On Tuesday, Sculpture Milwaukee unveiled its latest installation, Stay, on the eastern grounds of Northwestern Mutual. Open to the public, the piece was created by New York-based artist Sarah Braman.
Stay is an interactive open-air concrete culvert, complete with a multi-colored, stained-glass window and seating areas. Visitors are welcome to enter the piece through its open frame and observe through the glass.
“It gives people a chance to pause, have a seat, enjoy the breeze and have different views of the sky and the light projected through the glass.” says Braman.
Braman collaborated with Sculpture Milwaukee, a non-profit that installs public art around Milwaukee. The organizations helps artists from all over the country create and share their pieces across the city.
“They’ve been super supportive in producing the work and citing the work – it’s been great,” Braman says. “It’s very cool to see a city that is actually prioritizing public art, rather than just having it isolated in museums. That’s something that Sculpture Milwaukee is invested in.”
Braman’s work often centers on small-scale pieces around an established object, such as a car or a sunroof. Her sculptures create condensed emotional experiences that ask the observer to contemplate the piece. Stay is specifically designed to invoke a connection, grounding the viewer in objective reality while making them analyze subjectivity about themselves.
“The concrete is the physical world, it’s a blunt object contrasted by the more ethereal color and light, which to me speaks to the human object world meeting the spirit world,” says Braman. “I want people to have an experience that they’re not used to in their day to day, that makes them think more about their surroundings.”
