creative milwaukeeans

Her voice drowned by the sound of the crashing waves below, Ney Collier darts across the grass on Palisades Road, east of Lake Drive in Whitefish Bay, to the thicket of growth on the bluff. She spots a prickly nuisance called burdock, thrusts the sharp tip of her shovel into the ground and digs out the plant, the dangling roots raining dirt on her sandals.  Sparked by the zeal of her friend, the late conservationist Lorrie Otto, Collier spends many afternoons removing non-native plants – “death traps,” she calls them, for insects and soil – from spaces like Big Bay…

Curiosity summons  his attention/ in low, throaty moans. Serenades/ his intellect in the key of universal unknowns/  Unanswerable questions be his Siren song/ “I wasn’t thinking about the future”/ The future met him halfway/ Between baccalaureate and banality/ Timelessness and tragedy/ A drowning/ “That moment demanded a response from me.  I started to write.”/ Infused his tunes with far-reaching influences and voices/ Frank O’Hara. Jean  Dubuffet. Nietzsche. Pokémon. Wile E. Coyote./ “Art rap is not afraid to make fun of itself./ People love it. People hate it. There’s a utility of being weird.”/ He wields more questions than answers/ Favors…

We’re on the top level of the tower at the Urban Ecology Center’s Riverside Park branch, clear views of Downtown to the south and the new Rotary Centennial Arboretum to the west. Ken Leinbach, the center’s executive director, has just shoveled in his lunch. “When you’re up here, you get a different perspective,” he says.  He points to the northeast, to the park he built when he first started out. (“Just me and a toad in a trailer,” he jokes.) To encourage children to come from that park to the Urban Ecology building, a series of three sculptures dubbed Walk…

Keith Hayes has big ideas for Milwaukee’s trash, and even bigger plans for Webster’s dictionary. To wit: His beintween organization has been picking up tons of trash along an abandoned rail corridor between East Townsend Street and Capitol Drive and repurposing it into something he’s calling “matireal.” The hope is that the discarded tires that make up matireal can be used in a “creational” trail dubbed the “ARTery.”   Mangled neologisms aside, the Ohio transplant piqued enough interest to raise more than $10,000 via Kickstarter for his plan and convinced some foundations to open up their checkbooks. As we follow…

The amber ale is in a can that has no lid, because Jim McCabe has pulled a Louie’s Demise right off the assembly line. Yes, the Milwaukee Brewing Co. founder really named it for a man killed in a bar fracas, beer still in hand. No, it will never taste fresher than this. He walks you through the heart of his operation, past fermenting tanks and a computer terminal with the coy label “HAL 4000.” Just up a nearby metal stairway, the magic happens.  Here brews the beer, and a batch of O-Gii comes to life. Giant bags of Rishi…

For Emmy-winning filmmaker Brad Pruitt, it’s function over form. Although his past few projects have been documentaries – Bending Toward the Light about education and Mark My Words about spoken-word poets – Pruitt is returning to narrative for his upcoming film, Behind Closed Doors. Narrative just makes sense for this story, he says. The film follows five neighbors who live in the same apartment building in Milwaukee. It’s a film about connections and community, race and economics. The story had been developing in his mind for years.  But the time to act is now. “It feels like the moment is…

It doesn’t take long to realize that Michael Nieling, Ocupop’s owner, creative director, cat wrangler for a roster of employees from Honolulu to Brooklyn, skateboarder, former zoology major, unicorn admirer, former MIAD instructor and spiritual descendant of Paul Rand, operates on a different plane. Did we mention he surfs the glittery (and often frigid) waves of Lake Michigan? His office, in a nondescript warehouse on the shores of the Kinnickinnic River, afforded him enough room to install a skate ramp – a must in Nieling’s book. The loft-like space houses pods for four art directors, the ramp, a Herman Miller…

Ray Chi thought he wanted to become an architect. He earned a degree at the University of Michigan and proceeded to Harvard School of Design. But he was restless. When his childhood friend, Chris Smith, told him he was in Milwaukee working on an independent film with Sarah Price (American Movie), Chi packed a U-Haul, and headed down the highway to an unknown city and a dislodged destiny. He worked on the now- infamous film, eventually finished his architectural training, but never quite practiced the trade.  As an artist, he combines structure and function with whimsy, invention and, often, houseplants.…

Landing a spot in a premiere dance company is no entrechat in the park, but Timothy O’Donnell’s path to the Milwaukee Ballet was longer than most, and not just because it involved a 9,000-mile trip from his native Australia. O’Donnell was selected as a finalist at the company’s 2009 Genesis Choreographic Competition, then won first prize, then returned in 2010 to set another dance on the company, and was named artist-and-resident choreographer in 2012. With ballet roles to play – Paris in Romeo & Juliet, Rothbart in Swan Lake, among others – O’Donnell spends a lot of time in the…