ARTIST STATEMENT

This body of work was developed as a result of the growing discourse regarding Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood. During the first half of the 20th Century, Bronzeville grew to become the business, economic, and cultural center to most of Milwaukee’s African-American residents. Re-imagining this neighborhood through a series of paintings serves as a basis for visually articulating the adverse effects of eminent domain policies that destroyed this neighborhood during the early to late 1960’s, the result of a political apparatus that allowed the I-43/I-94 freeway to plow through the heart of the neighborhood and wipe out the richest source of black cultural identity Milwaukee has ever known.

My investigations has lead me to consider my role as an artist and how visual art could help shape the current debate concerning the possibility of revitalizing and promoting the Bronzeville neighborhood district as a cultural tourism destination. This is to say that perhaps art can become a useful tool to establish points of contact between artists and the community.

The inclusion of the poet as a principle subject of this work enabled me to combine two major influences: an African-American social realism painting tradition that emerged during the mid to late 1930’s and the oral and literary traditions of spoken word-poetry. The presence of the freeway structures in my work serve as visual metaphors that turn these architectural artifacts into visual code, an indirect reference to the scale of global urbanization circuits and the massive disruption it causes to resident populations - an urbanization that produced a political climate that granted the city and state the power to literally change the cultural and economic fabric of an entire city to the detriment of marginalized citizens.

The principle aim of using Milwaukee’s Bronzeville as a cultural case study is to introduce a set of visual images that promote a discourse about cultural awareness. This becomes my own personal way of establishing a working method that uses the power of the arts to help influence public opinion. As artists we can open up new avenues of art practice and critical thinking that serve as cultural conservation strategies that are responsive to the needs of neighborhoods like Bronzeville.

“To give back meaning to the people is a way of going public, that by piecing together fragments of memory shared, might make whole again something lost.”

– Charles Merewether, The Spirit of the Gift –