There’s a lot to notice about Cactus Club’s new, accessible ramp: the intricate mosaic of brick and stone along the side, the light cast through the multicolor diamonds, the colorful resin beads embedded in the railings. Grab one of those beads, and you can give it a spin on your way into the Bay View venue for a show.
The striking new features outside the club come after nearly six years of effort. When Kelsey Kaufmann took over ownership of the club in 2020, her team set out to improve accessibility at the roughly 140-year-old building. The club raised tens of thousands of dollars to renovate, launch new programs, and construct the 29-foot outdoor ramp.
Once the concrete portion of the ramp was completed in July 2025, Kate Klingbeil, Cactus Club’s artist-in-residence, set out to turn it into something beautiful. That began with the mosaic that now runs along the ramp’s side. It’s made up of pieces of brick and rocks – much of which she collected from Lake Michigan beaches. The pieces, she says, largely came from buildings that have been demolished, their detritus eventually washing up from the lake.
“For me, the project represents the importance of art and accessibility,” Klingbeil says. “Art is for everyone. Anyone can enjoy this. They don’t have to enter a white-walled gallery.”
The artwork’s theme, with its pieces salvaged from beaches, is Lake Michigan and the subterranean.
“Cactus Club is a space that highlights and centers a lot of underground cultures and subcultures,” Kaufmann explains. “The mosaic evokes these underground environments where worlds exist out of sight of the normative day-to-day. There’s something really beautiful about that.”
The next step after the mosaic’s completion was the installation of the railings. Klingbeil envisioned stained-glass-esque diamond pieces along them, each one with different colors and designs – akin to sailing flags out on the lake. Each now casts multicolored light onto the sidewalk.
The railings were fabricated and installed by Mikail Dance, a Milwaukee artist and fabricator. And along the railings you’ll find resin beads fabricated by Vincent Zager. Each one is spinnable, allowing passersby to interact with the art.
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“It was really challenging. I had to completely learn a new method and material. But that’s a theme in my work, learning along the way,” Klingbeil says. “The sensory element was really important to me. I was thinking about a bridge between neurodivergence and physical mobility. … The interactivity was important to me because so often people are not allowed to touch artwork. And this is the opposite. I want people to feel included.”
Cactus Club has more accessibility projects and programs planned. The club’s Cactus+ Accessibility Initiative combines infrastructure improvements, artist resource initiatives and community programming. Some of the initiative’s big-picture projects for the future include an accessible stage, bathrooms, greenroom, improved sightlines and a lower ordering area at the bar.
“Often we think of accessibility in a narrow scope,” Kaufmann says. “Accessibility is important to us in a broad scope. Whether that’s mobility, financial accessibility, sensory accessibility, cultural accessibility. All of our shared environments are opportunities for inspiration and engagement. And I think what’s so special about how ornamental this [ramp] is is that it’s a departure from just function and highlights and enhances our shared surroundings.”
