Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month has been celebrated in May in the U.S. since the 1990s.
In honor of the historical and cultural contributions of people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent, this month, WUWM is especially centering stories of AAPI communities.
On a sunny, slightly windy, 76-degree day in Milwaukee, I met visual artist and muralist Emma Daisy in Black Cat Alley on the East Side.
Black Cat Alley is an outdoor art gallery behind the Oriental Theater.
This was the first stop on a tour of Daisy’s murals in the Milwaukee area.
Here, she has a mural that she painted in 2018 that is over 15 feet tall called “In Full Bloom.”
"This mural features a woman who is very playful in her pose. She’s sort of jumping, dancing with her leg kicked up. She’s barefoot. She’s in this little crop top in there. I use a lot of stark black and white in a lot of my work,” says Daisy. “I think black is a really grounding color, especially in design. I love the way that black makes colors pop. And then like in this mural here that we’re looking at you know there’s a lot of bright pops of color."
“In Full Bloom” took Daisy about two weeks to complete. And she says this design started out as a tiny painting.
"I’ve been an artist my whole life. I think I’ve always been making things with my hands,” says Daisy. “I’ve always been creating. I think I’ve always at heart considered myself an artist, though professionally I would say probably since 2017."
The next stop on our tour was Bayshore Mall in Glendale.
There, Daisy’s work adorns the parking structure, a wall leading to the center green space, and inside the mall’s rotunda.
As we headed to toward the mall entrance, we passed the wall art titled “Dancing Shapes.”
"So, the idea was like these shapes, these kinds of geometric abstract shapes are kind of dancing along the wall and they kind of slowly turn from black and white into colorful shapes,” says Daisy.
I told Daisy this piece reminded me of the colorful shapes that used to be on restaurant and mall walls in the 1980s.
We walked inside toward a two-story abstract piece Daisy painted in 2020 with three-dimensional shapes.
"I wanted to incorporate and bring to life a small painting that I created that was like a gouache watercolor painting. And I though like how cool to replicate the brush strokes and like enlarge them but make it still look painterly, but then also turn some of the other kind of mark making on that piece into these other materials,” says Daisy.
On this piece, a penciled squiggle mark from the original painting is turned into this bent metal piece that’s installed on the wall. Another squiggle that looks like a backwards C was originally paint, and on the wall looks like a transparent fluorescent green using colored acrylic.
And then there's another made of neon. "I worked with a neon artist and commissioned him to recreate a literal squiggle that was on the painting that was actually made out of negative space on the original painting and turned it into light," says Daisy.
Our final stop on the tour was Downtown Milwaukee on the corner of 7th and Wisconsin.
This is the largest mural Daisy has ever painted at 4,000 square feet: 80 feet by 50 feet tall.
Daisy says the actual name of the mural is “West Town in Bloom,” but it’s also called the “Gateway Mural” because it welcomes people into downtown.
"This mural is colorful; it’s meant to be a community garden of sorts. It’s meant to be uplifting," says Daisy.
Daisy says the biggest flower is maybe 20 feet wide; they’re enormous flowers.
"The idea was to inspire growth and vibrancy and life in this part of town. It’s an interesting neighborhood, it’s really diverse. It’s kind of like a cusp kind of neighborhood where it’s like bordering different parts of downtown. It gets a lot of traffic, and it gets a lot of viewers of all walks of life and that’s one of the really cool parts of it," she says.
Daisy's inspiration to continue to do art really lies in that she just has to create. She says arts are vital to the social fabric of our existence, culture, community, and lives.
It's a way for her to understand the world around her.
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