada, Beloit and Vicinity at the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, WI, for which they won first prize and a solo exhibition to be mounted in May 2009, Leading Edge at NML Gallery, Cardinal Stritch University, in Milwaukee, WI, Broken Down at The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN, and New Work/Emerging Artists at Inova at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Milwaukee, WI.
XAV LEPLAE
Xav Leplae, born in Belgium in 1966, is a Milwaukee based filmmaker, performer and artist. He is best known for his film I’m Bobby (official selection at Sundance Film Festival), and was creative consultant on Chris Smith's The Pool (Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival). Leplae attended art school at Cooper Union, studied cinema and animation in China, and was a member of Paper Tiger TV in New York. He is recognized locally as the owner of Riverwest Film & Video. Leplae is currently in post-production on Rasmalai Dreams, a 3-D talent video shot in India.
IVERSON WHITE
Iverson White is a native of Detroit, Michigan. While attending Cass Technical High School’s Performing Arts program, he joined playwright Ron Milner’s Spirit of Shango Theater Co. White attended Wayne State University where he acted in local productions, was a delegate to the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture, in Lagos Nigeria (1977), published several volumes of poetry, and produced Oracy, an LP album of poetry and music with long time collaborator Kamau Kenyatta. Oracy was re-released as a CD in 2005. After graduating from WSU with a degree in mass communications, White joined the Graduate Repertory Company at the University of New Orleans (1980-1981) before transferring to UCLA’s film school. At UCLA he received the Donald Davis and Jack Nicholson Awards for screenwriting in 1982 and 1983. In 1985 he produced Dark Exodus, a short film that has been screened on PBS, the Southern Circuit Film Tour, and in national and international film festivals, and has received several major awards including the Dore Schary Award from B’nai B’rith, the Paul Robeson Award from the Newark Museum, the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award, and the Prized Pieces Award. White’s latest film, Self-Determination, was completed in 2008. It has screened at the Pan-African Film Festival, the San Diego Black Film Festival and at UWM. Iverson White is an associate professor in the department of Film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he has been on the faculty since 1987.
Emerging Artists TATE BUNKER
Tate Bunker moved from Florida to Wisconsin to enter the film program at the University of Milwaukee-Wisconsin. The city’s support for local filmmakers kept him here after he received his M.F.A. in 2001. Bunker has directed more than 30 films in the last 10 years. He balances directing his own films, freelancing (Bunker’s lush images and mastery behind the lens make him one of Milwaukee’s premier cinematographers), and teaching film production at UWM. His received an Emmy for his production work on Gumbo TV, two additional Emmy nominations, and two Milwaukee International Film Festival “Best Milwaukee Filmmaker” awards. He also won a Paris Film Festival “Best Cinematography” prize for his Stanley Kubrick-inspired short, Starlite. He is currently working on a feature film, Resurrection Ferns, which will be shot in early January.
FRANKIE LATINA
Italian American independent film director, producer and screenwriter Frankie Latina was born July 14, 1978 in Milwaukee Wisconsin. The son of counterculture parents Lisa Jordan and Thomas Latina, he was raised by his two sets of grandparents: Frank and Charlotte Latina and Alex and Shirley Jordan. This unique collage of grandparents, immigrant entrepreneur juxtaposed with a labor movement activist, exposed Latina to the contradictory yet inspirational values of the American dream. Using his Uncle Dave's Super 8mm camera, he began making movies when he was a teenager. He studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is a graduate of MATA cable access. Away from show business, Latina is also a crepe chef, visual aid for the blind, and music writer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He also mentors and teaches film making to Milwaukee Public high school students. Latina is best known for directing the highly regarded art house epic, Modus Operandi. Latina aspires to explore the dark experiences of contemporary life and transform them into a phantasmagorical escape for his audience.
