For 18 months, in the politically charged environment leading up to the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, veteran journalist Mary Louise Schumacher and artist-photographer Kevin Miyazaki embarked on a quest to interview 100 Milwaukeeans.
The project, called This Is Milwaukee, focused squarely on a single question: “What is democracy for you?” The deeply personal conversations, which they documented with photos, text and audio, occurred as the city braced for an influx of thousands of convention-goers and reporters that never came.
Fast forward four years, and large crowds are once again expected to flock to the city for the Republican National Convention on July 15-18. Has This Is Milwaukee stayed relevant in today’s post-COVID political atmosphere?
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Schumacher and Miyazaki are convinced of the project’s lasting power – the website at thisismilwaukee.us
remains active. Because of that, they didn’t feel compelled to update it for 2024.
“These are not people who were in it for the short term,” says Schumacher, who spent 18 years as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s art and architecture critic. “It still feels like a useful, meaningful portrait of Milwaukee.”
The project also remains significant because Milwaukee – and Wisconsin – remain key battlegrounds in the upcoming presidential election, as was the case in the contentious run-up to the 2020 vote.
“Our politics and the state of polarization here were being explored a lot by outsiders,” says Schumacher. “I wanted to go deeper with [Milwaukeeans] and experience the political landscape through their work and their eyes and think about it in a very bipartisan way, which was very challenging.”
The project has a core goal of portraying and celebrating what it means to be a civically devoted Milwaukee resident.
“From a little girl who picks up trash along the river with her dad to somebody like Lafayette Crump, who runs the Department of City Development, and everyone in between, we wanted to capture this panoramic view conceptually of what a citizen can look like,” Schumacher explains.
This is Milwaukee was also designed as a resource for journalists covering the DNC so they could learn more about the city and its people beyond brats and beer. But when the event was scaled back due to COVID, the project did not reach national and international audiences, as the two had hoped.
“Ultimately, in part because the DNC never really happened here, the lasting takeaway is it sort of feels like it’s for Milwaukeeans, so they can learn their neighbors’ thoughts about democracy and the city,” Miyazaki says.
The project left Schumacher feeling encouraged by the subjects’ quiet devotion to the city.
“It was very inspiring to bring to the surface so many stories of people who are doing very deep and often unheralded work,” she says. “I felt a lot of love for Milwaukee walking away from this project.”
