Before she became a well-known name wielding outsized influence in the Milwaukee art scene, Polly Morris was a dancer. She began studying modern dance as a 7-year-old in New York City, taking classes with world-renowned instructors.
After earning a Ph.D. in 18th-century social history, Morris moved to Milwaukee in the late 1980s and taught at UW-Milwaukee. In 1992, she co-founded the local dance school and performance company Danceworks.
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“I was very interested in building connections between what was happening in Milwaukee and what was happening around the country with dance,” she says.
Morris became immersed in the local arts ecosystem. She also brought choreographers from outside of Wisconsin for residencies and worked to send Milwaukeeans to other cities. An interest in multi-disciplinary art programming eventually led Morris to UWM’s Peck School of the Arts, where she led marketing and outreach.
In 2002, she became coordinator of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists Program – a role she continues in today. Most artists, Morris explains, don’t have the opportunity to earn a living wage in Milwaukee – and many leave the region as a result.
The annual prizes – a five-figure salary awarded to as many as five winning artists – can be life-changing, but even those who don’t win a fellowship can benefit. The program exposes all applicants’ work to judges from around the country, potentially creating new career opportunities.
Morris also heads Milwaukee’s arts board public art subcommittee, which pays artists a salary to complete projects in partnership with the city. “To sustain an arts ecosystem, you need to support the artists that make up that ecosystem, not just organizations that deal with artists,” Morris says. “If you have no artists, you won’t have any arts organizations either.”
On top of all of that, Morris also has a full-time day job. She’s been executive director of the Lynden Sculpture Garden in River Hills, overseeing 40-plus acres of land and about 50 monumental sculptures, since 2010. In this work, too, she has a bent toward bettering the community, collaborating with local educators and marginalized communities to develop the space.
“If we want to have a well-rounded, vibrant kind of city and civic life, artists are an important part of that,” she says. “We can’t keep treating them as icing on the cake.”
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