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Wisconsin People & Ideas – Winter/Spring 2021

In this issue: We get to know the new Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Dasha Kelly Hamilton, and discover a new sustainably operated and tribal-run fish processing company on the shores of Lake Superior. Wisconsin art is increasingly defined by first generation artists, a few of whom we profile, and an essay reveals how one artist is living—and creating—with Parkinson's disease. Brand new creative writing from our 2020 fiction contest 2nd-place winner and honorable mention poets, and reviews of three new books by Wisconsin authors.

Volume:

Issue Number:

Photograph of Academy director Jane Elder

From the Director

Time for a National Initiative on Civics

By:

Jane Elder

Have dwindling investments in K-12 civics and social studies led us to our current cultural/political moment?

Editors Note

The Spirit of Marieli

By:

Jason Smith

From a clammy basement office in the Academy’s Steenbock Center, Marieli Rowe ran a nonprofit called the National Telemedia Council.

Commercial Red Cliff Band fishermen like Junior Gurnoe (left) make their living from the waters of Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Photo courtesy of Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

Wisconsin Table

Fishing for Community

By:

Hope McLeod

A tribally owned and operated, zero-waste processing plant and retail shop opens on the Red Cliff Reservation just north of Bayfield.

Fellows Forum

In Memoriam – Ruth DeYoung Kohler II

By:

Jason Smith

Ruth DeYoung Kohler was a long-time supporter of the Academy and its arts programming.

A 1995 photo of the artist Arthur Kdav in Lake Geneva, Illinois. Photo by Heather Swan.

Essay

Living into the Blind Spots

By:

Heather Swan

My dad, the artist Arthur Kdav, didn’t tell anyone when he noticed the first signs of his disease.

Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dasha Kelly Hamilton stands in front of The Rebirthing of the Earth Mother, a mural artist Tia Richardson created in 2018 for an exterior wall of the Historic Garfield Apartments (originally Garfield Street School) in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood. Photo by TJ Lambert/Stages Photography

Profile

Dasha Kelly Hamilton: Agent for Creative Change

By:

Joey Grihalva

Poet. Teacher. Mentor. Maker. It has taken Dasha Kelly Hamilton decades to find a fitting title for her role.

Internationally renowned coffin maker Eric Adjetey Anang is part of a vanguard of immigrant and first-generation American artists who call Wisconsin home. Steven J. Erickson, 2017.

@ the Watrous Gallery

Belonging: First-generation Artists in Wisconsin

By:

Jody Clowes

Six first-generation immigrant artists describe how moving to Wisconsin has affected their artwork and their careers.

Fiction

Wiseacres

By:

Jennifer Morales

The woman stands in a yellow sundress and sandals, snow circling her blue ankles. It’s January in Milwaukee, and she’s out on the street half-naked.

Book Review

Seahorses: Poems, by Abayomi Animashaun

By:

James Roberts

What constitutes reality and what is merely enticing fantasy?

Book Review

Education for Democracy: Renewing the Wisconsin Idea, edited by Chad Alan Goldberg

By:

Jeff Snowbarger

Few things have shaped our state more than the Wisconsin Idea. But what the heck is it?

Book Review

Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar

By:

Gary Jones

A picaresque autobiographical journey that focuses on the simultaneous sense of belonging and dispossession that immigrants and their first-generation children often face.