BARBARA MINER
Barbara Miner is a writer and print journalist with a 30 years’ experience, with an emerging focus on photography. Her long-term artistic goal is to combine photography and writing in order to make the final product more powerful than either words or photos might be on their own. For the shorter term, her goal is to hone her photographic skills and use them in the tradition of social documentary: to help people see what is there for all to see, but which too often goes unnoticed and/or unacknowledged.Miner has written for publications including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Magazine, The New York Times, The Progressive and Rethinking Schools. In May, she received an associate degree in photography from the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Among her photography awards, she was named 2008 Photographer of the Year, college division, by the Wisconsin News Photographers Association. Her photos were also selected in 2007 and 2008 for the college competition of the Lakefront Festival of the Arts.
SPECIAL ENTERTAINMENT (ANDREW SWANT & BOBBY CIRALDO)
Andrew Swant and Bobby Ciraldo have been collaborating since 2003. They share an interest in exploring and bending the rules of art, entertainment, and humor, and in new media especially with respect to how they relate to the field of memetics (the study of viral, evolving ideas). Swant (born 1976, raised in Madison, Wisconsin) is a writer and filmmaker who studied film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and art at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He was a Sundance TV Lab finalist and has exhibited work in New York, Los Angeles, and Brazil. Bobby Ciraldo (born 1974, raised in Michigan and Florida) is a filmmaker and web-based artist who attended Grinnell College and later collaborated with Chris Smith, Ray Chi, and Scott Reeder to create ZeroTV.com, a pre-cursor to MySpace and YouTube.
Working as Special Entertainment, their titles include The Robot Mousetrap, shown at White Columns gallery in New York; the award-winning Studying the Lie, with artist David Robbins; work on The Ice Cream Social, financed by the Sundance Channel; and Zombie Killer, a music video for the band Leslie & the Lys with guest vocals by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Their hit music video, What What (In the Butt), was recently featured on the television show South Park in an extensive shot-for-shot re-creation. Current projects include Hamlet A.D.D., a feature length comedy based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with live-action characters in an animated world, and William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet, a feature length documentary about the making of Common People, a ballet choreographed for Milwaukee Ballet by Margo Sappington and set to the William Shatner/Ben Folds album Has Been.
Milwaukee rallied for one (or a few dozen) of its own last night – almost 1000 people showed up for the local premiere of Song Sung Blue, a documentary by Greg Kohs about local legends Lightning & Thunder, a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute duo. Milwaukee Film literally rolled out the red carpet for the crew and much of the cast, notably Claire “Thunder” Sardina, who stepped out of her limo in a fabulous scarlet sequined gown just as we arrived at the theater.
VITAL was there in full force along with hundreds of community luminaries and personalities. The film, though tragic, is joyous and exultant, an eloquent, oddball testimony to the power of love and of music and performance. The entire VITAL team – a hard-scrabble handful of toughies – was choking back tears at the end of the night.
Song Sung Blue – which has won major film festival awards around the country – certainly stands alone as a beautiful piece of documentary cinema, but seeing it in Milwaukee was extra-special. Walking back to the car in the rain we ran into Dancing Queen and Dancing Machine, whose maniac moves were featured briefly in the film:
And of course, at the after party at Shank Hall, where we crowded around the bar talking heatedly about this week’s monumental election, we were graced by the presence of Thunder herself, who gave a rousing performance with another Neil Diamond impersonator (“We call him ‘Frightening,’” Thunder said) as well as Dave Alswager, Mark Shurilla and the Greatest Hits.
And maybe the best part: I hadn’t realized it right away, but I spent most of the night sitting next to the bass vocalist of The Esquires, Milwaukee’s most famous soul band. When he was finally convinced to take the stage with the Esquires’ keyboard player, they joined the Greatest Hits for a stumbling – but perfectly triumphant – rendition of “Get On Up.”
It was a good night for Milwaukee, and it made me proud to live here.
More information on Song Sung Blue available here. Cheers!
