Kelsey Kaufmann
Owner, Cactus Club
Accelerants for Creative Nourishment
Intergenerational spaces are accelerants for creative nourishment. In 2019, parents of campers participating in Girls Rock teamed up with local music venue Cactus Club to change how the city defined “A Center for Visual and Performing Arts.” We eliminated a stage size constraint, enabling our space and others to host all ages and 18+ shows – instead of restricting audiences to 21+. Youth culture is a vital ingredient for fomenting art and music scenes. Their inclusion is essential, but that’s not the preoccupation of this piece.
How do we give permission and carve lanes for inter- and transgenerational artistic venues? What are the variables that polarize or promote interest, or access? Who are we talking about and in service to who?
I’m tempted to write of the squandered resources of Summerfest and Visit Milwaukee against a revelatory socialist history of Milwaukee, scarred by redlining and outsourcing. Instead I’ll focus on the transformative lighthouses who are deserving of flowers. The nourishing ones from the cracks and crevices, the ones that help us make sense of everything.
Carl Bogner, a former film professor and poet, is an exceptional example of an educator whose love of art licensed countless students to make, question and celebrate work in, and more excitingly, outside of institutions. For over 30 years he ran the LGBT Film and Video Festival and inspired students to start poetry programs, microcinemas and screening series. I never took a class from Carl, but dearly know this contagious sparkle he imparted to all he’s impacted. The Cactus+ Moving Image series and Cactus Club Independent Film Festival are his byproducts.
Some Fools. A gallery and basement venue run by housemates in Riverwest. It was my first house show since Covid-19. A third of the basement had been built out, painted, and drywalled, adorned with clamp lights for a sensational group exhibition accompanied by performances and a DJ in the main landing. They’ve since hosted teach-ins, artist talks, openings, performances and launched a collaboration with GAG ORDER, a new curatorial project by Billy Dimmit and Gnat Bowden that “strengthens queer, trans, black, and disabled communities left in the wake of generational gaps and erasure post-AIDS epidemic. We center ourselves and our community. We are choosing to create our own spaces and cultures of care through mutual aid.” I look forward to them invoking and illuminating the radical queer spaces of generations past.
DJ Bizzon taught free DJing classes called Scratch Sessions at The Jazz Gallery in 2017-2018. Affirming and talented, he empowered many aspiring DJs to not only learn foundationals, but get bookings, directing work their way if/as they desired. DJ DRiPSweat, who came out of that program, is now a hometown staple. That transmission of knowledge, time invested, and trust building is so powerful. This type of skill share is a model to reference.
Kinship Community Food Center sees feeding hunger as “a catalyst for the well-being of our community.” With food distribution roots dating to the late 1970s, this special organization offers a 27,000-square-foot farm, free store, weekly cooking classes and hot meals to all who show up. It’s a hub for generative growth and connectedness. How does this relate to the arts? Food access is critical for artists and the reality is many working artists do not have stable incomes. More importantly, the space exemplifies how to create sustainable inroads for a “deeper community of mutuality.” They served over 15,000 people in 2023 and distributed 86,000 pounds of produce. They function outside of the constraints of ‘service’ and artfully champion the necessity of everyone having a seat at the table.
National DIY is an impromptu skatepark under the highway on 7th and National Avenue in Walker’s Point. Beginning in 2020, the build was unsanctioned and incremental, mostly done by older skaters and artists with the assistance of young enthusiasts. What was an underutilized park and ride became a free cultural destination. In spring 2024, the city recognized the park and granted $100,000 for lights and safety improvements.
Grilled Cheese Grant began in 2016 as a fundraising experiment to provide financial support for senior exhibition projects for MIAD and UWM students. Buy a grilled cheese for $5, now $10, walk through a gallery of proposed projects and vote on a ballot for the one you believe in. Most of the sandwich materials are donated by local purveyors. Running for nearly a decade, the annual event has broadened its lens beyond student projects to include proposals from emerging visual artists based in southern Wisconsin. The last few years they’ve provided full funding to all of the finalists at the event. It’s a unique, artist-run initiative that successfully harnesses participation from intergenerational, multimedia communities and by extension their friends and families from across the city.
Service to a known need is the throughline of this list. There are many needs in this under-resourced rust belt city and many orgs clamoring to be mediaries of funding. There is a true need to restructure hotel tax disbursements to cultivate meaningful arts funding. We need a self-generating account to fund projects of consequence – for artists directly, artist collectives, nonprofit art orgs and for-profit art venues. There is a known brain drain of the creative class in Wisconsin. The time to materially support the ideas highlighted above is now. And it doesn’t require inventiveness, just adoption.
In anticipation of the opening of our new space in September 2024, we invited active participants and longtime contributors to the artistic communities in Wisconsin to write about the cultural context of this region. While we recognized the impossibility of capturing this state in its entirety through this one endeavour, the goal was to gather a range of perspectives to provide a fuller and more complex understanding of the artistic production of this region. We welcomed thoughtful, critical pieces that allow readers to see the artistic milieu, or this place, in a new light, reflections on Wisconsin's histories that have defined its present, or future-facing pieces that guide us towards new directions.