creative milwaukeeans

Ladies and gentlemen, direct your attention to the lovely and learned woman before you. No huckster or quack is she. No ma’am. She holds three degrees in psychology and runs a private counseling service. Tonight, here in our restaurant, she will cure your phobias, relieve you of your guilt, and free you of your sadness. All for the price of a New York strip and a cocktail. Give it up for the host of “Shrink ‘n’ Drink,” Julie Helmrich! Clinical psychologist Julie Helmrich greets a large group of diners. Microphone in hand, she reads her first question from a thick…

Andrew Williams talks at what seems like a thousand-words-per-minute in his Wisconsin Avenue office. He’s wearing a blue polo with an image of a cartoon robot stitched in the upper-left corner. A robotic dog sits atop the file cabinet behind him. He stops for a breath. “Am I saying too much?” he asks, legitimately concerned. With so many career highlights, it’s hard for Williams to know when to stop speaking. He talks about his engineering career at GE, his time teaching at Spelman College, the battery-powered rain detector he built as a child. He forgets to mention how, in 2008,…

Tyanna Buie’s exuberance defies her difficult history. Her family was unstable. The aunt she lived with was abusive, and a subsequent series of foster homes made life unpredictable. Yet, Buie, at age 29, has blazed into the local art community. By age 5, she discovered art as a safe mental retreat. After earning her master’s of fine arts in printmaking from UW-Madison in 2010, Buie moved to Milwaukee. She volunteered at art centers and worked at Goodwill Industries until a position opened at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Now, she’s everywhere: the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship show (she’s…

My fellow editors, in one of their more delusional stunts, want me to learn one of Tim Knoll’s bicycle tricks. Never mind that he’s mastered a daredevil brand of rolling gymnastic grace, while I’ve mastered only the grace of a circus clown. And never mind that more than 6 million YouTubers have watched his Baryshnikov-on-a-bike exploits, or that he’s still recovering from a concussion suffered while practicing new ones. So I meet the 28-year-old one evening at Estabrook Skatepark, the open-air studio where he hones his craft. And being a team player, I ask if I could realize one of…

Justin Carlisle – the former Umami Moto chef who spent late summer knee-deep in construction of his 15-seat solo project, Ardent – has a progressive, yet sentimental cooking style. Step 1 in this maturing process was growing up on a farm in Sparta, where his dad raised cattle and his body developed, courtesy of a diet rich in honest, simple farm food. Step 2 was entering the culinary program at Madison Area Technical College. Folded in were a number of cooking gigs – from Madison’s Restaurant Muramoto and 43 North to Chicago’s Tru. Carlisle’s 2011 move to Milwaukee added to…

The one-room den of game development – where Guild Software in Wauwatosa is building the next version of its popular multiplayer shoot and trade-’em-up Vendetta Online – features a neglected billiards table, somewhere underneath strata of computer equipment and other miscellanea. John Bergman, founder and lead designer at the studio, spends the majority of his days tending to a subscriber base of several thousand space pilots and plotting new reaches of the mini-universe that launched in 2004. We quizzed the longtime resident – who moved here at age 14, after a colorful childhood spent on his family’s sailboat – on…

Tea with Niki Johnson involves a jaunt around her North Shore home and a tour of her basement that’s filled with plaster molds, power tools, projects in-the-works, and, of course, laundry. Bags of plaster mix, buckets and plates – they’re all byproducts of one of the city’s busiest artists, and perhaps its most visible. We stop at her delicate brown-glass sculptures of Michelle Obama’s arms, the fingers of which are translucent, like watery cola. To Johnson, A Vision in White speaks to the media’s fascination with the First Lady’s body. After walking past an enormous stack of library-issued bookends, which…

Shots are fired, someone falls, the body count mounts. Mallory O’Brien reaches for her spreadsheets. O’Brien is an epidemiologist, a supreme number cruncher. She developed a violence reporting system at Harvard School of Public Health, then adapted the system in Milwaukee in 2005 by forming the Homicide Review Commission to help tame the city’s mean streets. Think of the system as a social autopsy. To identify root causes of violence, O’Brien’s team examines arrest reports, victim and suspect demographics, and more. Then it works with law enforcement, social service providers and neighborhood groups to craft intervention strategies. The results? Milwaukee…

  In her studio in that Bay View warehouse, incense wafts through the room and mingles with the intoxicating scent of newly tanned leather. Sewing machines sit idle and leather purses hang from metal, tree-like racks, their branches reaching out to offer leather-covered handshakes. It’s all extremely calming, especially if you can appreciate a well-made handbag – one that could be made with locally tanned Seidel leather to boot. This is Heather Hambrecht’s kingdom, though it will soon expand to Evanston, Ill. For now, Milwaukee will remain her “place of creation” from which these purses and sizeless leather apparel spring…

Edited by Claire Hanan With Debra Brehmer, Sarah Butler, Abby Callard, Kurt Chandler, Ann Christenson, Matt Hrodey, Dasha Kelly, Paul Kosidowski, Howie Magner & Tim McCormick  Photos by Adam Ryan Morris There’s an old warehouse in Bay View, near Skipper Bud’s marina and Barnacle Bud’s. It’s wrapped in Cream City brick, and just by looking at it, you’d think it’s empty.  It is anything but.  If you peeled back that dusty, corn-colored layer, you’d find a hive of about 40 artists so diverse, you’d swear you’ve stepped into the Sydney Hih building in its heyday.  It seems as if these…