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This Week: Milwaukee's Imaginary Insularity

I’m still learning the layout of Milwaukee’s art funding landscape, but my understanding is that its two main features are a pair of mountains. Each is named after a recently dead and notably generous art fanatic, Mary Nohl and Ruth DeYoung Kholer II. I’m simplifying the picture a little (the mountains are of vastly different sizes, and I’m leaving a few ranges out) but it’s still a powerful image, Mount Nohl and Mount Kholer standing against a red sun, loosing avalanches of cash upon us, the artists. Maybe not you or I specifically, but we can hope.

I got in touch with Ruth Arts last week, and hope to write something soon about the specific avalanches they’re loosing these days. While we wait, I’d like to take a second to do some surveying.

ART SCENE BECHDEL-APPROVED

I wrote a bit about the Nohl Fellowship this September, but to be honest, I never had a chance to tell the whole story. The conversation I had with Polly Morris then was only about an hour long, though she has a talent for fitting many words inside a short time. Whole branches of our conversation never made it to Grape Eater, specifically the one about the history of the program, and the ideas that went into its inception.

It’s 2002, a year after Mary Nohl’s death and a year before the first batch of Nohl fellows would be announced. Polly walks into the office of Karen Spahn, Program Manager for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, the organization overseeing the Nohl fund. It’s hard for me to imagine the scene clearly, but Polly’s words were, if you don’t mind some heavy paraphrasing, “What are you going to do with the money?”

To which Karen replied, “Good question! What would you do with it?”

And thus the Nohl Fellowship was born. I guess you could call it a smoke-filled room, but what I picture is something much more ordinary. I can see Karen offering her a Yoplait from the minifridge under her desk, let’s say key lime. Polly peels off the lid, but refrains from licking the foil, out of respect.

The point I’m trying to illustrate is that Polly was given a surprising amount of latitude to decide the details of the program. It’s hard for me to understand what was going through Karen’s head during the meeting, but my best guess is that big organizations like the GMF don’t often have a clear idea of what they want to do with the money they’re sitting on, even if they pretend to. They rely on people like Polly to tell them how to spend it.

Under Polly’s direction, the Nohl’s distinctive features took shape. First, it would award unrestricted funds to artists, as opposed to project grants. It’s a practical distinction but also a philosophical one. The idea being to support artists rather than commission art. Second, the jurors would be pulled from outside the city. The practical benefit here was a more anonymous and less partial jurying process, crucial in a small city art scene. But again, the choice reveals something a little more than practical.

Polly saw the Nohl Fellowship as more than a cash handout, but an opportunity to invite curators, critics, and artists from around the country to enter into an exchange with our city. Basically, they’d be locked in a room with some of our best art, and wouldn’t be let out until they admitted to liking at least some of it.

As Polly would later put it, sitting in a coffee shop across from a sweaty man covered in sandwich crumbs, outside jurors were an antidote to our small city’s insularity problem.

Which, to me, begs a question. What insularity problem?

If you’ve been paying attention to this newsletter, you’ll know I have both praise and criticism for the Nohl. But if there’s anything that illustrates my philosophical differences with Polly’s, it’s this: I don’t think insularity is our city’s biggest challenge.

I get where she’s coming from. The FOMO of small-city life is more palpable to artists than anyone. The common wisdom is that you can’t make a career as an artist here, and for many recent MIAD and UWM grads, there’s no higher aspiration than moving away. Personally, I think Milwaukee is an ideal environment for making art, but I don’t blame the career-ambitious for seeking money elsewhere.

But FOMO isn’t the same thing as insularity. In a way, it’s the opposite. We feel like we’re missing out because of our awareness of what’s out there. Maybe this was less true at the Nohl’s conception. Don’t forget, it was in the waning years of dial-up internet and the heydey of the flip phone. Those of us who happened to be in middle school at the time don’t have a clear idea of what it was like, downloading e-flux articles onto our Nokia.

But things have changed. Then, the global art narrative was something artists worked to seek out. Today, we can hardly escape it.

Even as someone who shows up to openings, most of the art I look at is on Instagram. When I do see art in person, I expect it was made by someone who mostly looks at art on Instagram. The effects are seen in the proliferation of International Art English, the near-extinction of Riverwest’s once ubiquitous pop-up galleries in favor of larger venues that look more like the ones in New York. As for the art itself, I’m not sure. Maybe a topic for the future.

Of course, there are still practical benefits to calling on outsiders to judge the Nohl. I just worry that our biggest funding streams lean too far toward a narrative in which local artists only succeed by gaining the favor of outsiders, in which Milwaukee is better off aspiring to become baby NYC than a grownup version of itself.

To be clear, the insularity narrative is endemic to the city, not specific to Polly, or to the Nohl. I just thought it would be useful to take a closer look at the root systems of an idea that still plays a big role in how our artmoney is spent.

Next week, pending their response to my email, Ruth Arts.

Friday

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