If you’re downtown this month, be sure to take the time to look up. An outdoor art installation, “Road of Democracy,” can be seen hanging from street poles. Curated by Milwaukee Downtown BID 21, the exhibition features 58 banners adorned with artwork by Della Wells and poetry by Dasha Kelly Hamilton. The project also includes a movie by filmmaker Brad Pruitt.
Wells’ collages often portray people, especially women, working toward their freedom, and she chose to focus on that subject for this project. “One thing I hope is that it will inspire people to keep working for us to become a more perfect union,” she says. “I want people to realize that we’re on this road together, particularly in this time of divisiveness.”
Wells believes My Rainbow Makes Me Dance, depicting a woman dancing beneath a lightly hued rainbow surrounded by flowers and houses, best illustrates the idea of that more perfect union.
“We take this democracy for granted,” she adds. “And we take for granted that some of us have freedoms and some of us don’t.”
