Katherine Wikoff

I’m teaching two sections of the freshman composition class at MSOE, and among the things we cover in this course are how to “read” art as a “text” and how to talk about any work of art. We spend about three weeks learning art concepts, we visit the Grohmann Museum and do some formal analysis of a couple paintings and sculptures, and then students take a class period to wander around the museum on their own and select an artwork to analyze and present to the class (in five minutes, very informal).

Today was our first day of focusing on art in our class (as opposed to writing, rhetoric, and composition). We have a whole list of terms and concepts (like color, lighting, lines, shapes, perspective, composition, etc.), so I go term by term, showing examples of the various concepts and discussing them.

When I reached the point of talking about mediums/media and materials used in creating a work of art in today’s lecture, I suddenly thought of Portrait of a Textile Worker, a large quilt created by Milwaukee native Terese Agnew that is part of the Museum of Arts and Design’s permanent collection. The “portrait” of this woman sewing in a factory among other garment workers was created entirely from clothing labels. Agnew needed thousands of labels in order to have the broad palette of colors and tones needed to “paint” her picture. People spread the word of Agnew’s project, went into their closets to cut labels out of their clothes, and the raw materials for this quilt poured in from around the world.

Although I remembered the quilt and the garment worker’s image earlier today, I couldn’t immediately recall Agnew’s name. But I did remember the spectacular dragon she created and installed in the mid-1980s on the North Point Water Tower (a fabulous Gothic-looking structure similar to Chicago’s water tower that famously survived the Great Chicago Fire in 1871), so I just Googled that and found this fun article.

Like Portrait of a Textile Worker, the 1985 Milwaukee water-tower dragon project was a collaborative effort. This is something I always found fascinating about Agnew. Even very, very early in her career, when she was only about 25 years old, she seemed to understand the power of partnership. With every city hearing that she had to present at to win approval for moving forward, word began spread about her dragon project (basically, she looked at this medieval-castle-looking tower one day and thought: wouldn’t it be great to have a dragon perched up there?). In the end, she had a large(ish) crew of people helping her hoist the massive sculpture up there and get it securely installed. Although it apparently remained on the tower for a mere five days, I can still vividly remember seeing it and thinking it was fabulous.

With Portrait of a Textile Worker, created about 20 years after the dragon project, not only did Agnew have people sending her the raw materials she needed to construct the quilt, but she also, and possibly as a consequence, then had a huge base of supporters who were willing to help raise the necessary funds and otherwise contribute to the effort to get a museum to purchase and display this artwork.

It’s ironic. We have this collective mental picture in our heads of artists and writers as individual geniuses, the lone poet or painter toiling away in an unheated garret apartment (a romantic image, perhaps, but no doubt uncomfortable).

The reality, in my experience, is usually the exact opposite.

Successful artists and writers are often more like project managers. They do the creative work, of course, but they also collaborate with others along the way and take the lead on tedious but necessary things like moving a project through the process of getting approvals from, say, the Historic Preservation Committee, the Milwaukee Arts Commission, the water tower landmark trust, the entire Common Council, the Milwaukee County engineers, and the mayor—all of which Agnew had to do for her dragon back in 1985. They don’t wait for inspiration; they have deadlines and multiple irons in the fire.

As Steve Jobs famously put it: Real artists ship.