Your shopping cart is empty.

Wisconsin People & Ideas – Fall 2017

In this issue: Milwaukee uses art to bring attention to wastewater issues, Rhinelander keeps the School of the Arts flame alive, and the story of Janesville gets told. Dinner (on a train) is served and beer/biofuel research takes a step forward. Hot, hot glass at the Popelka Trenchard Studio in Sturgeon Bay and Meals on Wheels feeds bodies and souls. A look at the genesis of the Writing in Stone installation at the James Watrous Gallery as well as book reviews, and new fiction and poetry from our 2017 writing contest winners.

Volume:

Issue Number:

From the Director

Shifting baselines

By:

Jane Elder

Floods, droughts, out-of-control fires: Are we willing to see and accept what the bigger picture shows us?

Editors Note

Pebbles worn smooth

By:

Jason Smith

Standing with my toes in the warm sand, I watched my four-year-old daughter Violet coax out string on a small, orange kite.

Jones Island rendering by City as Living Laboratory.

Happenings

Watermarks: An Atlas of Water and the City of Milwaukee

By:

Jason Smith

A project under development in Milwaukee uses large-scale art to increase city residents' responsibility for—and understanding of—how water quality is connected to everyday choices we make.

Happenings

Janesville: An American Story

By:

Dena Wortzel

In Janesville: An American Story, Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein explores the complex and unpredictable economic, political, and social forces that lie beyond our control.

Happenings

ArtStart Rhinelander

By:

Jason Smith

Picking up where the School of the Arts left off, ArtStart is bringing the Rhinelander-area community together through art.

Greg, Mardell, and Alexander Vreeland of the Great Northern Wisconsin Railroad, which is one of the only family-owned heritage railroad operations in the country.

Wisconsin Table

Dining on the Rails

By:

Brenda Bredahl

Railroading is a family affair for Greg, Mardell, and Alexander Vreeland. Their Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad is one of the few family-owned heritage railroad operations in the country.

Petri dishes in the Hittinger lab at UW–Madison grow a multitude of wild yeast species. Undiscovered yeast species and engineered yeast hybrids may hold the key to unlocking the biofuel potential of switchgrass and other biomass crops.

Discovery

Salvation through Fermentation

By:

Krista Eastman

Yeast hybrids may hold the key to unlocking the biofuel potential of switchgrass and other biomass crops.

Photo Essay

Meals on Wheels

By:

Carl Corey

The Meals on Wheels program supplies both physical and emotional sustenance for volunteers and recipients alike.

Sturgeon Bay artists Jeremy Popelka and Stephanie Trenchard transform molten glass into sometimes practical, sometimes whimsical works of art. Photo by Mike Roemer/roemerphoto.com.

Profile

Dancing to Hot Glass

By:

Alyssa Skiba

Sturgeon Bay artists Jeremy Popelka and Stephanie Trenchard transform molten glass into sometimes practical, sometimes whimsical works of art.

@ the Watrous Gallery

Writing in Stone

By:

Judith Woodburn

Instead of creating monuments for death and war, artist Terese Agnew makes monuments to transformative ideas and events from Wisconsin’s past.

Fiction

The Hardest Part

By:

Jeff Esterholm

The five women, all in their thirties and costumed as pigs in pink cotton onesies, faces hidden by Petunia Pig masks, trotted in through the back door of the house on the corner of 16th and Marquette and into its dark kitchen.