What is Washington Park Collaborative?
Washington Park Collaborative is a consortium of three upper level art, architecture, dance and design studios that explore how multidisciplinary design practice can engage professionals, academics and local cultures and communities. Our collaborators and participants include the Wisconsin Humanities Council (www.wisconsinhumanities.org), Quorum Architects, Washington Park Partners, United Methodist Children’s Services, Office of Undergraduate Research, UWM, Milwaukee Public Library (Washington Park Branch), Urban Ecology Center, Our Next Generation, and Express Yourself Milwaukee, Amaranth Café, Bus Stop Coffee Shop, Community First Inc., Artists Working in Educationx`, Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity, BLC field school, neighborhood residents, business owners, and UWM, UW Madison and MIAD faculty and students. Sister studios include ARCH 645/845, URBPLAN 858: Citizen Architect Studio (Arijit Sen, Instructor), DANCE 490: Repertory and Ensemble (Simone Ferro, instructor) and FA255/355/455 Public Art: Social Practice (MIAD; Jill Sebastian, instructor). This trans-disciplinary, multi-campus collaboration is associated with the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures (www.blcprogram.org) field school. Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School The Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures collaborative project at UW Milwaukee and Madison introduces an interdisciplinary research track concentrating on the examination of the physical, cultural, and social aspects of our built environment. The program serves students enrolled in the UW Milwaukee and Madison campuses respectively. It involves faculty members on both campuses with diverse research and teaching interests, including urban and architectural history, cultural landscapes, urban and rural vernacular architecture, public history, and environmental. Fieldwork is an important aspect of this program and a cross-campus fieldwork school is a special offering of this project. This summer the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school provided students with an immersive experience in the field recording of the built environment and cultural landscapes and an opportunity to learn how to write history literally “from the ground up.” Students received training in site documentation (including photography, measured drawings, digital documentation, audio-visual production), historic interpretation of buildings and landscapes (focusing on how to “read” buildings within its material, political, social, cultural and economic contexts), and primary source research (including oral history, archival research, architectural analysis). What is Picturing Milwaukee? We are storytellers, collecting and relaying tales of places and neighborhoods in Milwaukee. We call this idea “Picturing Milwaukee” and our objective is to conjure up –or picture– various neighborhoods of Milwaukee like designs in a wonderfully complex quilt. Individually unique and beautiful, each street is part of a larger whole and we are interested in examining how the local and the urban relate to each other – how a street fits into a larger urban narrative. Understanding this relationship between the whole and its parts is important because it shows us how individual places produce our larger world. We are the sum total of smaller units. Such an understanding promotes civic belonging and allows us to reimagine ourselves as stewards of our worlds. Why do we tell stories? Stories are powerful not only because they connect and transfix, not only because they are accessible to all, but also because they spread. Stories produce more stories; transferred from one person to another, stories disperse across time and space. Stories produce revolutions – not the kinds that we saw in 1789 and 1917 in France and Russia or the campaign for free speech that set campuses on fire in 1964, not even the kinds we saw recently in 2011 at Tahrir Square or the Wisconsin State Capitol – although those too are born of stories of resistance and intrigue. We collect stories about morals and ethics, ones that recount honor and perseverance, or those that our neighbors and community members communicate to us – all with a moral at the end of it. We are interested in stories that become part of our speech and imaginations; stories that teach us how to behave and react to life and how to walk and to talk – those stories that in turn gently transform who we are and what we do. |
Washington Park Collaborative
Jill Sebastian Simone Ferro Kasey King Claire Olson Milan Outlaw Ashley Pollex Rafael Ferreira Hebah Abu Baker Michael Babbitts Hillary Byrne Hyrom Stokes Richard VanDerWal Tyler Mills Luke Arndt Robert Matthiesen Kelly Stamper Riley Niemak Anthony Mau Carson Braun Margaret Halquist Amanda Stein Cassie Rogala Andi Bissen Sophia Nord Zach Schorsch Melissa Vesel Gabby Kay DeKok Alexa Noll Kristina Krueger Nicole Spense Angel Alexander Sarah Draper Miranda Heavener Caroline Seigworth Tori Diny Flauntajia Harris EJ Holmes Amelia Morris Meredith W. Watts Jeff Pearcy Kellie Bronikowski DJ QuisB Mischa Premeau Mina Na Arijit Sen Esmé Barniskis Tommy CheeMou Yang |