HOW TO MAKE WISCONSIN GREAT AGAIN

By Dominique Paul Noth

Today’s Wisconsin has become the hind leg of the United States on economic, social and intellectual fronts –a strange backseat for a state that once led the nation in industry and intellect.

Terese Agnew outside her new exhibit

The proof is there for all to see in a cultural exhibit touring the state. The continuously updated Writing in Stone grasps what we’ve lost.  It’s not intended as a political screed, but an art-based reflection on the past with historic use of the term progressive in law, society, science and personalities.

“I find it amusing,” creating artist Terese Agnew told me. “There is a historic truth to the term progressive that gets all mixed up in today’s politics, without looking at the strides forward it originally meant.”

On its tour, “Writing in Stone” keeps expanding, piling up collaborators under noted artist Agnew, adding sections on Wisconsin’s legendary lessons that most citizens still don’t realize. Today it is far more expansive and artistically presented than its nascent outing last January in Milwaukee. 

After showings in La Crosse and Oshkosh, “Writing in Stone” will set up expanded shop – in presentation, participants and vision -- at the James Watrous Gallery in Madison through Nov. 6, with gala opening 4-7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23.   The gallery is providing a hypnotic blue environment with spot-lighting aimed at enhancing the journey through various monuments of words and images. New banners created just for “Writing in Stone” add to the background appeal.

There are five new exhibit areas. One contrasts -- almost inevitably-- the Grand Old Party of today to the group that formed in Ripon 163 years ago, angered by both slavery and a new law that would prevent new immigrants from becoming citizens.  The group was named after the Latin for “equality and the common good” -- Res publica.  Today we call them Republicans. Re-imagine the human and political impulses that fashioned the origination.

Actress Flora Coker during a Milwaukee
performance.

The state’s most famous politician came out of that Republican tradition -- Robert La Follette (1855-1925), whose name has been appropriated by the annual progressive Fighting Bob forum. But “Writing in Stone” gives actual life to his wife, Belle Case La Follette, whom the New York Times called on her death in 1931 “the least known yet most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs.”  A book club formed in her name has helped gather material but Belle comes alive as a speaking living statue at the opening reception – in the person of noted Milwaukee actress and Theatre X co-founder Flora Coker. 

She is only one of several living statues at the 4 to 7 p.m. exhibit opening Sept. 23 at the Watrous Gallery, a notable home for contemporary Wisconsin art located on the third floor of Madison’s impressive Overture Center for the Arts.

Writer Paul Hayes

Another guest at the opening will be Paul Hayes, noted award-winning science reporter at the old Milwaukee Journal whose new book with Martha Bergland, “Studying Wisconsin: The Life of Increase Lapham,” provides much of the textual basis for another exhibit. It is built around a representation of Increase Lapham’s desk and study.

This naturalist pioneer not only anchored conservation science but also pushed such creations as the National Weather Service, whose existence continues to benefit us all.  It is another of the many ways Wisconsin ideas once spread throughout the nation.

An expanded monument to voting pioneers incorporates a reminder of when the Wisconsin Supreme Court was highly regarded and struck influential chords for the disenfranchised, such as supporting former slave Ezekiel Gillespie’s pursuit of the right to vote.

Updated as well is the exhibit area devoted to Obreros Unido and the migrant workers movement. An early map of North America in the exhibit portrays the vast Mexican migration spots before there even was a US for a community that sometimes feels treated today like aliens in their own land.

Returning is the sound cave in the forest – the musings of Ojibwe environmental pioneer Walter Bresette in looped audio recordings.

All join sections ranging from civil rights activist Lloyd Barbee to Wisconsin Gov. Lee Dreyfus; from Caroline Quarils, the 16 year old slave who first used the Wisconsin Underground Railway, to John R. Commons, a noted UW economist and labor historian; from earth science activists Aldo Leopold to Gaylord Nelson, and much more in the land of monarch butterflies, Door County innovators and even Theodore Roosevelt, who was actually shot in Milwaukee when campaigning for president. 

A remarkable collection of artists, artisans and core crew have worked on this vital artistic anthology of  Wisconsin, including  Diane Dahl, Elliot Medow, Rob Danielson, Peggy Krzyzewski, Gene Lombard. Lynette Lombard, Henry Klimowicz, Jeri Mehne, Ellen Nimo, Chris Jarosh, Tom Bamberger, Dick Blau, Paul Gaudyinki, David Giffey, Lisa Stone, Bonnie Norwood, Jeff Redmon, Ken Clark, Jim Brosek, Cathy Williams and Billie Jo Scharfenberg.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.