Last night I had dreams of every strange breed: that I slept through the election, that I couldn't same-day register, bombs at the polls, that I voted on a Barack Obama/Bob Dylan ticket. I woke up every hour, jittery, and had to force myself to go back to sleep. At six in the morning, by the dusky morning light and an unseasonable breeze, I pulled myself out of bed and into some decent-looking clothes to the reassuring rumblings of NPR.
A few weeks ago, I thought about voting early, but I like, sentimentally, the flush of civic excitement and public activity, the coming-alive of some sort of town square. I walked across the park through piles of fallen yellow leaves and met my friends across from the Cass Street School. I gave them apples and they handed me a big mug of just-brewed coffee, and at 6:45 am, we stood in line, which was already halfway down the block.
In 30 minutes we were inside the building amidst wall murals of inexplicably frowning sad-faced fish and funny school posters ("What about cigarettes?"). We voted in the gym. The halls were still empty, but by the time we reconvened outside the buses were arriving, and crowds of yelling children were descending upon the school, skirting the line of voters that was now snaking around the block.
While I was changing my address at the registration table, the election officiant helping me looked up from our papers and said, "Here comes big T.B.!" I turned in my chair to face the gymnasium doors and sure enough, there he was, with his one-man security detail: THE MAYOR!
It was an enchanting, hassle-free, feel-good morning (with a nice, sunny boost from the warmest election day temperatures in more than 40 years). Four years ago it was raining and I was clutching my heart with anxiety and a trenchant sense of disappointment; today, the mood has been overwhelmingly enthused, excited and perhaps preemptively celebratory.
I'll take it. I'm glad I voted in person. I'm glad I voted. The adrenalin that surged me through this morning is thinning, but I'm still so thrilled!
More than many, many things, I think Pecha Kucha certifies Milwaukee's place in the constellation of great world cities, proving once again, on a regular schedule, that we're home to lots of bright, enthusiastic, cosmopolitan professionals who care about ideas and learning and thinking and sharing with each other. Tonight's third volume of Pecha Kucha Night (at Sugar Maple in Bay View, 441 E. Lincoln Ave.) is especially exciting for us at it includes presentations by two smart and talented and beautiful VITAL-ites: our Art Director, Bridget Brave, and senior music writer Erin Wolf. Also presenting: WMSE 91.7 FM's handsome and affable promotions guru Ryan Schleicher; Tim Cigelske of Milwaukee Magazine and teecycle.org (recently shouted out in "Savage Love" -- hot!); and installation artist kathryn e. martin, whose delicate floating structures are currently on display at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Plus Taryn Roch, Jason Kennedy and Jason Gessner. And live jazz from Chicago! It's that rare international phenomenon that showcases the best of what we grow at home.
Last week I was alarmed to hear on NPR that a college classmate, Taylor Luck, had gone missing in Jordan with his friend Holly on their vacation (!) into the tumultuous northern regions of the country.
I was shocked -- and worried. What had happened? Would he be found alive? Or at all?
Just days earlier I had remembered David Byrd Felker, another Beloit College student who disappeared in Ecuador the summer before I started my freshman year. Obviously, I never knew David, but at a school of just about 1100 students, everyone I met had known him in some way, and his loss was deeply felt -- it was almost in the air, that first year. Thinking about him, I did a search and found a beautifully written piece in the Journal Sentinel including excerpts from his journal about his travels.
I didn't sleep well the night that I found out about Taylor, but in the morning, news broke that he was alive and in custody in Damascus after being arrested trying to cross the Syrian border illegally. It was a relief. I sighed and moved on. The 24-hour news cycle is grating, exhausting, and to keep it from breaking you, it's imperative to learn to depersonalize. But here was a story I couldn't process, absorb and discard. I knew this guy. My Facebook news feed came alive with status messages from Beloit alum about the news, links to the story, photos and video clips of Taylor, a jocular, almost boorish young man, tossing off rude stories about Jordan. It was a rally, a sort of digital vigil, and when the news of his fate hit the wires, we erupted into a chorus of "goddammit, Taylor. What an idiot." And then we moved on. In six weeks, no one will remember the blip on the radar about the American journalists who pushed their luck and came out alive.
