It’s Not Just About the Holidays
Harleys as art, a great sale of local artists and lots of verbiage from Allis Art Museum.
Galleries typically slow down during the holiday season, making room for seasonal performances and gift markets to encourage us to buy from local creatives and pad next year’s budget, ensuring the cultural wheels keeps on spinning and galleries stay open. That said, I am an absolute grinch about this season, though I feel strongly about circulating support back into our local art scene in the form of buying more handmade gifts and tickets to local performances, paying artists what they’re worth while enjoying something for yourself.
But when it comes to a preview column like this, I prefer not to include holiday-specific visual art events in any of my articles. It tends toward the pandering, the commercial, while what is interesting or unique is happening in too few spaces we still know too little about. It is a struggle in this city to advocate consistently for our creative undercurrent when the undercurrent doesn’t seem to want to be known, or struggles so hard to exist they have no time to publicize. Okay, so maybe I’m fired up. There are shows worth seeing this month that are presenting new perspectives, from curators and artists and art directors who are deeply invested in Milwaukee creativity. While some of these recommendations are unavoidably holiday related, I’ve included them anyway because they contain elements you might find very interesting.
Harley-Davidson Museum
Cate Dingley: Ezy Ryders: History & Tradition, Heart & Soul
Semi-permanent exhibition
Monday – Friday 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays in January and February
400 W. Canal St.
This was my first visit to the Harley-Davidson Museum, located on an expansive campus encircled by the Menomonee River and Hank Aaron State Trail. I’m not a motorcycle enthusiast, but I am a Milwaukee native and recognize the company’s role in shaping our regional identity. I remember waiting for the bus on North Avenue in 2003 when a thunderous clamor gave way to thousands of bikers heading east en masse to the Harley-Davidson 100th year celebration, drawing honks and cheers from traffic along the way. Rider after rider streamed by until the individuals blurred into a great body of chrome and leather, gathered in a revving, sputtering murmuration that would soon descend on the Summerfest grounds.
The museum opened five years later and contains a comprehensive timeline of the company history, stocked with artifacts from early designs, noteworthy moments in branding, and rotating exhibits that can change one’s perspective about what it means to ride. Those unfamiliar with motorcycle culture and ethical codes might be surprised to learn there is a benevolent tradition of providing goods and materials to underserved communities, a reaction against discriminatory redlining and resource bottlenecks that primarily affect people of color, immigrants, women, and children.
The newly installed Ezy Ryders: History & Tradition, Heart & Soul features black-and-white photographs by Cate Dingley, who was welcomed into the New York City Black biker community to document their lifestyle, traditions, and code of conduct. Portraits of the bikers line a long hallway, where Dingley’s images are accompanied by personal stories. There’s King Midas, who uses riding to cope with PTSD following his return from Iraq. Lady Diamond, who was afraid of bikers until she discovered members of her own family posted up at the motorcycle club. And Brown Sugar, late founder of the South Side Shifters whose advocacy for the NYC Black biker community has appeared in books and films on the subject for a decade. The show forces the audience to slow down and get to know individual reasons for riding outside the chopper throng, and to consider how finding community in motorcycle culture is not just for tough guys. Stay a while at the museum—there’s a lot to see.
Black Arts MKE Presents: Black Nativity
Directed by Ashley S. Jordan. Play by Langston Hughes
Six 90-minute showtimes from December 5th to December 8th. Check website for specifics
Wilson Theater at Vogel Hall, Marcus Center
Langton Hughes wrote this gospel and performance based on a classic Christmas tale for a musical ensemble that has been performed around the country since 1961. The familiar story intersects spirituality, race, and culture, often switching up sets and costumes year after year to reflect current times and environments. Hughes was perhaps best known for his poetry, but he was an intellectual, an activist, a Midwesterner, a jazz enthusiast, and a keen observer of his environments. He poured his experiences into his work, and dabbled in forms that could highlight the parallel nature of joy and suffering. Now in its 9th year in Milwaukee, Black Nativity imagines the first Christmas story from a Black perspective—a lens missing from the more popular holiday counterparts on stage. Of Langston Hughes’s vision, artistic director Wanyah Frazier says “We need spaces just for us, birthed by the essence of who we are so we can tell our stories the way we want them to be told without oversight from something outside of ourselves—that’s what Black Nativity has become.” The performers in Milwaukee’s production of Black Nativity include D’Shaunta Stewart as Mary, Dacosta Martin as Joseph, and Ernesto Bell Jr. as Jesus. Expect jazzy gospel numbers, sprightly choreography, and colorful costumes to usher you into this merriest of seasons.
