Milwuakee--Artistic City

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 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 unite 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, Sculptor, urban designer and Director, Mangiamele Arts Foundation.  Designing private spaces, parks, plazas, and streetscapes as outdoor architecture).