Sculpture Milwaukee 2017

For decades Chakaia Booker has recycled rubber tires, manhandling them into fierce totems that suggest African objects while also referring to issues of contemporary African American identity and culture, gender and environmentalism.

Booker chose tires because of their presence in the landscape, not only when in use, but when abandoned, congregating in mounds like tumbleweeds driven together by the wind. Using the raw but recognizable materials, Booker is able to make her works look like the skin of animals, or evoke the ancient objects of war or healing.

Cemin was part of the roiling, dynamic world of New York’s East Village in the 1980s, where a new generation of Conceptual artists focused on ideas, not objects. Cemin always strayed, however, since he is grounded in making beautiful objects that live beyond ideas.

Cemin’s Vortex is a shiny tornado of energy turned upside down. Its mirrored surfaces reflect the street life around it. Cemin began working with craftspeople in Beijing in 1999 for their ability to patiently pound out the seams of works in stainless steel, like 'Vortex'.

Milwaukee-based artist Paul Druecke’s Shoreline Repast borrows the visual form of a public, commemorative plaque to celebrate Lake Michigan, the most important site of Milwaukee’s public rituals.

The project commemorates the long legacy, across generations and cultures, of sharing a meal near water's calming presence.

The plaque appears to sink into the ground. The shift in orientation, which configures the plaque's perpendicular, upright relation to the earth, magnifies the symbiotic, conditional nature of landmarks and the culture that erects them.

Grabner elevates hand-made, hand-me-down fabrics to fine art. In her process of translating soft fibers into durable material, she creates a modern-day version of the marble cloaks of classic Greek gods and goddesses. Grabner reminds us to honor the art works that populate our everyday lives.

His works balance delicate lines against sturdy trunks of steel, adding color as a way to stand out against the urban environments of the American landscape.

This work harkens back to Oppenheim’s earliest works, made when he first moved to New York in 1966, where he simply marked off spaces in the city with engineer’s stakes, creating zones of art, or curiosity, or danger.

Oppenheim’s Safety Cones remind us that humans continually change their environment, often losing what is poetic and historical about our place on this land.

His work Immigrant Family, commissioned for a new development in Toronto, honors a fundamental truth about the growth in population in North America.

This history is vibrantly alive in Milwaukee, with each summer’s festival schedule highlighting the cultural heritage of one of the groups who found refuge in our region, escaping from economic or political conflicts at home, creating community on the shore of Lake Michigan.

The rose has ancient and contradictory associations in Western culture, representing purity as well as passion and fertility, life as well as death.

Ryman refers to the romantic history of the rose while slyly commenting on how it is used to sell the products of romance. Ryman’s Rose is part of a dispersed urban garden that includes everything else in our landscape, from cigarette butts and floating plastic bags to architecture, cars and pedestrians.

Saar’s figure is every woman, bringing forth new life, as well as shaman, protecting the fragile spark of life that ensures the continuity of civilizations. Summer is based on Saar’s interest in African traditions, like Nkisi, (or “power figure”) where spirits inhabit objects.

Angled Tangle uses materials typically found in the street—the bollards and curbs that control how we navigate our channels of travel. She tops her playful maze with a tangle of bright lights, giving us a new outdoor room in which we can romp.

Like Pop artist Andy Warhol before him, Tasset looks for images or ideas that are simple and easily understood, allowing the visitor to bring their own set of meanings to each work.

Tasset’s Arrow Sculpture points to American obsession with rankings and symbols.

Reina Mariana (Queen Mariana) is part of Valdés’s series, based on Spanish artist Diego Velázquez’s Queen Mariana (1652-1653), a portrait of the second wife of Felipe IV.

Mariana, from the Austrian Hapsburg family, was well known to be an unhappy participant in her adopted country’s life. The voluminous and starched costume of the regal Spanish aristocracy holds her upright and rigid. Valdés pays homage to one of his country’s most iconic painters and subjects, while commenting upon the life of those who serve subservient roles in history.

The Legend of the White Snake is an ancient Chinese folk tale dating to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 C.E.).

The White Snake yearned to join human society so she took the form of a woman and married a scholar. Because snakes are considered evil in Chinese culture, a monk imprisoned Madam Snake—it is her cage that Yi evokes in his tangled construction.