Charles Allis Art Museum
Christina A. West and Meg Lionel Murphy: Talk Back Chapter Two: Collection
Through February 16th, 2025
1801 N. Prospect Ave.
This exhibition is the second of a series that “illustrates one of the approaches our current staff is taking to decolonize the Museum’s history and better reflect the communities we serve,” the museum’s website states. The focus of this show is on women and female empowerment, and Christina A. West and Meg Lionel Murphy were fine choices to carry this theme forward. However, this isn’t really the definition of decolonizing. A hot-button word like colonization has spread so rapidly among artistic and academic circles to insist that, beyond the land we occupy, gender has been colonized, language has been colonized, even our minds and private thoughts have been colonized. I’m not dismissing these claims outright, but arguing that when physically violent term like colonization is broadly applied to visual art it has a diluting effect that diminishes current active colonial wickedness and can slot art works or an entire exhibition that maybe have nothing to do with colonialism into an agenda that absolves institutions of their histories.
Let’s be clear: much of the Charles Allis collection was possible to acquire because Allis, son of a milling and mining businessman, and his wife “shared a love of art, the natural world and traveling. Together, they traveled across the United States and Europe collecting art,” the museum’s website explains. It says the loud part quiet with this statement, since the 19th century saw several global scrambles to expand Western empires, and a lot of artifacts from those newly colonized cultures passed through a lot of hands on their way to the museums and private collections we see today. Basically, it is not possible to actually decolonize the Charles Allis Art Museum.
And is that what the show even is? In her artist statement, West writes: “My work is rooted in figuration as a way to try to understand and connect with others, and is informed by contemporary art criticism and social theory about the gaze as a way to call out dynamics and politics that complicate the act of looking. Broadly speaking, addressing the gaze allows me to reflect on my relationships to others and consider what those dynamics can reveal about how we understand ourselves and others.” Call out. Politics. Understand ourselves and others. These are the familiar flags driven into post-contemporary Trump-era art-making—the signals that tell the politically savvy and culturally omnivorous onto which side of history this particular art will fall. Smart if you’re a museum trying to redefine your legacy. But by always trying to remain one step ahead of would-be critics with the right mix of tame materialism and virtuous word salad, artists and galleries rob the audience of actually interesting concepts and forms. By slapping a “certified decolonized!” sticker over the thesis, Charles Allis Art Museum wedges West and Murphy into a show that falls into my personal least-favorite thematic trifecta: quiet trauma, magical femininity, and superficial engagement.
Here’s why I think this show is worth seeing: West and Murphy have selected pieces that coherently reference the Charles Allis collection. There are allusions to the architecture and individual artifacts in the new installations. Despite what you just read, I think the museum is unique in Milwaukee and perhaps its untapped potential could actually be tapped one of these days. Maybe the “communities they serve” will even have a say in how the museum serves their sensibilities. I don’t have a suggestion—only more back talk.
Scout Gallery
Located in the Hide House in Bay View
2625 S. Greeley St., #110
Through December 31st
Monday and Saturday: 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.
Tuesday and Thursday: 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.
I would not normally include a holiday market in the arts roundup, but I believe in the Scout Gallery mission to deal local art at prices that remain fair to the artist, buyer, and gallery. You can find more than a dozen artists and their works on the gallery website, meaning you can window shop before stopping by. Avoid delivery delays by visiting the gallery and picking out your gifts in person. Peruse colorful acrylic paintings by Dan Fleming, Ann Baer’s display-ready shelf sculptures, Eric Hancock’s framed watercolor fish paintings, and much more. Look—anyone can order mass produced drop-shipped disposable goods from America’s favorite online retailer, which overtaxes vastly underpaid and enormously under-appreciated warehouse workers and drivers. Where’s the originality in that? Or you could take a chance on something that improves lives in our city, keeps creative businesses and neighborhoods afloat and diverse, and buy a piece of art from Scout Gallery for someone on your holiday shopping list. Someone you like or love can own original Milwaukee-made art, and you don’t need to disclose how steeply the piece was discounted for this very reason. Ever! Tis the season for many things, including ulterior motives.
That’s all for 2024. I’m taking December off from this column as the art scene slows down, so expect the next edition in February. As always, you can take my writing with a pinch of salt and, if you feel so inclined, send me a strongly worded email about how and why you disagree. Discourse makes the scene. Let’s shake things up in 2025.
Annie Raab has been writing about art since 2014 for print and online publications. You can find more of her critical and creative writing at www.annieraab.com. She lives in Milwaukee.
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