Today as Milwaukee residents queue up to vote, some might be surprised to find a little living piece of art nearby. It’s a project called My Vote Performs and it’ll be featured at 11 polling sites around the city. WUWM’s Susan Bence visited several artists as they tweaked their election day pieces.
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I meet Brent Budsberg in his studio on Fratney Street. He’s the founder of a performance group called WhiteBoxPainters. Everything it creates incorporates white boxes, some flat, some three dimensional.
“We’re making some serious progress now, so we’re hoping to test this thing of the side of our building in the next few days,” Budsberg says.
The thing he’s talking about is a Jacob’s ladder, you know that elegantly baffling toy? Wooden blocks are strung together with ribbon and when you flip the top piece and the blocks cascade down, they seem to hang together by magic.
Budsberg and his colleagues have constructed larger-than-life ladders. During the performance, one player, dressed in white, will sit at a desk taking imaginary phone calls and then signal to another performer at one of two ladders.
“Each time the ladder falls, it’s tallying more votes,” Budsberg says.
Not surprisingly, Budsberg's creation is called “The Tally”.
It's designed to symbolize the tug and pull voters feel when deciding which candidate to choose. The site his group has chosen for its performance, is the former water tower on South 6th Street, now a neighborhood building and polling site. The three-foot, white blocks will be suspended along either side of the entrance.
“The top of the ladder will be 30 feet off the ground,” Budsberg says.
Budsberg says they were inspired by the monumental look of the place.
“Just really beautiful structure. t’s really prominent with like lots of green space around I,” Budsberg says.
“What’s it like doing a project like this, that’s connected directly with voters voting in a major election,” I ask.
“It’s intense, I mean this is a really important election. With all of these projects they’ve made sure that the content is nonpartisan,” Budsberg says.
Budsberg says he won’t be surprised of the project gets mixed reactions, because it’s never been done before.
“I think some people are going to be very excited about it and some people might even be upset about it. So, we’re just going to have to see,” Budsberg says.
A few miles away at the polling site at the United Community Center, voters will be greeted by brilliant yellow flowers scattered around an altar.
“The marigolds are supposed call the, supposed to light the path for the visiting spirits,” Deal says.
Artist Raoul Deal created the altar.
“That’s going to be a voting box. It sits up on a little pedestal I made,” Deal says.
Election day happens to coincide with the center’s annual Dia de los Meurtos, Day of the Dead, exhibit. It marks the Mexican tradition of setting up altars to honor people who have died. This year, it's Deal's inspiration for an Election Day performance. When it begins, he'll slowly pull a painted wooden mask over his face and slip on a straw hat to become the spirit of an immigrant.
“My piece then is about an immigrant coming back, a Latino immigrant, coming back to exercise the right to vote,” Deal says.
Deal says he’s honored to be able to address a topic he cares about deeply.
Annie Carter will also be commemorating ancestors in her Election Day performance. She’s lived in Milwaukee for years now, but remembers a different life growing up in Mississippi.
“And I remember as a little girl, going to school, getting on the city bus, that we had to go to the back of the bus and sit down. You know what we had to do was pay the fare, get off the bus and go and get on in the back. We couldn’t walk through, this is how it was done,” Carter says.
Carter says her memories and thoughts other older adults shared about the right to vote were fashioned into a song by another My Vote Performs artist. Carter will be one of the people who sings the piece while neighbors vote at the Clinton Rose Senior Center on Milwaukee's north side.
“I am part of something that I can leave as a legacy for my grandchildren and my great grandchildren,” Carter says.
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