Community Update

 MILWAUKEE
– ARTISTIC CITY.

(Sharing some of our
optimistic goals for our city.)

Milwaukee is well founded in
public art and outdoor architecture. 

To further promote public art
as a city enterprise and in unifying the most prominent art of the city, Mangiamele
Arts Foundation (MAF), engaging itself in all sorts of creative art enterprises
is also actively beginning to define and link places of art and locations to be
visited that are existing and amicably accessible to us on a daily basis.

A growing place for this sort
of art is manifesting itself along the lakefront area at the Eastern section of
downtown.  A grouping of outstandingly
designed buildings provides us the basis for more comprehensive art. 

MAF will be seeking to
strengthen this section of our art city as our focal point of public art and
outdoor architecture, primarily on a private basis, building on the private and
public art that already exists there. 

We want those responsible for
new development, especially in this area to pay special attention to the
artistic environment that can develop there and to direct a certain percentage of
building funds to the value-adding character that public art brings to these otherwise
changing areas.  

Outdoor architecture extends
itself to the floor of the city as well as to the walls and perhaps to
“virtual” outdoor ceilings of these public places forming and defining public
spaces and artistic areas.  We therefore,
seek further artistic creation in various areas in their comprehensive aspects as
we create outdoor architecture in Milwaukee.

The development energy of
this part of the East downtown is then to find its way West toward and beyond
the river, West on Wisconsin Avenue and should grow from this developing
lakefront art to a metropolitan activity center that generates a
people-attracting environment. 

The basic function of outdoor
architecture then is to promote and create places where people want to be and to
create or recreate the economic value of these places.

Public art as appropriately
applied is the nutrient element that gives growth and that tends to marry these
people attracting places.  And it is the
goal of MAF to assist and to cooperate with others in providing that certain
energy to these areas as they evolve in their apparent early stages.

We intend to assist in
providing that energy to bring about that attractive adhesiveness that neither
the private sector even when working with local government agencies can bring
about by them selves.  Functioning as a
social enterprise, we expect to contribute to a public energy already in
existence in Milwaukee’s organic structure.

(Joseph Mangiamele, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, School
of Architecture, University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee, Sculptor and Urban
Designer, Director and President of Mangiamele Arts Foundation).