But what if something worse had happened? What if Taylor Luck had become another Byrd Felker -- another casualty of the intrepid, intellectually curious and recklessly adventurous students that Beloit graduates? What if Taylor had become another specter on the tally of untimely deaths I've been sadly keeping this year -- a friend from Turkey killed in a car accident, a high school classmate found dead in the woods in Oklahoma, Rock Dee, my uncle?
I've been thinking a lot, in these last rapid-fire weeks, about healing. It's been a hard year, and I've become steadily engrossed in the strange process that happens in every human mind and heart when faced with loss and sadness.
At the Milwaukee Art Museum now through January 4 is Act/React, a show that includes a tremendous piece by Brian Knep, "Healing Pool," that invites peaceful contemplation and a sense of comfort about how things heal. The size of a swimming pool, the glowing floor is like an organism. Walk across it and it will spread open in your wake, then come back together as it "heals" -- but it's never quite the same; every track leaves a scar. The most genius part of its programming, I think, is that every 45 minutes to an hour, it takes a big, pink breath, and it resets. I saw Brian on a recent visit, watching quietly from a bench by the wall. "I'm just a fly today," he said, witnessing vistors' natural reactions. At the media preview he told me that the programming was simple, and designed to work the way things work in nature. It's a patient, meditative experience.
Last week we took a trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum, even though we were in the thick of production, for the media preview of Titanic, an immersive, emotionally affecting exhibition that surprised all of us. The show winds through meticulously constructed recreations of the ship's cabins, cafes, meeting spaces and even the boiler room, complete with evocative music and sound. But the real appeal is the selection of painstakingly excavated and preserved artifacts from the submerged Titanic, including glassware, still-full Champagne bottles, shoes and items of clothing, paper money, jewelry, sink basins, chandeliers and ship hardware. The exhibition goes to great lengths to document the provenance of each artifact which lends an edge to the show that keeps the story deeply human and strikingly sympathetic. To recoup after the show, we got in touch with our inner kids and spent an hour finding the rattlesnake buttons, buying candy at the general store and strolling through the butterfly garden, where we actually saw a butterfly pop out of its chrysalis and shake its new wings.
And on Sunday afternoon I saw The Persians at Renaissance Theatreworks. The oldest surviving play in Western literature, Aeschylus' brutal but lyrical telling of the massive Persian army's defeat at Athens in the Greco-Persian wars is a chilling homily on the hubris of war and empire and the devastation it can wreak. It's a difficult play, but it's important, and ultimately cathartic. What is left for the Persians but to grieve? And to heal?
Maybe it was the epic collapse of the reign of embattled Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who resigned a convicted felon in September, that started all of this. "I don't know why," I said to my friend John when he called to share the news, "but I'm really sad." Kwame had been screwing shit up around the city for years -- early in our friendship, John and I sent a pranky email to Kwame's PR manager asking if we might be invited to one of his storied parties at the Manoogian Mansion -- but he was young, vibrant and forceful, literally towering and gorgeously dressed, embodying at the start of his term all of the broken but tenuous hope of a bitter, struggling city. Even the city's brightest hopes are bound to fall. It seemed, cruelly, like destiny.
"It's okay," John said to me. "It's time for healing."
24:HRS MILWAUKEE: THE MOVIE
This is a late shot, but I just have to share it with you. Our 24-hour tour of the city was a grand spree -- boat rides, home-brewed beer, dancers in the Valley at dusk, rich wine at the Iron Horse and rowdy partying at Wolski's. And then some! Here's a little video we made about what the city felt like at four in the morning after a hard 13 hours of touring, no sleep and a little too much to drink.
Amy, your friendly neighborhood managing editor, likes dogs, coffee and sleeping in late. A native of Detroit and the daughter of a meat magnate, she moved to Milwaukee in 2006 and has spent most of her time here taking walks, riding bikes, and falling in love with everything. 
